Once, during my work on the sadly never published game Reptoads – a round-based deterministic multiplayer cooperative card game, I got asked by different members of the art and design team: why can’t we have a visual scripting language such as Blueprints or Shader Graph for either the gameplay code or the visuals? My answer was always the same: we don’t have enough time to implement such a tool. This question, however, got stuck in my mind and I started searching for a “Lua” of the visual scripting languages just to find… nothing.
Have you ever stumbled upon job offers where companies are looking for “coders” or “scripters”? Every time I see those, I ask myself: what is the difference exactly? How can “scripting” or “coding” be different from programming? Is there even a difference? I could keep listing questions, but I am sure you get my point. With this in mind, I got asked a few times why I am using the term “scripting language” and “programming language” interchangeably, since they represent different concepts.