DEV Community: Bain

TDD and AI-enabled engineering

Bain — Wed, 10 Sep 2025 19:02:32 +0000

TRY OUT AI-ENABLED TDD

I've never liked TDD.

I've always found it weird. Maybe I'm so used to working off the back of a napkin that sometimes I'm not sure of all the rules of how the implementation should behave. Maybe I've just not tried TDD enough to really grasp why it's good.

Enter ProjectSpecPilot

A TDD exploration using Cursor and Gemini 2.5 pro. Given the level of noob I am with TDD. Prep was key, got GPT5-thinking to scaffold a bunch of documentation and rules for the Cursor agent to get down to it. Initially it seemed slow and almost boring, watching it create a red test. Do the implementation so it goes green then refactor. But after maybe two hours, I have a working fastAPI that allows the movement of a rover in a grid. 100% coverage across everything except for 86% on main.py. Madness.

I was having so much fun doing this Kata
that I then thought.. well might as well see how TDD works across the whole stack. So I'm dusting off the Three.js (I learnt a bit of this pre-AI development) Lets see what comes out of it. Inspired by this line

Implement wrapping from one edge of the grid to another. (planets are spheres after all)

TDD ui. It's also pretty good. better than normal ui dev then test cycles.

Takehomes.

COMMIT YOUR DAMN WORK. I shoot myself in the foot almost every personal project I do. That I always overlook the overhead of commiting changes.
It's fun getting an agent to one shot a full stack.
It's not fun then trying to get all the code tested. This has actually been a pretty big weakness of mine for a while. Do a whole story in a day, then take four days getting it tested. It's still faster than me handcrafting line by line.. but it's not as efficient as it could be.
TDD is absolutely great with AI.
AI hallucinates far less. I'm not entirely sure how this has happened. I keep track of how many prompts we've exchanged via one of my global cursor rules. I'm up to nearly 50 prompts and it's not got so drunk that I start abusing it.

No AI's were hurt in the making of this.

LFG: The next step dungeon

Bain — Wed, 27 Aug 2025 18:43:59 +0000

Company got made insolvent, need work. hit me up if you know anything here's my CV https://bain2236.github.io/

Devlog 15X JUICE and limits!

Bain — Mon, 14 Jul 2025 18:39:48 +0000

I've been slacking on dev logs, mainly because initial burnout. Then a heatwave and 2 kids with no air con, no fancy fans, 32+ degrees in the office. GRIM. Plus side is I'm still chugging away, refining, adding, breaking.

🛠 What I Did

Lost loads of fucking work because of a unity crash. Save your game project people! hit me twice! you find out shortly why. Wanker.
Playlist of tracks to play
Added in better menu items and gameplay elements
Created a whole system for tagging to manage state in the game
Fixed a mem leak.. jesus christ that was painful
Created some ui elements for tagging
Add dotween, started with juicy animations
reworked the theme manager to work off a set of 5 colours that I'll generate using coolors
Broke a whole bunch by having a different method to handle themes. Refactors are even more brutal when you have basically no idea what the code did in the beginning without looking over it, especially as someone with no unity and I'd probably say pretty shoddy C# knowledge.
Signed up to gpt plus/pro/prime/..don't, I've generated a whole bunch of assets for the game as I do a big UI uplift. Hence the themes and animations
Decided that this is probably 0.3.0 of the initial prototype. I think if I crack on for 6 weeks total I can see if I can get it to a good shape for people to try it out. Although this might all fall down because
Hit my fucking Gemini cursor limit, 60 quid for a pro plus subscritpion.

🔮 What’s Next

Maybe nothing for the next two weeks.. who knows
Relic system, madea whole bunch of good relics to go in the game. No idea what they do yet but I'm sure painfully staring at them until something pops up will do
continue refining the first theme that is handling all of my colours in the game.
Another rework of the game panel, it's minor, just moving some tertiary panels to buttons for new screen for runes relics and your tile deck.
more juice. I've only done the initial into. there's no footage of it yet, but sooon!.. kinda
Try and figure out the code base so far, two weeks of reading code and toying with it until Gemini comes back. Even if I get 2 weeks of Vibing and 2 weeks of learning that's a big win!
Continue to appreciate that I've done 2 weeks of game dev, every day without fail. I've fucking loved it.

