My team is continuing to work on our Escape Room game, with significant progress being made with Unity and working with some commercial assets we purchased. AI is not a feature of our game – there is no “AI component” with which the user can interact, but it has nonetheless played a significant role for all developers on the team.
This is the first project I’ve allowed AI to play a major guiding role in development and it has been a shockingly positive experience. Before this project, I had read so many humorous stories about ChatGPT generated code which just made no sense. While I have certainly encountered this, it has not been the norm. Having never worked with Unity or C# before this, ChatGPT has been a great source for learning how to approach a problem. It has been questionable at-best for generating code, other than simple boilerplate, but has been great for giving high level overviews of how to create a component, including which built-in components to use and which attributes to give them, in order to achieve a desired goal. For example, it was able to give me a very clear and accurate list of steps for creating a 3D zone in our game which is not visible but would trigger some event when the Player entered it. I wouldn’t go so far as to say it has made me a better developer, but it has certainly helped me learn Unity quickly.
Github CoPilot on the other hand has absolutely made me a better (and faster) developer. A teammate let me know that CoPilot is free for students, so I got it connected to VS Code and don’t know if I could ever go back. Like ChatGPT, it is extremely useful at generating boilerplate like getters and setters. It also seems to generally understand what I’m trying to do and is able to very quickly generate debug logging messages with correct formatting, and able to quickly flesh out YAML files. I haven’t let it generate any complicated chunks of code, but I am now able to focus on those pieces of logic rather than typing out long strings or writing simple methods. It has absolutely made me a better developer, and it’s a tool I plan to continue using indefinitely.
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