The New 10 Hacks for Game Development with AI · StopSlop AI Books Games Movies

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The New 10 Hacks for Game Development with AI

Here are all 10 prompts from the video, ready to paste. Paste them into Claude or any coding AI, inside your game's project, and change the words in [brackets] to fit your game. Some steps need your engine's own tools for export, rendering and video, so your AI may need to adapt them.

1. ONE AI, ONE JOB

Write a file called TEAM.md. List every part of this game: combat, world, story, art, menus, builds. Skip any part the game doesn't have yet. Give each part one owner and name the exact files that owner controls. If one file holds two parts, split the file or give it to one owner. Each AI I run gets this rule: you only change files you own. If you need a change in someone else's part, write the request in TEAM.md and leave their files alone. Add a line to the file my AI reads at startup (CLAUDE.md, AGENTS.md or similar) telling it to read TEAM.md first.

2. GIVE THEM A GROUP CHAT

Set up a shared log file, CHAT.md, that every AI on this project reads and adds to. Keep it in one shared folder, and never on separate git branches. Before you start a job, add a line starting CLAIM, with the time, your name and the files you're touching. When you finish, add a line starting RELEASED, with what changed. Before you start anything, read the last 30 lines and also search the whole file for any CLAIM with no matching RELEASED. If someone else has claimed your files, leave them alone: pick something else, or ask me if that was the only job I gave you. If a claim looks abandoned, ask me before taking it over.

3. KEEP ONE RULINGS FILE

Create RULINGS.md. When I clearly decide something, it goes in, in my words, with the date. If you can't tell whether I decided or was thinking out loud, ask. Where it disagrees with another document, the ruling wins. Don't edit my words. When I decide something new in this chat, add it, then show me the line. Add a line to the file my AI reads at startup (CLAUDE.md, AGENTS.md or similar) saying: read RULINGS.md before any other file.

4. FIVE BAD PLAYERS AND A BUTTON MASHER

Build five test bots that play [my fight] with real inputs, sent through the same input system a keyboard uses, never by calling game functions directly: cautious, balanced, eager, sloppy, and a button masher who presses attacks at random. Also run a bot that presses nothing. It has to lose every time, or the test is broken. Run each bot 12 times with different seeds and print a table of win rates. If two seeds play out the same, tell me. A bot counts as winning at 50% or better. The target: 3 or 4 of the 5 win, and the masher wins less than the balanced bot. If you miss the target, change the game's numbers, never the bots, and show me both tables. Don't tell me it's balanced. Show me the table.

5. SCREENSHOT EVERY TEST

After every automated test, save a screenshot of what a player would see at that moment, with the file name saying which test it was. If my tests run with no window, turn real rendering on first, and tell me if you can't. Open the screenshots and tell me what's in them: is the hero visible, is anything the wrong size, is anything missing? If you can't view images, say so and don't call it checked. A passing test with a broken picture counts as a fail.

6. TEST THE EXPORTED GAME

Export a release build of this game. If export isn't set up, walk me through it first. Copy the export to an empty folder outside the project, and run my main test on that copy, not the editor. If I have no main test, make one that plays from the start to a win or a loss, and tell me anything you had to add to the game so it could run. List anything the game loads that isn't in the export, and anything that only works because a raw file is sitting on my disk. Then search the code for calls on values that could be empty, because a release build can crash there with no error message. Show me only the ones that could really be empty, with the line number and how it would happen.

7. SEARCH YOUR CODE FOR THE WORD "BOT"

Search the whole project for the words bot, test and headless, and for any command-line flag. Read the comments too. List every place the game acts differently during a test, or was built around a test's route. For each one, tell me what it changes. Logging can stay. Anything that changes a wall, a floor, an enemy, a reward or a rule comes out, and the test has to pass on the same game a player gets.

8. CHECK IT THROUGH THE PLAYER'S CAMERA

Test [this feature] in the real game level, through the real player camera, with the camera where it sits in normal play. Don't use a test stage. Get there using the keys a player presses. If my tests run with no window, turn real rendering on first. Save three screenshots from where a player would stand: far away, mid-range and right next to it. Tell me what you see. Does [this feature] stay where it should? Is anything on screen that shouldn't be there?

9. ASK WHERE EVERY TRY ENDED

Don't tell me whether [this feature] works. First say what counts as success. Write a bot that uses only the keys a player presses, and run it 15 times at each of three skill levels, 45 runs in all. Tell me what each level changes: reaction time, mistakes, route. Log where every attempt ended and why, using place names from the level. Group the failures by place and by cause, and show me the biggest group first. For that group, tell me if the game caused it or the bot's own steering did.

10. YOUR GAME FILMS ITS OWN TRAILER

Add a capture mode to this game that runs at a fixed clock of 30 frames a second, so frames can take as long as they need and the video still plays smoothly. Read camera shots from a file: start point, end point, what to look at, time of day if my game has one, how long. Hide the HUD and name tags. Render at 1920x1080 even if my screen is smaller, and check the saved frames really are that size. Tell me how much disk space the frames will take before you start. Save every frame, then join them into a video that plays anywhere. With ffmpeg that means H.264 and -pix_fmt yuv420p. If ffmpeg isn't installed, tell me how to get it, or use the engine's own video writer if it has one. Don't use a screen recorder. Start with one 5 second shot of [my best place in the game].

Which one are you trying first? Tell me below, and post what your AI builds.

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The New 10 Hacks for Game Development with AI