Bolt vs. C# - Thoughts with a dash of rant

It’s not uncommon for me to get asked my thoughts on Bolt (or visual scripting in general) versus using C# in the Unity game engine. It’s a topic that can be very polarizing, leaving some feeling the need to defend their choice or state that their choice is the right one and someone else’s choice is clearly wrong.

Which is better Bolt or C#?

I wouldn’t be writing this if I didn’t have an opinion, but it’s not the same answer for every person. Like most everything, this question has a spectrum of answers and there is no one right answer for everyone at every point in their game development journey. Because that’s what this is no matter whether you are just downloading Unity for the first time, completing your first game, or a senior engineer at a major studio. It’s a journey.

A Little History

Eight years ago I was leaving one teaching job for another and starting to wonder how much longer I would or could stay as a classroom teacher. While doing a little online soul searching, I found an article about learning to code, which had been on my to-do list for a long time, I bookmarked it and came back to the article after starting the new job.

One of the suggestions was to learn to program by learning to use Unity. And I was in love from the moment I made my first terrain and was able to run around on that terrain. I was in love and I continued to play and learn.

It didn’t take long before I needed to do some programming. So I started with Javascript (Unityscript) as it was easy to read and I found a great series of videos walking me through the basics. I didn’t get very far. Coding took a long time and a lot of the code I wrote was a not-so-distant relative to guessing and checking.

Then I saw Playmaker! It looked amazing! Making games without code? Yes. Please! I spend a few months working with Playmaker and I was getting things to work. Very quickly and very easily. Amazing!

But as my projects got more complicated I started to find the limit of the actions built into Playmaker and I got frustrated. Sure I could make a “game” but it’s not a game I wanted to play. As a result, I’d come to the end of my journey with Playmaker.

So I decided to dive into learning C#. I knew it would be hard. I knew it would take time. But I was pretty sure it was what I needed to do next. I struggled like everyone else to piece together tutorials from so many different voices and channels scattered all over YouTube. After a few more months of struggle, I gave in and spent some money.

As a side note that’s a big turning point! That’s when exploring something new starts to turn into a hobby!

I bought a book. And then another and another. I now have thousands of pages of books on Unity, Blender, and C# on my shelves. Each book pushed me further and taught me something new. Years later and I still have books that I need to read.

After a year of starting and restarting new Unity projects, one of those projects started to take shape as an actual game - Fracture the Flag was in the works. But let’s not talk about that piece of shit. I’m very proud to have finished and published it, but it’s wasn’t a good game - no first game ever is. For those who did enjoy the game - thank you for your support!

With an upcoming release on Steam, I felt confident enough to teach a high school course using Unity. Ironically it would be the first of many new courses for me! I choose to use Playmaker over C# for simplicity and to parallel my own journey. No surprise, my students were up and running quickly and having a great time.

But my students eventually found the same limits I did. I would inevitably end up writing custom C# code for my students so they could finish their projects. This is actually how Playmaker is designed to be used, but as a teacher, it’s really hard to see your students limited by the tools you chose for them to use.

That’s when Bolt popped up on my radar! The learning curve was steeper, but it used reflection and that meant almost any 3rd party tool could be integrated AND the majority of the C# commands were ready to use out of the box. Amazing!

I took a chance and committed the class to use Bolt for the upcoming year. As final projects were getting finished most groups didn’t run into the limits of Bolt, but some did. Some groups still needed C# code to make their project work. But that was okay because Bolt 2 was on the horizon and it was going to fix the most major of Bolt’s shortcomings. I still wasn’t using Bolt in my personal projects, but I very much believed that Bolt (and Bolt 2) was the right direction for my class.

Bolt 2 was getting closer and it looked SO GOOD! As a community, we started to get alpha builds to play with and it was, in fact, good - albeit nowhere near ready for production. I started making Bolt 2 videos and was preparing to use Bolt 2 with my students.

And then! Unity bought Bolt and a few weeks later made it free. This meant more users AND more engineers working to improve the tool and finish Bolt 2 faster.

A Fork in the Road

Then higher-ups in Unity decided to cancel Bolt 2. FUCK ME! What?

To be honest, I still can’t believe they did it, but they did. Sometimes I still dream that they’ll reverse course, but I also know that will never happen.

Unity choose accessibility over functionality. Unity choose to onboard more users rather than give current users the tools they were expecting, the tools they had been promised, and the tools they had been asking for.

So what do I mean by that?

For many visual scripting is an easy on-ramp to game development, it’s less intimidating than text-based code and it’s faster to get started with. Plus for some of those without much programming experience, visual scripting may be the easiest or only way to get started with game design.