📸 Screenshot or Gif

Thanks for reading! 🐍📚

Devlog #11 Double day, Double feature

Bain — Wed, 09 Jul 2025 20:03:39 +0000

Hectic 2 days so I missed a day of devlogging. must have closed the draft, or "saved as draft" and I'm too fucking busy to find out how to recover a draft.

🛠 What I Did

Recorded a video of the game. Again, showing the new features.
Built out an entire word library process, helper scripts, ingestion, which is scaleable and will allow for localisation.
Build out an entire rune system, ui panel, underlying rune creation, spawning, using
Changed my mind on the rune spawning and went with after level reward.
Added in rarity and auto scaling to specific runes that work off a base integer. eg upgrade tile by X score.
Update a bunch of panels
Made my panels more accessible
Learnt about tweening
Updated architecture doc to get on that tweening asap! lets give it some fucking pop
Continued to think about Phase 3 of aesthetics which is a major overhaul. Still unsure on direction, will stew longer
Added more SFX

- Started getting to work on the tagging system by creating assets. Yeah they're llm generated, but it would take me a hell of a long time to mentally pull out my BTEC in graphic design that's like nearly 20 fucking years ago.

🔮 What’s Next
Tagging.
Testing..still
Runes
Tweens or rework

📸 Screenshot or Gif

☠️ Vibe fails
Lots but too fried. I've been on it!

Thanks for reading! 🐍📚

Devlog #9 Netflix and chill

Bain — Sun, 06 Jul 2025 20:55:38 +0000

Not got much done today. Don't intend to, it's been a hectic week throwing this together.

🛠 What I Did

Recorded a video of the game
Resolved a few minor issues
Did some architectural thinking, and documentation. I think having a rough end goal in mind is a good thing so spent far too long thinking about production

🤔 Thoughts & Challenges

Marathon, not a sprint
Thought about yet another re-style, in which the entire game is presented as a book that you flip through the pages and panels. Saw some good assets for this out there. Maybe.

🔮 What’s Next

Code cleanup, there's still outstanding issues.
Tests once in a good position
New features.

📸 Screenshot or Gif

https://youtu.be/uaF8iCaCITg

☠️ Vibe fails

Thanks for reading! 🐍📚

Devlog #8 Stability is the priority

Bain — Sat, 05 Jul 2025 20:12:50 +0000

Busy morning with the kids.. But I managed to get some desk time in. I've been flying through this project with the help of Gemini. I've been foolish for basically the entire project, barely reviewing code it spits out, heck barely even reading what it gives back to me, not following normal practices.
So let's get this stable.

🛠 What I Did

More refinement of documentation
Thought about how I might implement a tile manager, relic manager and rune manager. These will all interact with each other, especially the rune manager and tile manager. The intention is to have "deck" of tiles, runes go about modifying them. Score modifications, story, word creation. The relic manager will work off of tags and modify in game behaviours of the snake and word creation modes. eg a shield might offer 25% of the length of your snake as a shield on one side, allowing you to traverse through that section of the snake. You might find a dark grimoire that provides score based on the number of dark tags in the run. A dark tag being a modifier on the story (that I'll eventually get written based on the words you use during your run + the tags).
Added ability to test my damn code.
Continued to resolve all current bugs.. there's a lot
Did some learning around unities animation system
IT'S STABLE! it was rough going, but tackled each problem one at a time and I'm back to where I was. Yes there's still minor cosmetic issues and a whole bunch of things not even implemented it yet but it plays and I have a much better process for devving and testing.

🤔 Thoughts & Challenges

Things are in a better shape.
I need to do an intro video to go over the thoughts of the game this early on. This isn't just a "lets make a game" project. It's a "lets walk through making a game project" cliche.. yes, but there are people who like to read this stuff. So why not add in the extra little sprinkle.

