I wanted to share something personal with this community, because Unreal is where everything started for me.
My entire development career began in Unreal Engine.
Blueprints were my first real programming language.
They shaped how I think, how I design systems, how I solve problems.
But over time, my work shifted.
I moved deeper into backend development, low-level systems, Rust, storage engines, APIs, automations… all the stuff that lives far away from a game engine.
And yet — for years — I kept “rebuilding Blueprints” everywhere I went.
Not visually, but conceptually.
In server code, in automation logic, in API pipelines, in offline agents.
I recreated the same building blocks again and again because nothing else felt as natural, expressive, and safe as working in Blueprint.
Easily 6,000+ hours of my life went into recreating those patterns for backends.
Typed pins.
Clear data flows.
Node catalogs.
Async logic without pain. Concurrency by design (!)
Visual clarity instead of piles of glue code.
I wasn’t building games anymore —
I was rebuilding the feeling of Blueprints for backend work.
At some point I realised:
Instead of rebuilding these systems over and over, why not build the tool I always needed back then?
That’s how Flow-Like was born.
Not a Blueprint clone.
Not a game engine tool.
But something inspired by the same philosophy — rebuilt from scratch for modern backend work:
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Nodes written in Rust
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A tiny, embeddable runtime that can run locally or inside your apps (or even Unreal Engine)
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Local-first and private-first — no cloud accounts required
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A graph editor that feels familiar, but built for APIs, agents, vector search, documents, events, automations
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Offline, typed, fast — the kind of system I wish I had during my early Unreal days
It became the missing piece I needed years ago when I was wiring backend systems manually inside Blueprint graphs.
I’m sharing this here because Unreal Engine played a huge part in my journey.
Flow-Like exists because Blueprint taught me how powerful visual programming can be.
If anyone here is curious, wants to play around with it, or just wants to look under the hood:
Website: https://flow-like.com
GitHub: https://github.com/TM9657/flow-like
If you like the idea, a star on GitHub would genuinely mean a lot — it helps more than you think.
And any feedback, thoughts, even harsh critiques are super welcome. I’m building this for people who think visually, just like I did when I started in UE.
Thanks for taking the time to read this — and thanks to this community for being where it all started.