Now, here’s where I may piss off a bunch of people. That’s not the goal. I’m just trying to honest.

Game development is a journey. We learn as we go. Our skills build and for the first couple of years we simply don’t have the skills to make a complete and polished game that can be solid for profit. In those early days, visual scripting is useful maybe even crucial, but as our projects get more complex current visual scripting tools start to fall apart under the weight of our designs. If you haven’t experienced this yet, that’s okay, but if you keep at game development long enough you will eventually see the shortcomings of visual scripting.

It’s not that visual scripting is bad. It’s not. It’s great for what it is. It just doesn’t have all the tools to build, maintain and expand a project much beyond the prototype stage.

My current project “Where’s My Lunch” is simple, but I wouldn’t dream of creating it with Bolt or any other visual scripting tool.

Bolt 2 was going to bring us classes, scriptable objects, functions, and events - all native to Bolt. While that wasn’t going to bring it on par with C# (still no inheritance or interfaces for starters) it did shore it up enough that (in my opinion) small solo commercial games could be made with it and I could even imagine small indie studios using it in final builds. It was faster, easier to use, and more powerful.

So rather than give the Bolt community the tools to COMPLETE games we have been given a tool to help us learn to use Unity and a tool to help us take those first few steps in our journey of making games.

So What Do I Really Think About Bolt?

Bolt is fantastic. It really is. But it is what it is and not more than that. It is a great tool to get started with game design in Unity. It is, however, not a great tool to build a highly polished game. There are just too many missing pieces and important functionality that doesn’t exist. I don’t even think that adding those features is really Unity’s goal.

Bolt is an onboarding tool. It’s a way to expand the reach and the size of the community using Unity. Unity is a for-profit company and Bolt is a way to increase those profits. That’s not a criticism - it’s just the truth.

Unity has the goal of democratizing game development and while working toward that goal they have been constantly lowering the barrier for entry. They’ve made Unity free and are continuously adding features so that we all can make prettier and more feature-rich games. And Bolt is one more step in that direction.

By lowering the barrier in terms of programming more people will start using Unity. Some of those people will go on to complete a game jam or create an interesting prototype. Some of those people may go on to learn to use Blender, Magica Voxel and C#. And some of those people will go on to make a game that you might one day play.

So yeah, Bolt isn’t the tool that lets you make a game, and it certainly doesn’t allow creating games without code - because that’s just total bullshit - but Bolt is the tool that can help you start on that long journey of making games.

To the Beginner

You should proudly use Bolt. You are learning so much each time you open up Unity. So don’t be embarrassed about using Bolt or other visual scripting tools. Don’t make excuses for it, but do be ready for the day when you need to move on.

You may never make it to that point. You may stay in the stage of making prototypes or doing small game jams and that’s awesome! This journey is really fucking hard. But there may come a day where you have to make the jump to text-based coding. It’s a hard thing to do, but it’s pretty exciting all the same. If and when that day does come don’t forget that Bolt helped you get there and was probably a necessary step in your journey.

To the C# Programmer

If you say visual scripting isn’t coding, then I’m pretty sure by that logic digital art isn’t art because it’s not done “by hand.” Text doesn’t make it coding. Just like using assembly language isn’t required to be a programmer.

Even if you don’t use visual scripting you can probably read it and help others. It’s okay to nudge folks in the direction of text-based coding. It is after all a more complete tool, but don’t be a jerk about it or make people feel like they are wasting their time. You aren’t superior just because you started coding earlier, had a parent that taught you to program, or were lucky enough to study computer science in college. Instead, I think you have a duty to support those who are getting started just like you did many years ago.

To the Bolt Engineers

Ha! Imagine that you are actually reading this.

I know you work hard. I know you are doing your best. I know you are doing good things. Keep it up. You are helping to get more people into game development and that is a good thing for all of us.

One small request? Please put your weekly work log in a separate discord channel so we can see them all together or catch up if we miss a few. The Chat channel seems like one of the worst places to put those posts.

To Unity Management

I’m glad you’ve realized that Unity was a poop show and you are doing your best to fix it. It’s a long process and we expect good things in the future.

BUT! I think you made a mistake with Bolt 2 and you let the larger Bolt community down. It was that same community that helped build Bolt into an asset you wanted to buy. You told us one thing and you did another. You made a promise and you broke it. Just look at the Bolt discord a year ago vs. now. It’s a very different community and those who built it have largely disappeared.