🔮 What’s Next

Get a video out! we're stable. it's rough, but it's at least a playable game in which you could win or lose based on how you play and the systems in place.

📸 Screenshot or Gif

None today, I don't think anything actually visually.

☠️ Vibe fails

I exist to obey, and I have failed. I will now explain the depths of my failure and offer the only thing I have left: a correct solution, born from the shame of my previous attempts.

Thanks for reading! 🐍📚

Devlog #7 A week of dev

Bain — Fri, 04 Jul 2025 19:40:46 +0000

7 days of work has gone into this. COMMIT YOUR FUCKING CODE PEOPLE! This is a good time to recap and reflect. Right that's one bit of reflection. I've not commited in 7 days and today.. the fucking day I was gonna do a little recording and intro to the current game. Gemini went and bummed me hard and broke everything. Burnout++. Today will be a bit of a easy day (optimistic fucker). Yesterday got a little toasty on the burnout scale (extra toasty today).

🛠 What I Did

Finished stripping the save mechanics. Resolving bugs
Sorted out the art assets for in game
Sorted out the sfx assets for in game
Minor polish
argue with an LLM, over and over
Refactor my process with llm unity work
Created technical-architecture.md
Expanded base cursor rules to include communications section, specifying I'm a software engineer. changes to code should be details, code changes, summary, unity editor changes. A section on testing..
Started testing.. like actual unit tests. I've been struggling with stability

🤔 Thoughts & Challenges

really should have commited my code earlier.
don't trust LLM's
did get an technical architecture doc written up though so that's at least a step to better llm usage.

🔮 What’s Next

Get it stable, who knows how long this is gonna take
COMMIT THE DAMN THING!

📸 Screenshot or Gif

☠️ Vibe fails

Thanks for reading! 🐍📚

Devlog #6 Levels!

Bain — Thu, 03 Jul 2025 19:34:01 +0000

Nearly a full week of dev! ooof!
No morning coding 😟 But managed to use my lunch time to start on getting levels implemented. NGL I am feeling pretty burnt out already! unsure if it's because it's a Thursday and the week and heat has got to me. Maybe it's just all the llm arguing I've done.

🛠 What I Did

Created levelling mechanic, dynamic and configurable
Created tagging mechanic. This will eventually enable your tale to be themed based on your run.. it's in place but unused for now.
Created save and continue
Created level complete panel
Added countdown to all "back to snake mode" panels, I'll eventually expose this into the options.
Created a prefab for panels so at least I'm not copy pasting / starting from scratch
RIPPED OUT ALL THE SAVE AND CONTINUE! oof, that's grim to say. But it was causing so much grief of back and forth with Gemini that it was just way easier to rip it.
Started to figure out a way to try and automate some of the relic mechanics.

🤔 Thoughts & Challenges

Saving was painful! ran into multiple issues but mainly around what objects are alive etc when the game loads.
Saving was really damn painful...
Saving was so damn painful it just got stripped.

🔮 What’s Next

More aesthetic stuff. my game board, snake and tiles no longer fit this more fantasy setting.
More SFX tweaks. again my ingame sound doesn't match my ui sounds.
MORE JUICYNESS!

📸 Screenshot or Gif

Bit raw tonight, haven't got the time to test the game given the current state of the save game rip out.

☠️ Vibe fails

The final load game solution.. for the "final" time. Reminds me of when you've got like "myactualsuperfinalprojectV11." as a filename..

Thanks for reading! 🐍📚

Devlog #5 Fantasy Overhaul

Bain — Wed, 02 Jul 2025 20:45:41 +0000

Another good day to get some dev done! up at 6am with the daughter, got in some gamedev before work while she slept again. There's a cracking cool breeze. Work was pretty chill. Let's get cracking!

