If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

In this article, I’m gonna:

1. Show you how to easily increase the performance of your in-game debug tools 100x.

2. Show how to save lots of production budget by optimizing your in-game debug toolkit.

3. Walk you through the Paradigms of Graphic Interfaces and find the most performant solution for in-game debug tools in your project.

Does using AI language models (LLMs) really accelerate game development, or do they just create hidden technical debt that can hurt us later? We’re going to approach this as a hypothesis: LLMs can dramatically speed up development, but also risk amplifying technical debt. Let’s test this claim together by looking at real examples from our workflow.

I spent the last couple of months observing the impact of AI on No Rest for the Wicked. In this article, we're gonna take a deeper look at what type of tool LLM really is and how to use it properly.

* Any time I mention AI-tool or LLM in this article I don’t mean any specific tool. On a daily basis, I usually use Gemini and Cursor. The article doesn’t consider which model is better.

I can't count the hours I've wasted on building useless internal tools, endless refactors, and micro-optimizing code that was already 'good enough'. At first glance, these tasks feel like 'Must-Haves', but in reality, they lead to burning budgets, delayed releases, and crunch. "The Aware Game Engineer" is a deep-dive series on how to stop wasting budget on things players don't care about. I'm gonna share the mistakes I made and explain where they came from, so you can save time and your production budget. Each article is a tool you can use to increase the production speed of your game.