I come from a similar background. I do art and animation, and I'm very visually oriented. Stencyl's visual scripting helped me a lot -- Through it, I learned a ton about programming concepts. Stencyl made it very intuitive, and the way it functions is basically 1:1 to traditional programming. It's just a visual representation of programming syntax (in their case, Haxe code). When I started studying C# and watching tutorials in Unity most of the concepts were familiar and often quite similar to what I had been doing in Stencyl.
That said, I still recommend Unity as a smarter choice if you're serious about your project. It's way more powerful. I just started using it recently, and, incidentally, I just got Playmaker myself! My early impression is that it's not quite as natural and 1:1 to programming as Stencyl's visual scripting is, (Stencyl's scripting is
amazing and I wish I could somehow pair it with Unity) but it's still intuitive in its own way.
Playmaker was used by Will and Ari at Team Cherry to make Hollow Knight. That's when I first became very aware of it.
The way Playmaker works is by creating FSMs ("Finite State Machines") and attaching them to Unity objects to control them. In the above example we can see an FSM that was attached to an enemy unit in HK. In it is a flowchart of states and events that lead into or out of states, and embedded within each state is a list of actions that determine what happens when that state is active -- and these actions come packed with the software and cover almost anything you're likely to need to do. You just search, select, and configure them within the menus.
I love "ideated"
