AI Context Limit Explained for Game Makers

The context limit is how much text your AI can hold in mind at once: your messages, its replies and every file it reads. When that space fills up, older parts get shortened, and details can disappear.

What is it, in plain words?

Think of a desk. Your project folder is a big cupboard, and the AI can only work with what lies on the desk. Every file it reads, every reply it writes and every message you send lands there. That desk is the context window. The Claude glossary calls it the AI's "working memory".

Space on the desk is counted in tokens, which are small pieces of text. On older Claude versions a token was about 3.5 English characters. Newer versions use roughly 30 percent more tokens for the same text, and other AIs count differently, so treat these as rough sizes.

What does that look like in a real project?

Say you are making Starling Foundry, an invented factory game. Everything sits in one file, game.js, which has grown to 70,000 characters. That is about 20,000 tokens by the older count and about 26,000 by the newer one.

Now you ask for six small fixes in one chat. If the AI reads the whole file again for each fix, that single file takes up around 150,000 tokens before it has written a word. Paste in 800 lines of console messages three times and the desk is mostly old paper.

Will you actually hit the limit?

That depends on your tool. The Claude Code docs say most current versions have a window of 1 million tokens and summarise the chat by themselves, so really running out is rare there. Other tools and plans have other limits. We found no official figure for ChatGPT, so we give none.

The bigger risk is what happens on the way. After a summary, Claude Code reads your CLAUDE.md in again and brings back up to five recent files. Everything else you said is now only as good as the summary. That is why its docs still recommend clearing between tasks: "a focused context gets you better answers and costs less."

What should you do about it?

1. One task, one chat. A new task does not need the old conversation.
2. Split big files by topic, so the AI reads only what a change needs.
3. Paste the first red line, not the whole log. See what the red messages mean.
4. Put decisions in a file. Anything that lives only in the chat can vanish. A handover note takes two minutes.

In Claude Code, /context shows what is using the space and /clear gives you an empty desk.

Paste this to your AI

I want to use your working memory well.

1. If your tool can show how full your context is, show me the real figure. If it cannot, say so. Do not give me an estimate as if it were a measurement.
2. List the five biggest files in my project with their real sizes, and tell me which of them you had to read in this session.
3. Before you touch anything, draw a Mermaid diagram of how the parts of the biggest file depend on each other. Check each arrow against the real file, and mark any you are not sure about.
4. From that drawing, suggest how to split the file by topic, such as player, enemies and levels. Show me the plan and change nothing yet.
5. After I agree and you have split it, tell me what you tried to see that the game still starts and plays the same, and what you could not try.

Or skip this and connect the MCP: your AI then finds all of this by itself.Connect the MCP

How to check it worked

• Read the drawing. If one box has arrows going everywhere, that box is the next thing to split.
• Play right after the split. Same game, same speed, same saves. A split should change nothing you can see.
• Ask a small question in a new chat. Ask about one topic, such as enemy speed. Your AI should only need that one file.
• Compare how full it gets, if your tool shows this. Run a normal evening's work and see whether the desk stays clearer than before.