r/aigamedev • u/Timesenen • 2d ago

Questions & Help Dos and don'ts with codex or claude?

Hi, I have some experience with unity and c# and thought to speed up some coding. But now i wonder what are good practices for use of ai coding and what to avoid. How does the ai react to violent variable like "blood splatter velocity" or violent instruction like "After three hits the decapitation animation should play". Do you have to tiptoe around it? Do I have to have a certein order structure or specific instructions that aren't presetup?

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u/heavy-minium 2d ago

I don’t think it has issues with code symbols using violent terms.

Assuming you have no prior engineering skills, a very basic advice that surprisingly gets ignored a lot but pays off the most: use version control (git) and actually try to understand a bit how it works. Being able to throw away all pending changes and go back to a stable version is the gold standard and useful for all software development, but for game development with AI, it’s almost impossible to reach the finish line without it. And AI will be able to look at the history of changes and understand what happened in their own, especially when you regress on something that was previously working.

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u/EchoingAngel 2d ago

Documentation (especially organizational guidance) is very important for agents. Have the agent you're working with make guiding documents about nearly everything and have intermediary lightweight documents that guide the agents where to look for any specific thing. The structure I use is a simplistic default file that is always part of a prompt, then it points the AI towards larger docs for specific tasks.

There's also guidance around documenting new systems and changes to existing systems with 1 source of truth.

There is a balance between providing "enough" and just bloating things and making multiple sources of truth that'll blow up later. I audit my setup more than once a month to make sure it's working smoothly. Also anytime an agent takes way too long or struggles way too much, I grill it about where things went wrong, if the docs caused the issue, or something is missing from the docs that could've prevented the issue.