Why would experienced developers care about visual scripting? It’s only for people allergic to code, right? We recently sat down with the author of Bolt and Chronos to hear how he got started, his ideas on code visualization, UX and the Asset Store itself. The man behind popular Asset Store packages Bolt and Chronos is Lazlo Bonin, an award-winning 24-year-old, tool and game developer who works out of the collaborative, brightly lit GamePlay Space in downtown Montreal. Bonin is passionate about contributing to the Unity community: “At some point when you spin off a tool from a game you’re working on – and it gets some level of polish and usability – it feels wrong to not share it. My first impulse is that I want other people to have it, and I think a lot of toolmakers have the same mentality. They don’t want their peers to have to reinvent the wheel, which is like Unity itself: Why would you code your own game engine when you have all these tools available?” And of course if your tool becomes popular, then it can help bootstrap the game that gave birth to it. Long before he got started making tools, however, he was a self-taught game hobbyist: “When I was around 10, a cousin came over to my place, installed Visual Basic and left without any instructions.” While Bonin had been coding HTML, this was a completely new challenge for him. Fast-forward a couple of years and he was a super-intense hobbyist making numerous, unpublishable games that he laughingly describes as “crazily ambitious projects that I would discourage anyone from ever trying!” When he was 19, he discovered Unity and began getting more serious about game dev. He gives shout-outs to assets like Full Inspector, which “was a godsend – it really supercharged the Unity Inspector and gave me much more flexibility in my designs. It was the first asset I imported on every project.” More recently, Bonin uses Odin – Inspector and Serializer a lot: “It’s one of the most useful, polished and amazing tools on the Asset Store.”