Let's Talk Playmaker

This is Playmaker.  Playmaker is an asset for the game engine Unity3D.  In brief it's a solid state machine that strings together pre-coded blocks of scripts into step by step algorithms.  This allows for quick iteration and implementation of systems without having dust off your robes and pointy programming wizard hat.

If you don't know how to code in Unity (C# or Java), Playmaker could be a solution for you while you start building your programming skills.  Knowing how to code and using code in junction with Playmaker can yield some really nice results, as Playmaker can interact with anything in the engine's inspector or hierarchy windows.

One thing that I really like about Playmaker is the flow you create when making systems. Everything you make is in steps and it lets you think logically about how to progress from one state to the next.  Step one: steal underpants.  Step two: horde underpants.  Step three: ? Step four: profit!

Playmaker has an easy learning curve and very active and helpful forum community.  The system can be as complex or simple as you need it depending on what you are trying to do with your game.  And if you need help getting anything to work, you can generally just look it up or even find tutorial videos by the creators and users.

Even better is that the asset has an open design.  Anyone can program new actions and add them into the Playmaker library.  The asset even has a formatting wizard to assist you in coding your own custom actions.  There is also a plug-in you can download called "The Ecosystem" that is a searchable database for these custom code bits that you can download and start using without even leaving your Unity environment.

Another thing that is really helpful is the debugging.  You can watch your state machines running live as the game plays.  Playmaker highlights each state it moves through in real time (and where it gets stuck when something breaks).  In a way, this kind of teaches you how to be a better programmer as you learn about loops as well as what works and what doesn't.

For me personally, I'm not very good at writing code from scratch.  It just does not come naturally to me and I still struggle with basic concepts. As I practice and write more, it gets easier of course, but I needed some sort of help to get through my classes.  Here is where Playmaker saved my life, figuratively and academically.  In my first semester at Johnson County Community College in the Game Development program, it became very apparent that I'd be making a lot of these games by myself if I wanted to keep up with my courses.

Unreal Engine 4 has the node based blueprint system that can be used to make small scripts without code, and is written in C++ a language that I studied for a class or two at the University of Kansas, but Unity is pure code.  And nearly all my classes were in Unity.

Downloading Playmaker was the best thing I ever did for my classes.  With it, I was able to navigate around the roadblocks I had with coding and follow along with my assignments quickly and easily.  With how fast systems are able to be built and iterate through in Playmaker, I was able to quickly burn through several attempts on each assignment before I figured out how to make the best answer for each given problem.

In conclusion, if there is one asset everyone should have in Unity, it's Playmaker.  It's easy to learn but has a staggering level of capability.  It bridges the gap between pure programmers and everyone else in the game development pipeline.  Sketching out concepts and iterating through them fast and painless.  And on top of everything else, it's even used in some major games, such as Hearthstone by Blizzard Entertainment.

My rating for Playmaker: It's a necessity. Maximum five star rating.