Mapping LLMs over excel saved my passion for game dev

Summary

(map LLMs excel) saved my passion for game dev What? Recently I hit a code-block (like writers block except for code) in my game development experiment that I have been slowly doing over a few years now because I absolutely hated data entry. I built a battling card game, prototyped it offline using pen, paper and excel, before creating my game in Unity3d. Everything was going well. I created my battling systems, setup data structures and refactored my code a few times to accommodate some crazy idea I had to support augments ala Warframe. Data entry, however, was that elephant in the room. I had dozens of characters designed with unique spells and traits. I need to translate my plain English descriptions of spells and traits into my spell system. Before all of this, I have had set up script-able objects and custom editors in Unity using Odin. This worked fine for simple lists and dictionaries but since my spell system required heavy usage of sub-classes and nested components it became incredibly difficult for Odin to present a consistent user interface for my systems. One particular example was around nullable references to complex subclasses. A simple List<Spell> would show up as nullable with no way to change it in the editor. Data entry became difficult because I had to fiddle around the editor UI and figure out the origin of each element. I kept working on other systems to avoid doing data entry until I got to the point where I more or less need to have more data in the system before I could progress meaningfully. A month or so later, I had a flash of insight. Why do I even need to use the Unity3d editor for this? Why not store everything as code instead? Code was easy to edit and manage. Code can be type-checked. Code is what I'm familiar with. So I began reconstructing my game asset files into code. At first I tried to convert raw unity asset files into c# code. That didn't work. Then I tried storing them as structured YAML using some custom schema. That took o...