>I mean all the major hurdles of making a game aren't really helped much by AI...

I have been using Claude Code to develop a game in unreal engine. It is fricking amazing. Its like hiring someone with 10 years experience to work for you. I am really impressed by how it know game patterns.

>It definitely doesn't get anything visual right really. Sometimes it struggles to things things right visually, other times it nails it!

I have been using an MCP from gemini image 1.5 to generate my icons. And once it go my styles down, after 20 experiments, it does really good. Notice: It uses high quality by default which will burn up your credits. But if you turn down the image quality to low, it cost around 3 cents an icon.

>There isn't large amounts of automated testing.

Some things can be easily automated for testing. But other things require play testing.

>The art is also going to all be really derivative plagiarism

I am just using it to generate icons, and it does great. For 3D artwork I either use things from the FAB Store, or I pay a team of artists in Pakistan to do it.

Overall I say it is the equivalent to have a senior dev on your team, for 100 bucks a month

edited for line breaks.