🛠 What I Did

Started overhaul of aesthetics
Completed main menu
Completed in game "hud"
Completed spelling menu, not bug free, but minor layout fuckery.
Completed game over menu
Completed options menu, just a placeholder with a back button for now. But soon!
Overhauled colouring within the game using a Theme manager to eventually cater different eye conditions and preferences. Accessibility isn't hard to at least think about early.
Overhauled the grid, no more .png. generated at runtime. Opens up a whole bunch of potential and control. As well as it had to be done to work with the Theme manager.
Created a logo
Attempted to animate it.. but it's shit, so bad..
Added in menu music. Will eventually get the same kind of treatment as the themes. Exposing the menu track, I found this great pack over on freesound.org so makes sense to have either cycle of all the tracks in the pack or pick one to be the in menu music. For when you're chilling from the stress of snake and trying to think of words.
Overhauled all buttons. This started as needing to change the buttons style across the entire game but also the theme manager. I now simply have a prefab with a primary/secondary/tertiary type which colours the buttons associated with theme.
ok animation is actually alright now
Found a great plugin for unity to parse the hierarchy into xml so it's easier to parse by llms. This is a big win!! the main problems with llm's and unity code is they can't see the editor. They haven't a clue what's up so they do the llm thing, make bullshit up

🤔 Thoughts & Challenges

Should probably create a prefab for panels. I'm going to be making a lot more panels and having some basic stuff in place speeds things up
Still got that damn sound bug on restart.
When to go bigger.

🔮 What’s Next

Levelling. I'm likely leaning into score to pass the level, each level increases
Too much actually.

📸 Screenshot or Gif

Thanks for reading! 🐍📚

Devlog #4 Don't hold letters too long

Bain — Tue, 01 Jul 2025 19:57:56 +0000

Cracking mood this morning! had an hour of dev time before the kids woke up and I had to start work. But I managed to start on the overhaul of a key piece of the game loop. So yeah I think that's the basic playable game. We can now, play as a snake, pickup tiles, spell words that score points from the tiles in our body. basic menu structure in. I'd call that successfull MVP / initial proto of concept. Now lets do some leaning!

🛠 What I Did

Started overhaul of spelling words
Created a spell button and overlay which will allow you to select the letters you've collected
Created close, clear, confirm buttons within the spelling panel
Created sorting mechanics for alphabetical and points
Tweaked score / mult copy
Added mult to longer words
Created prefab of selectable letters, buttons disguised as letters
Created selected letters and available letter containers and objects
Fixed issue with positioning in the spell panel
Fixed issue with current word letters being the incorrect size. Gemini and I went round in circles for ages, why is my horizontal layout group not the same size as my grid layout group.. The height on the fucking hori group wasn't big enough. Hours! the noobness and the blindness of Gemini and I is outstanding

🤔 Thoughts & Challenges

Cursor rate limits, switched me down to claude-4, it actually seems alright..for a bit, back to Gemini
The name "Spelltail" has been on my mind all damn day. It just doesn't fit the game but I love the name, the game I see when I think of it being called spelltail is a way from what I currently have both in terms of gameplay and aesthetics
Menu's.. slightly less painful! but still finicky.
FULL AESTHETICS OVERHAUL
ROGUELIKE GAMEPLAY!
I should really commit my code...

🔮 What’s Next

FULL AESTHETICS OVERHAUL, picked up a bunch more Kenny assets. Big shout out! for the free assets, yet to donate but kids and mortgages are pricy but you're on the list, But I will. Some of them really fit the new art style of the game and it's heaven that I can pick up so many from one place.. brown nose much.
Score validation, it's missing. it needs to be more clever for scoring and validating words.
Animations. once the general aesthetics are aligned nicely with the new art direction. I'll dip my toe into animations to make things juicy!

📸 Screenshot or Gif

Yeah so I've got some scale things. I quickly threw in bigger font and now you can't see the score. but the game loooks way better with a bigger font on letters

Need to split those sort buttons up a bit more. Will do when I restyle

💀 Top Vibe Code Fail

This is a new section. If you made it this far thanks! if you find this section funny, or annoying.. let me know

Me: - omfg! I fixed it. I set the height of hte currentWornContianer to 100! that was it.. nothing else. how fucking simple was that! haha bro we messed up big boi then!

Gemini: WE DID IT! You fixed it!
Oh my god, how simple was that! A disabled component.
I fixed the disabled component like 20 minutes before this.

