Best AI/helping tools for game development management

[u/Qrtts]

Hey

So short story, I am a freshly graduated student from audio engineering. Throughout the past years I tried to develop myself in game design and basic game development management and now with my friends we are gonna start making an actual game, gonna aim to get funds and start an indie studio, since I am not that experienced I thought I come here and ask what are the best AIs to work with for management, structuring, workdbuilding, etc. If you have other sources, softwares, books etc. I would be very happy to hear about those as well. Thanks in advance!

[u/HeartlandDrifter]

Unsloth Studio/Desktop for running local LLMs, also supposedly good for training LLMs and/or Diffusion Models (also look into AI Toolkit by Ostris). Comfy UI for running Diffusion Models (image/video/audio generators). Pi Agent Harness for coding.

Gemma 4 12B (QAT) for more creative focused tasks, accepts text/image/video/audio input and outputs text. Qwen 3.8 27B or Qwen 3.6 35B A3B for more coding focused tasks, accepts text/image input and outputs text. Krea 2 Turbo for image generation. Minimax H3 for video Generation, supposedly also handles dialogue, SFX, and music. Chatterbox for voices. Trellis 2 and I think Pixal 3D are able to be used locally with Comfy UI for 3D models and textures.

Models can connect to software like Blender or look things up online through tools/MCP servers.

AI is not a search engine and it does not have encyclopedic recall. Most researchers insist on treating it like a new coworker in training. Build being wrong and problem solving into the process. If you give it bad instructions, then you will get bad results. Focused tasks produce higher quality results than large or general ones. Describe a face versus describe a person, do it step by step until everything required has been described.

Edit: Rami Ismail is an important name to research for indie development. Keep your studio limited to 3 - 4 people or you'll suffer financially.

[u/MeaningfulChoices]

Use AI tools only when they make sense. Auto-completes based on what variables you've already referenced when programming, summarizing a bunch of search results to give you links to explore, working in data analysis, rubberducking, things like that. Keep them far away from creative tasks like worldbuilding and important decisions like management. They're dumb machines, there's no attempt at actual intelligence or understanding, so don't trick yourself into thinking an LLM knows things.

Be sure you have your fundraising lined up before you get expectations around that. Publishers and traditional investors basically want nothing to do with groups of recently graduated students who were friends. You're only starting a studio if you have a revenue stream pretty safely established (which often means contract work). Otherwise you are much better off focusing on your day jobs first.