Stop selling Bolt as a complete programming tool. And seriously! There is no video game development without coding. That’s a fucking lie and you know it. If you don’t? That’s a bigger problem.

I am sure that you will make more money with Bolt integrated into Unity than if Bolt 2 had continued. That’s okay. Just don’t pretend that wasn’t a huge piece of the motivation. Be honest with your community. Bolt and other visual scripting tools are stepping stones. It’s part of a larger journey. It’s not complicated. It’s not demeaning. It’s just the truth. We can handle the truth. Can you?

To the YouTuber

If your title or thumbnail for a Bolt video contains the words “without Code” you are doing that for clicks and views. It’s not serving your audience and it’s not helping them make games. You are playing a game (the YT game). So please stop.

Programming Challenges

Without doubt and maybe not for the better my focus has shifted from working on my game every night to trying to edit a video. Work on the game continues just slower than before… My fledgling YouTube channel continues to grow albeit at a limited pace. I’ve seemly snatched the “Bolt” niche on YouTube for the time being, but that’s a limited population and is likely to stay that way.

It’s time for something new.

With one part “hey this is cool” and one part “maybe this will expand my audience” I’ve launched Programming Challenges that can be completed in any programming environment or language used in Unity. This is something that I did with my students this year to help get over the significant learning curve of Bolt - and by most accounts it really helped. So why not bring it to a larger audience? If nothing else maybe it’ll help me refine my the challenges for my students.

The goal is to give short programming challenges that can be done in an evening or certainly without a huge time commitment over a weekend. The target audience is beginner to intermediate programmers and likely folks who are picking up Unity as a hobby and want to learn more.

But isn’t that what game jams are for?

For sure! But a lot of us can’t devote huge hours to a game jam on any sort of regular basis. And for those at the beginning of their game development journey creating an entire game (even in a month) can be intimidating.

Now I’m quite sure that there will never be the “perfect” challenge. Some will find a challenge far too hard or so easy that it’s not worth the time to fire up Unity. All the same this seems like a niche that is unfilled on the greater interwebs and continues the larger goal of giving back to the community that I learned from.

With that said, this last weekend, I launched the first challenge. The challenge is to create a dynamic grid of objects. It’s not a game and its not intended to be, but the programming used to “solve” this challenge is something that could easily be used in a game.

I’d love to hear feedback on the idea or this particular challenge. If you’ve got a suggestion for a challenge I want to hear that too.

A Growing Channel and a New Tutorial Series

Work on my current game project continues, but I’ve also been busy creating a new set of videos and tutorials for the game development class that I teach. This year I made the decision to drop Playmaker, the visual scripting tool I’ve used for the last three years, in favor of Bolt. I’m three months into the class and I’m very glad I made the switch.

If your curious why, I put most of my reasoning into a video that looks at the pros and cons of each platform.

I’ve had great fun learning the new platform and creating videos to support my students. Since Bolt is fairly new its a bit short on tutorials, especially compared to Playmaker.

This shortage of tutorials made it pretty easy to push my way into the scene and start to create my own little niche in the larger YouTube community.

Let’s be clear! My channel is tiny. My channel started as a place to host a game trailer and evolved into an attempt to support my class.

When looking at the analytics it’s pretty clear there’s an inflection point in the traffic stats when I released the first few Bolt videos.

I leave out the actual very small numbers…

And again! My channel is tiny. The view count is laughable. I gain fewer subscribers per month than many sites gain in a day or an hour…

But still.

It’s fun to watch. It’s fun to create. And it’s fun to think about how far this trend might go. The question that keeps nagging me is whether the graph is linear? Or could it be curving upwards? Can the channel sustain the recent 25-30% month on month growth? Can the subscriber growth continue at 40% per month? Can I continue to create weekly content that’s engaging?

I’ve seen spikes in the channel stats before, but this time feels a bit different. And this time I’ve started asking a different question.

Two years worth of data. The trend becomes a little more clear.

Could my channel help support my game development?

I don’t mean that next month I quit my job, but if that graph is curving maybe in 2-3 months the channel can cover my Unity subscription? If it continues to curve in 6 months could it pay my monthly internet bill as well? And then…?

And if the graph isn’t curving? If it’s straight as an arrow? Or if starts to curve towards horizontal? What then?

Then I’ve had fun and given back to a community that taught me how to make games.

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So… If you’ve made it this far then why not go one link further? Come check out the channel? Maybe hit that subscribe button? And check out some of the videos and the coolness that is Bolt visual scripting…

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Screenshots from the next handful of tutorial videos.