Workspace
The AI Game Dev desktop workspace: project windows, sessions in panes, file previews for textures, 3D models and audio, Explorer, Search and Git.
The desktop app is a game dev workspace built around the loop you repeat all day with an AI agent: send a request, look at the result, check the changes. This page describes project windows, sessions and panes, file previews, the right panel with Explorer, Search and Source Control, and how to make the workspace your own.
One window per project
Each project lives in its own window, as in VS Code. When you relaunch the app, every project window that was open comes back with its own size, position, side panels and pane layout.
An empty window is a launcher with recent projects, Open folder… and Create new project. Ctrl-click (Windows, Linux) or Cmd-click (macOS) opens a project in a new window instead of replacing the current one. See Projects and engines for opening and creating projects.
Sessions in panes
The centre of the window is a layout of panes. You can:
- keep several sessions open as tabs, or split them side by side, vertically or horizontally;
- maximise one pane, or float it above the layout;
- drag a session from the session list straight into the layout.
Sessions in the background keep streaming, and the layout is saved for each project. Each pane keeps its own model, reasoning effort and agent, so one pane can plan a feature with a large model while another answers quick questions with a fast one. See Agents and models.
Session groups
The sidebar organises sessions into groups you can create, rename, colour and reorder. The grouping is committed with the project, so a teammate who clones the repository sees the same layout. Each row shows what the AI is doing and how long it has been working, and a search field filters sessions by name or group. Sessions you mark as done can be restored or removed permanently.
For long conversations, a prompt navigator lets you jump back to earlier messages, with hover previews.
Preview files next to the chat
When the agent creates or changes a file, open it in a preview pane beside your sessions. File paths in chat messages are clickable: a click opens the file and jumps to the line when the message gives one.
| File type | What the preview shows |
|---|---|
| Code and Markdown | Syntax highlighting, rendered Markdown |
| Images and textures | PNG, JPEG and others, plus TGA, TIFF, PSD, HDR, EXR, DDS, KTX and SVG |
| 3D models | The model with its textures, switchable lighting and shadows, an orientation gizmo |
| Audio | A waveform, the real sample rate, codec, bit depth and channels, a loop toggle |
| Video, fonts, CSV | Playback, glyphs, a table |
| Anything else | A hex view |
A single click opens a temporary preview, a double click keeps it open. Previews reload when the file changes on disk, so if you ask for a darker texture, the open preview updates as soon as the agent writes the file. Packages can add their own previews and editors for other file types.
The right panel: Explorer, Search, Source Control
The right panel has three tabs:
- Explorer: the project's files as a live tree with Git decoration, inline rename and create, and drag-and-drop of files into the chat composer.
- Search: content search with include and exclude globs, and replace for all matches.
- Source Control: the branch, ahead and behind counts and a diffstat; commit and pull from here.
Click a changed file in Source Control to open it as a diff. For images the diff is a side-by-side comparison, so you can see exactly how a texture changed before you commit it.
Packages can add their own tabs to the side panels; the Knowledge Base package, for example, adds a Knowledge Base view.
The CLI has the same operations as commands: /git for status, stage, commit, discard, pull and push, /search and /replace for project search, /file for file changes and /files for the files the chat mentioned. See the CLI reference.
The loop: request, preview, review
- Send a request, for example: "Switch Meadow Isle to the night grass texture and make the glide fall a little slower."
- Look at the results next to the chat: the texture in an image preview, a character in a 3D preview, music in the audio preview.
- Open Source Control, compare the old and new texture, and read the code diff.
- Commit when you are happy, or ask for another change.
Tools, status bar and command palette
- The Tools row above the composer switches the session's tools on and off: Blender, Music, Knowledge Base, Image Gen, Video, Tripo, Cloud generation and the tools of other packages you install.
- The status bar at the bottom shows package items, such as the Knowledge Base note count, and the package icon that opens the Packages window.
- The command palette lists app and package commands.
- Packages can add buttons to the composer toolbar and items to the right-click menus.
Make it yours
The workspace comes with six themes, from the neutral black Dark to charcoal Carbon and light themes; pick one in Settings, Appearance. As the window narrows, the composer hides its controls in a fixed order, so even a small split stays usable. Short in-app tips introduce features the first time they are useful; you can reset them in Settings, General.
Learn more
- The post one workspace for panes, previews and Git shows the whole loop on a demo game.
- Packages explains how to add panels, previews and tools.