Ask HN: Why is visual programming so popular for game programming?

It gives more power to artists to tweak things in engine.

First you need to define what 'visualise' means, as an aphantasian programmer I can't visualise anything. What does thinking in code blocks mean? I can mentally hold stuff, but it's certainly not visual. Feynman[0] has a good video going through this.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UMk963QdShA

The simplest way I can put it is that visual programming in games lets non-programmers meaningfully contribute to code-adjacent and 'code' parts of game content, like pixel shaders or character AI or simple object behaviors. These parts are typically not so performance critical or complex that you need a programmer to do them by hand, and more importantly, if you empower the game designer or artist to fiddle with them directly, they can quickly iterate until they hit something that is nearly perfect. At that point if there's something wrong with it, you can hand it off to a programmer to fix.

I view it as equivalent to how Microsoft Excel empowers all sorts of non-programmers to solve problems via the use of formulas (and the occasional macro). As a tools programmer and producer I frequently discovered that some of our designers or writers had cobbled together their own solutions for difficult problems just using excel know-how. Excel teaches ordinary people that computers can do their bidding and visual programming for games does the same thing for game artists, writers, etc.

Ease of use.

It's just another tool in the toolbox. Epic has mentioned how a portion of Fortnite was built using Blueprints. It helped them to prototype features and get the game built quickly.

Think about how handy it is to have a diagram, picture, or plan before writing a single line of code. Epic takes sections made using Blueprints and rewrites them in C++ for better performance.

After using Blueprints for a bit I can see its merit and why it's useful.

Unfortunately, I can't find the source where Epic talked about this. I think it was a GDC talk but I could be wrong. :\

Because games are visual. It is a shame that so much of programming is still through text files. Web programming for example should be completely done visually.