tips on saving token useage

[BackspaceOG]

Firstly, thank you to @Donchitos for making this. I am really enjoying seeing my ideas come to life.

Account: Claude Pro
Engine: Unity
OS: Windows 11 Home
IDE: Visual Studio Code

Q1) Token optimization strategies

I am finding that I'm burning through tokens fairly quickly, which fine, except I am about to hit my weekly limit. My game has 17 GDDs.

Things I am doing.

I have been using /clear often, but rn, Claude is now telling me that is nuclear option, and I need to just open a new session.

I am finding that VSCode does not print the CTX, so I am going back to windows terminal.

I have asked the agents to be more efficient, and it now uses --depth lean, but still likes to do design reviews often. In fact it just told me

"The real token drain on this project is the /design-review cycle. Each run spawns 4–5 specialist subagents, all
burning tokens. You've run it 14 times across 2 GDDs — that's the core cost."

It is also helpfully telling me

"Three things that would help most:

1. Use --depth lean from review 2 onward (you did this for some, not all — it cuts subagent count significantly)
2. /clear between GDDs — once Scene Management is approved, clear before starting Save/Load
3. Fix blockers in fewer passes — the input system took 6 reviews; aim to batch more fixes per revision before
   re-reviewing"

Is there anything else I should be doing?

I have some XP with development, but I am not a developer and certainly not a game designer. I am a product lead and this repo is made for ppl like me.

Q2) Account expectations

My game is a platformer, but it is pretty unique and has some interesting graphical needs. Is it unrealistic to expect to build with a pro account?

Thank you again to @Donchitos!

[ashmoonori-afk]

Brother i am here to ask same question on max 20.

[BackspaceOG]

I am already convinced I need to upgrade, worth it for what you get.

[Vandevious]

I also had this concern, so I configured Claude Code to run using DeepSeek V4 Pro - 85-95% as capable as Claude Opus for agentic coding, tool use, and narrative text but 5x-7x cheaper for input tokens and 7x cheaper on output tokens.

It's building a STEM Tutoring platform which gamifies First Principles and Socratic Teaching Methods while using Voxtral by Mistral to generate real-time voice guidance from the Chibli-styled robot mentor. It provided a lot of source material to build the First Principles and Socratic Teaching methods.

When I looked at my usage after completing the the 4th section of the 28 sections in the GDD - I was over 11million tokens (11M in, 70k out) used for $0.25 in usage.

[mahavira]

Same here. This is how many tokens have been used so far.

/architecture-decision Data Architecture: Resource-based DB + JSON Import