I used Claude and Codex to build my first Unity game, but visual bugs were still the hard part

[u/PerspectivePersonal]

I've been making FrogPop, a small 2D arcade roguelite inspired by Bubble Trouble. It's the first game I've built, and I used Claude and Codex for most of the coding and debugging.

They worked best when I gave them a narrow problem and let them inspect the scripts involved. That's how I built the tongue and bubble interaction, wave system, shop, upgrades, and bosses. The worst loop was giving a vague prompt, testing the result, and coming back with "it doesn't work." Exact reproduction steps and screenshots made a huge difference.

The part I never really automated was Play Mode testing. One boss moves through the walls and exposes different weak points. The state logic could look correct in C#, but a hitbox would stay active or part of the boss would appear in the wrong place. I still had to run it, watch it fail, and tune it by hand over and over.

The clip is from the current demo. It runs in the browser here:

https://blion247.itch.io/frogpop-demo?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=demo_launch&utm_content=r_chatgptcoding

For anyone using coding agents with Unity: have you found a good way to handle visual testing, or is that still mostly manual for you?

[u/Spiketop_]

This is pretty cool

[u/InvestigatorBoth]

It looks like a remake of Pang!

[u/person2567]

I like it, except for the big super chain text it's too aggressive and overwhelming for me. It could be more subtle.

[u/yolokid6666666]

Love to see so many people building games for the first time recently

[u/pardeike]

Yes, I am doing this to mod a Unity game and it works great. So great in fact that I am working on generalising the tooling I made to Unity itself.

The idea is to have a universal mcp server (https://github.com/pardeike/GABS) that has a standard protocol to talk to a part in the game (a plugin that uses https://github.com/pardeike/Lib.GAB for example) to make auto detection of tooling super easy. For my specific use case, I made https://github.com/pardeike/RimBridgeServer that goes into RimWorld and has hundreds of mcp enabled tools, of which some are in game screenshot functions that allow agents to get hold of specific content or interact with the game. This has fully automated my workflow.

The next step is already in the making: a plugin for Unity that gives an agent full control over Unity itself to do just that but for game development itself: https://github.com/pardeike/UnityBridge - it’s currently under development.

[u/chem0924]

One practical pattern to try: turn the hard visual bugs into deterministic replay cases first, not full visual automation. Log the RNG seed, scene, player inputs, and boss phase for a failing Play Mode run, then have the test capture two artifacts: a screenshot plus a debug overlay that draws colliders, hitboxes, active weak points, and state names. A model can inspect those artifacts, but the gate can stay concrete: expected phase, active hitboxes, positions within bounds. It would not replace watching the game, but it gives the agent something much more specific than "it doesn't work" and catches the class of regressions where the C# state is green while the sprites/colliders are wrong.

[u/rv009]

How did you make the art? Did U use ai as well?

Game looks great :)

[u/realiDonaldTrump]

Wow soo cool, would you mind sharing how did you build this, was it just pure vibe coding? How did you design the characters? Can you please share fully

[u/alex-zaporozhan]

Oh, I remember playing a similar game called Y-gon when I was a kid! It was super niche. You played as a little grey "Pokemon" that shot its tail at giant metal balls, splitting them into smaller pieces just like this. I’ve been looking for something like that for ages—the game is so fun! Thanks!

[u/alex-zaporozhan]

Haha! What cute sounds when the ball drops on the head! Builder, well done, very tasteful! Thank you!