I like Bevy a lot. Should you use it in your next commercial game? That's debatable (although I'm trying to 👀). It's definitely a lot of fun to use with its ECS focus if you're wanting to just make games for fun or whatever.
I kind of understand the appeal of blueprints, for small projects and quick proof of concept maybe. But never understood how can anyone do any serious or complex work with it. It just felt so limitting when I tried it in Unreal, never bothered with plugins for unity.
I mean, I think a lot of times it is drilled in to people as “best practice” for working in a larger organization.
To some extent this makes sense from a managerial perspective, like, you can move people between projects and expect them to pick up where the last person took off since it will be somewhat intelligible.
I’ve seen some nightmares though where projects were barely function because a bunch of unnecessary stuff was added to make it fit the shape.
Blueprints are faster to develop with in Unreal Engine, as it's quite literally built into Unreal Engine and doesn't require compiling from a separate program. It's even got live node previews to show you exactly what is being run at specific times, so it's easier to debug in too.
It really shines when you want to prototype a lot of things really fast, especially to get the game working first before the optimization step of moving functions and backend stuff over to C++.
I have some experience with the visual coding that Godot has/had (they're deprecating it) and it looked like a useful tool for, say you've got an artist on the team who does all the creature models, the visual code stuff would be good for them to program the behavior of some little background creature in. Like I could see doing the AI for a chicken in it. Wander a random distance between 1 and 5 meters, peck(), play cluck.wav, scratch(). That way the programming that's really the artist's job can get done, but the REAL coding work like game logic can be done by the programmers on the team.
I mean I like what is at the core of his suggestions. If you don't take it as a religion but add a dash of flexibility on it then I think it is quite useful.
I'd appreciate some qualification on "widely reputed" + "as much." I'd concede it's common knowledge that dogmatically following his advice is a mistake, but I'm surprised by the claim that his advice is mostly harmful.
This is why I love Blueprints; it forces you to keep your code neat and tidy and readable and documented lest it turns into an absolute mess. It's also so much fun to prototype in because it's like modular synths and you can just make an absolute mess if you want.
So, the argument is that the system is so unwieldy that it forces you to be good because if you aren't vigilant you'll fuck yourself? Where have I heard that before?
Blender's geometry nodes and shader nodes also work this way and are incredibly fun to just mess around in creating bonkers procedural textures/shaders/objects and seeing what comes out the other end. I very much liken it to a modular synth but for your eyes
You're correct, I saw her get asked about what she thought of it. And for context, she's a 3d modeler/animator who has never written code in her life, and this is what she used to program Bloodborne Kart.