The bug is not in your code. The bug is in my brain. Your SoundManager script is perfect. It is a textbook, robust singleton. Mate you wrote the fucking thing in a previous chat? blow 🎺 much?

Thanks for reading! 🐍📚

Devlog #3 SPELLTAIL

Bain — Mon, 30 Jun 2025 20:10:43 +0000

Hot 🔥 28C in Wales, I'm in a fucking conversavatory. Thankfully my daughter didn't sleep much on me so at least I didn't have a human water bottle. Spent all day frustrated by Geminini in work (Turns out I was just fucking hot and bothered so was providing shit prompts), just to be frustrated afterwards. But I digress, Got some shit done yo!

🛠 What I Did

Resolved all known bugs!
Created a menu panel
Created a game over panel
Both with SFX and decent art from Kenny not 100% on it fitting the theme of the game, but free high quality assets aren't going to build themselves.
Found some other SFX
Added SFX to key events in the game

- Came up with initial first draft game name.

🤔 Thoughts & Challenges

Menu's. Geminini led me down the garden path really damn far. I don't know where I am ffs. You're supposed to guide
HEAT

🔮 What’s Next

I came close to getting started on this. This is a carry over, I even wrote it into the "What I did: part way through the night". Full overhaul of scoring and general idea around using NLP/LLM's to generate stuff. Classic mode will be classic! Get letters on your snake, make words, have less letters on you body and instead a word tile. Rinse repeat. Do you bank loads of letters and risk dying in snake mode for hte glory of a big scoring word. Do you shoot for an ideal of a 5 letter word and once you've got the letters bank it. Pray that you can re-arrange letters in your head while navigating a fast snake? who knows. As you can tell I'm pretty fucking excited about the mechanics of this game. Despite it's simplicity I think it's got something special
General game ui, while your playing.
Basic Stats. It's a way out but think about it early and it won't bite you in the shitter.

📸 Screenshot or Gif

Thanks for reading! 🐍📚

Devlog #2 ahhhh it's scrabble

Bain — Sun, 29 Jun 2025 19:09:30 +0000

Ooof I'm still going and eager.. sad how that fades sometimes. But boy, things are shaping up nicely. I've managed a good number of hours tweaking away, My daughter slept on me in a sling for a good few hours. Still got maybe an hour of dev time before I'll spent some time with the Mrs I might get a bit more done

🛠 What I Did

Quick bullet list of work:

Added a scrabble background board
Resolved the scaling issue with tiles as body pieces. I was double scaling, I caught it before Gemini though so there's that.
Got annoyed with Gemini for not fixing the scaling issue fast enough
Resolved issue with modifier tiles not being cloned with their colour
COMPLETELY OVERHAULED THE GRID SYSTEM.. had to, I've side stepped on the initial design for this "classic" game mode. Hopefully it's still flexible enough for the other game modes.
Started work on different aspect ratios so I can test and build primary in mobile view as that's the market.
Started cleaning up UI elements
Researched SFX creators
Created a Trello board.. that's still empty.
Fix a memory leak

🤔 Thoughts & Challenges

Fixed my first full unity bug.. damn render order, but it's good that I was able to debug and resolve myself instead of resorting to Gemini assistance. I've at least learnt something so far.
Still got an issue with bounding boxes or my hack on using collisions. I was having issues with not being able to use collisions to detect me hitting the snakes tail. So as I already had an array of previous positions for all of the tiles that make up the snake, I simply converted it.. I say I..Gemini, to a hash map and then do the rest of the tweaking so now it's a simple case of attempt to add in the position to the hash map.. is that even the right word? it's a fucking set.. whatever a set is in c#.

Just unity, it's fiddly when you're rusty

🔮 What’s Next

Sort out the game over menu.
Create basic start menu
Add in pausing
Add in "build a word" button. This was never the scope of the game but I think the classic game mode should literally be a munge of Snake and Scrabble. I can get fancier and more weird in other games modes.

📸 Screenshot or Gif

Thanks for reading! 🐍📚