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.
This paper investigates potential criteria to identify visual scripting languages as embeddable within the domain of game development. We explore the criteria of embeddability for scripting languages and use them as the base line for the study.
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.
A Prototype of a visual scripting language based on the findings of my [master thesis](publication/master_thesis/). The main goal for this visual scripting implementation specification is it to provide a prototype for a visual scripting language that can embedded without much effort into an application.