Heya, I’m a solo developer with no programming exeprerince interested in everything related to game dev besides programming. To get the experience I want, I’ve learned I need full control. Right now I am focusing on mobile with 2D, so I am wandering, are any visual scripting assets fitted for 2D or any designed specifically for 2D and/or mobile? Thanks!
Try PlayMaker. Its quite intuitive and it also supports other third party 2D toolkits such as EX2D and 2D Toolkit.
Its the most user friendly visual scripting extension I have come across.
PlayMaker
ex2D
2D Toolkit
Besides the above two, it also supports other kits such as :
NGUI
Sprite Manager 2
Smooth Moves
Rage Tools
The other choices for visual scripting would be uScript and Antares Universe. uScript apparently supports 2D Toolkit through reflection, but beyond that, I have no idea.
uScript
Antares Universe
PS. PlayMaker and uScript are on 50% specials right now. Its best to grab it now before they go back to their original price.
You say you have no programming experience. I think you are going to need to learn at least some programming principles in order to use any of the visual tools. Although these tools claim that there’s no programming needed, the fact is that they are mostly just a different way to visualize a program, and you still need to understand program flow, logic, making things repeat/loop, branches, handling variables, and then you gotta learn the user interface and then you gotta learn how to connect the little happy boxes together with lines to make things work how you want. To do something reasonably sophisticated still takes time and effort and complexity and thought, and most likely none of these systems really cover all the bases so you may still end up having to dip into writing some scripts to do things that aren’t supported. I’m a bit skeptical of visual programming even though I’ve tried uScript - the interfaces are nice and pretty but there is still a learning curve.
I have some experience but it’s minimal. I’m thinking maybe gideros or moira, there seems to be too many hoops for 2D. Thanks for your replies. I also feel to unsure on which assets to buy and it’s a bit costly for me. I will need to learn lua though.
For drag and drop 2D games with a reasonable measure of control, you might be better off looking outside Unity at engines such as Construct 2 (hell yes!), Game Maker (not so sure) or the many others that you’ll find through a dedicated search. Beyond that, no amount of advice will replace your own research, testing and deciding what works best for you.
I’d recommend Construct 2 as a starting point because things JUST WORK and are exportable to many platforms. The event sheet system gets you into the mindset of programming from the get-go. It acts as a tutorial where you can get things working without having to worry about language idiosyncracies. Then once you get better and ready to move beyond its limitations (multiple scripts, complex loops, etc.) you will have the building blocks (putting concepts out of your head into a cohesive, logical, working gameplay) that are what you will learn a language for.
For Unity, The above systems are added ‘ontop’ of Unity and the one I tried (EX2D), while excellent, has quite a few counter-intuitive hoops to go through. I gets the job done (I’m sure they all do) but is far from a “drag, drop and it just works” interface since it’s not a core part of the editor. Can’t talk for the others since I haven’t tried them. However, you -will- get the control you’re looking for.
Actually I have a lot of experience with construct 2 after switching from unity looking for easier 2D. But it doesn’t seem to function quite properly on ios yet. I could just get working and hope it improves but my primary issue is putting in all the effort and seeing it not work as I had hoped.