DevKit

Situation

My iteration loop was painful. Every time I touched a sprite, sound, or texture, I'd wait ~12s while the engine reprocessed assets and reloaded the scene. Across a 6-hour session that's hundreds of dead seconds — and worse, broken flow.

• 12s round-trip per asset change
• Three engines in rotation (Unity, Godot, custom)
• No existing tool covered all three

Task

Build a daemon that watches the project's `assets/` dir, processes changed files (texture compression, sprite atlasing, audio normalization), and pushes diffs to the running game over a local socket. Cross-engine, cross-platform, <500ms round-trip.

• Cross-platform (mac, linux, win)
• Engine-agnostic protocol
• Sub-500ms perceived reload

Action

Wrote it in Rust on top of `notify` for file watching, defined per-asset-type pipelines in TOML so adding a new format is config-only, and chose a tiny WebSocket protocol so every engine could integrate with ~50 lines of glue code.

• Rust + `notify` crate for cross-platform watching
• TOML-defined per-asset pipelines
• WebSocket protocol — Unity, Godot, custom engines all on it

Result

Iteration time dropped from ~12s to under 500ms. Used in two of my last jams. Two friends adopted it for their own projects.

• Adopted by two other solo devs
• Saved hours per jam (24-to-48-hour formats)

Reload time

<500ms

Iteration speedup

24x

Engines supported

3

Lines of glue / engine

~50