The inception of AI-assisted coding opened a new perspective for me, Suddenly, there was an option I could use to get what I designed and imagined.
AI lowered the requirement for getting into programming, and the thing I’d parked for years came back to life. I should be clear about what that did and didn’t mean for me. I’m not new to this, I’m familiar with OOP concepts, web development, basics of C#, Swift and Python as I’m an computer science engineering graduate. So it wasn’t AI handing me programming from nothing. It was AI clearing the friction off a road I knew how to walk. That’s a different thing. (I’ve written about how I use these tools as partners, not magicians, and the same applies here.)
With the friction gone, I had two roads in front of me.
One: build the prototype inside the codebase. Two: build it as a separate system, outside the codebase.
Road one is tempting as it would make you feel to jump towards it at all time, like someone famously said “When you hold a hammer, every problem looks like a nail”. And the truth is unless we really need it, we dont have to do it at all and that could help us in terms of efficiency as prototyping inside a live codebase means setting flags everywhere, guarding against shipping or exposing something you didn’t mean to. It’s careful work. It’s the kind of careful that slows you down right when you want to be moving fast and breaking things to learn.
But door two isn’t a path paved with roses either. One need to find out why they would need to build code based prototype over a Figma prototype, because the gameplay is the big chunk of the actual game, and you’ve just stepped outside it. So what does this approach actually solve for? The meta. The pieces around the game.
Identifying which road to pick based on complexity and requirement is something one would need to learn depending on how much fidelity each test would require at the minimum.
Take FC 26. With a separate system you won’t prototype an interaction that happens inside a match. But you can build interaction systems for SBC, Squad Management, Transfers, all the meta surfaces. Which means this approach isn’t solving for everything I set out to solve. It’s solving for a small but pivotal parts of interactions within the game.
We can talk about the stack next.