Tools and engines
Learning paths through this topic
Unreal Engine AI Assistant: What Works Today
Epic's assistant answers questions and writes C++, and a new experimental plugin lets outside AI work in the editor. Small jobs work best so far.
Find the files in your game folder that nothing uses anymore
After a few weeks of asking an AI for changes, the folder fills with old pictures and sounds that no part of the game loads. Deleting them cuts the download, but deleting one that is picked by name at run time breaks the game. This entry shows how to tell the two apart.
Autosave at calm moments, not while the player is about to die
An autosave taken with one heart left and a monster at the door can trap a player in a world they cannot escape. This entry gives the AI a small rule for when to save, when to wait, and when to stop waiting.
Tell the AI how smooth the game really is, not just its average speed
A game can report a healthy average and still hitch every few seconds while the player runs through the forest. This entry gives the AI a short report from a recording of frame times that shows the average, the bad moments and how many spikes there were.
Keep the download size of your game in check, and see which files grew
A game built by chat grows quietly: one more music track, one bigger picture, and the download is twice as large as last week. This entry shows how to set a limit per kind of file, warn before it is crossed, and point at the files that cause it.
Keep the downloaded size of your game under a limit, counted the right way
A web game that is too heavy loses players before the first screen. Adding up file sizes gives the wrong answer, because some files shrink on the way and others do not. This entry shows the AI how to estimate what players really download and name the heaviest files.
Check whether a survival game leaves the player any time for anything else
Hunger alone may be easy to handle and thirst alone too, and still the two together can leave no minute free for exploring. This entry gives the AI a quick calculation of how much of the player's time basic needs eat up, and a plain verdict you can ask to be changed.
After the AI edits your item list, see what it removed, renamed or changed
Ask for one new sword and the AI may rewrite the whole list, dropping a few items on the way without saying so. This entry shows how to compare the list before and after, tell a rename from a deletion, and raise an alarm when too much is gone.
Stop monsters from appearing in front of the player and vanishing again
If creatures appear and disappear at the same distance, those standing at the edge blink on and off every few steps. And if they appear inside the visible area, the player sees them pop in. This entry gives the AI a check on the three distances and the rule that uses them.
Find conversations that lead nowhere, trap the player, or can never be reached
In a talkative adventure, one mistyped reply target can leave a character stuck mid-sentence, and a loop of replies can keep the player in a conversation for good. This entry shows how to scan all conversations at once and name each kind of fault.
Split long speech into pages that fit the text box, even with very long words
A villager's long speech runs out of the box, or a long German word pushes the line past the edge. This entry shows how to break text into lines and pages that fit, without cutting an emoji in two and without losing deliberate blank lines.
Show drop chances as whole percents that really add up to 100
When three equal rewards are shown as 33 percent each, the list adds up to 99 and a careful player writes in to ask where the rest went. Simple rounding cannot fix this. This entry gives the AI a method that always ends on the exact total.