Xenotris devlog/post-mortem.

A game made in 3 days and rambling about a cool new tool.

Hey everyone, welcome to a little devlog, something a bit different from the recent things I have worked on. 

Over the weekend I took part in the Bezi Remix game jam, and, two spoilers:

A. It was one of the most fun game jams I ever took part in as someone who has completed over 40 jams over the past 8 years.

And B: it ended up resulting in one of the most polished, fun and replayable jam games I have ever worked on: a Tetris inspired game with a horde survival twist and a crapton of angry aliens.

So for the breakdown of this project, I worked solo or almost if you want to be technical. I fully designed the game along with making all the pixel art, animations, background art, sound fx, music and voice acting all with a mix of my hands, mouse and voice and my usual software stack.

So that's where Bezi comes in. Recently a friend suggested I check it out and videos from Thomas Brush and BiteMe showed a lot of promise. However, while those videos are mostly sponsored demos, as cool as they were, they don't prepare you for the rabbit hole of what will happen should you give it a try.

Over the last three days I worked on this Tetris inspired game with elements of tower defense and horde survival, a day night cycle controlling the different phases, tempo synced music transitions. It was one of the most mind-blowing jams I worked on so far.

So what is Bezi? it's an assistant that interfaces directly into your local unity editor and project. It can see your scenes, game objects and components, see how your objects and code relate to one another, and even read the exact values in the inspector and debug console. It's adept at making custom shaders, editor scripting tools, systems and mechanics for your games.

There are multiple steps down the path of getting as sophisticated as Bezi. If the limit of how you look for assistance from a computer with code is to copy paste it into chatGPT you're at the shallow end of the spectrum. 

Going midway you start to dive into tools like Claude Code and Crush, while these are interesting tools for software and web devs, they leave a lot to be desired for gamedevs, with a lack of context of what is going on in your game outside of pure code. And going beyond that with them involves the use of MCP which seemingly when used locally on Windows is a buggy mess of constant disconnections and swearing when you find out Claude has gone into a huge loop after disconnecting from unity 5 minutes earlier.

So getting into the deep end and the context of this video. What can Bezi do for you? Well I can briefly explain what it did for me.

A brief aside on my background, I'm a jack of all trades gamedev person with a level of specialization in audio, but I love working on the fun parts of gamedev and I find the grunt programming of deep mechanics of systems I design an absolute chore. And that is exactly where Bezi comes in.

If you are a solo gamedev or small team of creatives who love designing games, the graphics or sounds that go in them but dread the idea of spending more than half your time working on games in an IDE… Bezi is calling!

So far its biggest limitation is being currently only available for unity. I don't know if that will remain the case for very long, if a version for Godot drops my jaw will drop just like it!

But for this specific project… 99% of my code was worked on through interactions with Bezi. Around 300 queries across tens of different threads over the last 72 hours of gamedev work I did.

Most of the time I opened VScode or rider was to remove comments, individual debug logs, or make small tweaks to parameters not exposed to the inspector. None of the implementation was done there. 

All the design of the mechanics was written out by me in totally human readable form. And I delegated the task of implementing it to Bezi, giving interesting results through creative prompting.

And yes some things did go wrong. Some catastrophically wrong, like ending up redoing whole systems the game was built upon. My first suggested iteration of the Tetris gameplay involved swapping sprites based on their world position rounded to grid positions but you only have to know what a floating point error is to know how dumb an idea of mine that was. 

So I ported the Tetris system to be based on a tile map instead and that solved a ton of the issues and resolved most of the bugs. The process wasn't one of copying and pasting code inside a text editor or IDE, or manually rewriting hundreds of lines with tons of testing. It instead worked out to be a couple hours of back and forth dialogue, discussing old and new errors and the contents of the console. 

And then it just kind of worked. Past that snag the road became easier. I had already designed a UI layout for my game scene and when wanting a nice design for the main menu, I got Bezi to design a editor tool to one click place everything I needed to put the menu together. Then with some tweaking of scripts and prefabs as objects needed to be decoupled from their game state versions it was up and running in no time.

While first iterations of the enemy AI were quite rough, as soon as I could understand how some of the poorer interactions with the towers worked, I could quickly iterate on it and get the AI from useless to absolutely murderous OP over the course of several messages in the thread, needing me to tweak and nerf it.

The handling of UI layouts and scripting with Bezi was done very well, the handling and speed of designing of custom shaders and particle effect systems even better. 

I often ended up rejecting its auto detection systems for objects and components in the inspector view and manually linking them myself via the inspectors just because it felt safer to me. I wish it would have asked me more often if I had wanted these autodetection systems because it felt mean to reject them when it was trying to make my life easier.

The game ended up surprisingly polished and mostly bug free, thanks to Bezi I could make one of the most complex gamejam entries I have ever made in 3 days, and spend a large amount of time working on fun stuff. 

I just kept building, recording more new voiceovers on my phone and composing new parts of my soundtrack in Ableton Live. Doodling new pixel art frames to make static sprites come to life more in Aseprite. And finishing my game fast at the same time.

For the first time in 8 years of gamedev, and 3 years of on and off tinkering with AI tools that all claim to be the next big thing, this is the first time I think I've found something legitimately revolutionary for designers and gamedevs who still want to enjoy the fun parts of making games. 

I'm planning on taking part in all the future Bezi gamejams and I suggest next time one is running, if you are happy to work with unity, download the trial and take it for a spin. You might be pleasantly surprised.