10/25/2025
This was a screenshot of my session with Claude Code from another conversation about AI and how it has helped me.
I have been absolutely bothered by how crappy the performance of "Animal Friends Adventure" has been, even 5 years later. So I migrated the project to Unity 6.2 upgrade to Claude Max ($100/month) and got to work on refactoring the entire project.
I may never actually make that money back on such an old game. But I cannot let it leave a legacy of bad performance especially as I work on future releases. I would love it if the eventual updated release gets discovered and funds my next 2 game releases. But I live in reality.
Claude Code has been amazing at keeping the project on track. Letting me know what still needs to be worked on and where we left off. Sometimes I'm too tired and "done" to make notes and the next day I completely forgot where I left off. I have Claude Code keep Change Logs, project notes and constant code audits.
Just today we refactored the entire UI system to have null checks and less prone to crashes. We redid the entire ground detection system and enemy headstomp system with proper impulse and damage response. Now the death and revival system, level start...
Things started slow. I had to learn how Claude works. Claude had to learn how I work. I have him save session notes and context memory so we don't lose our place each day. In fact, screen 2 is just a small glimpse of the trove of documentation Claude has generated for this passion project.
While all my efforts may not be profitable, the learning experience is beyond valuable. I have learned so much on how to take my thousands of lines of code, have Claude analyze and formulate plans. I still have a ton of work within Unity to match our code, but one of the rules I had Claude follow was to strive to maintain the front interface. this way we preserve most of the functionality and fix the labyrinth of code behind the scenes.
We take each fix slow and cautious. We remove dead code. We unravel excessive dependencies. Once in a while we'll completely change how an object functions for the better.
One of the first tasks I had Claude do was write a series of editor scripts. One of the most absolute important was the refactoring of the Object scaling.
For some reason long forgotten, all the objects in the game were imported at 10x scale. This was the absolute major pain point and had no easy fix. Basic walking speed was like Starship Enterprise entering warp. When I restored scale to normal levels, and the Claude script moved all the level objects to their proper places, the player character ran blazingly fast, jumped high enough to hit the moon and even headstomps would send the player to sub orbit.
What all this was doing, was making Unity engine work extra hard to move even simple polygon objects at an ultra fast speed. Once the scaling issues were resolved, frame rates went from 30-45 on a powerful PC to 120-300fps! This was all in editor mode!
Just that one fix alone would have improved the entire gaming experience and I could have shipped and slept peacefully. But no. I am doing an exhaustive code audit, refactoring, bug fixing and just an overall overhaul of the entire game. It's now 3 months into this venture and progress is going amazingly well. Even with Claude Code doing the brunt work, I am working on this 6am till 10 pm every day I able. Claude code is far from a cheat code, but It is an absolute time saver because what I have achieved so far would have been 2-3 years of actual work and mental burn out.
