- Hello everybody. And welcome. My name is Ashley Alicea and I'm a Senior Developer Advocate for games at Unity Technologies. And today I'm excited to share how you can streamline your game development workflows using Unity Visual Scripting. This feature empowers game creators of all backgrounds to create logic and interactions for their games using node-based graphs instead of traditional C-sharp scripts. This feature is really useful for non-programmers and programmers alike and it includes an API for advanced tasks, custom nodes, and more. Now, when using visual scripting there are a couple of things to keep in mind as to how it can help your development workflows whether you're a solo developer or you're working in a team with many talented people. The first is that this feature is particularly useful for rapid implementation or prototyping of interactive systems, art, animation, you name it. Let's say you're a game developer and you want to test some values or a new mechanic for a health system that you're working on. Or you're an animator and you want to see how some animations get changed when the player enters a dialogue scenario. You can use visual scripting to test and implement these behaviors yourself without having to learn a bunch of potentially complex C-sharp code, or without having to ask your programmer and then spend time waiting for them to implement that for you. Unity Visual Scripting will let you work independently and seamlessly with the rest of your team. And I say seamlessly because you can also use visual scripting with traditional C-sharp scripts. Now, if you are a programmer on your team you can have visual scripting graphs be attached to your C-sharp scripts so that your game designers or artists can modify or extend your work that you've created in your scripts. Or you can use C-sharp to create custom nodes or other development tools that your team can take advantage of when working with Unity Visual Scripting. Now, speaking of C-sharp, it's also a very useful tool for people who want to learn how to work with C-sharp. Unity Visual Scripting is similar and follow some similar concepts and it's a much easier way to get your feet wet with learning scripting than it is for jumping into traditional C-sharp. So it's similar enough that as you're using visual scripting and you get more skilled with it, you'll find that you'll be able to understand C-sharp code a lot better and eventually jump into using it, and the only thing that you'll have to learn left is the syntax of it all. Now, Unity Visual Scripting is also very useful for creating templates and tools for other Unity users not just the folks on your team. We already have wonderful community members who are creating different extensions or tools that you can use a visual scripting and even game templates. For example, a 2D platform or template that's created with visual scripting that the whole community can use. So we definitely encourage folks who are interested in making templates of resources for the community to use visual scripting for that. And lastly, we just want to mention that you can use Unity Visual Scripting in production for Unity Versions 2018 and above. This tool has existed for many years. It's definitely been battle-tested and so, you can use it for any of those versions and let me kind of know on the specifics of that. If you're using Unity Visual Scripting in version 2021.1 and above, visual scripting is integrated into the editor. So there's no additional assets that you need to add. Everything's ready to go, just add a script or state machine components to your game objects to get started. Now, if you're working with Unity 2018, 2019, or 2020 then you'll want to integrate Unity Visual Scripting via the Unity Asset Store. So right now it's currently listed as Bolt. So you can go to Bolt on the Asset Store, download that, import it into your project, and then once you do it'll automatically open up the Bolt Setup Wizard and that's how you set up all your different types and assemblies and settings that you want to have for your visual scripting environment.