Game development stack

Gamedev tooling on macOS Apple Silicon, chosen (August 2026) for how well AI agents can drive it — engines with diffable text formats and headless CLIs, plus MCP servers that let Claude Code manipulate scenes, run tests, and generate assets. Full research + phased roadmap: GAMEDEV_PLAN_CLAUDE.md at the repo root.

Overview

Layer	Tool	Status
Asset hub	Blender 5.2 LTS (`cask "blender"`) + `blender-mcp` (`packages/mcp-servers.txt`)	Installed
Engine — early-adopter	Unity via `cask "unity-hub"` — prerelease stream + first-party MCP	Installed; manual steps below
Engine — planned	Godot 4.7 + Bevy 0.19 (plan Phase 1, not yet applied)	Planned
Engine — wanted	UE6 (native MCP, Verse) — Early Access ~late 2027	Watchlist
Skills	`router` (awesome-gamedev-agent-skills) in `packages/agent-skills.txt`	Installed

The 2026 agent-friendliness ranking that drove the choices: Godot first (.tscn/.tres/.gd are plain diffable text, first-class --headless), Bevy first for code-first work (pure Rust — maximally LLM-legible), Unity second (best MCP tooling, held back by GUID-heavy YAML scenes), Unreal last (binary .uasset, opaque Blueprints — agents can’t diff content; UE6 is the fix).

Blender as the asset hub

ahujasid/blender-mcp (registered as uvx blender-mcp; requires its addon installed inside Blender) is the most mature MCP in the gamedev space: arbitrary Python in Blender, viewport screenshots for feedback loops, and generation hooks for Poly Haven (CC0 stock), Sketchfab, Hyper3D Rodin, and Hunyuan3D. Engine-agnostic — it feeds Unity, Godot, or Bevy via glTF/FBX export.

Unity early-adopter track

Unity’s alpha/beta streams are open to everyone (no signup) and it is the only major engine shipping a first-party MCP server. After brew bundle:

Unity Hub → Installs → Pre-releases — install the current beta. The milestone build is the 6.8 alpha (~end of 2026): full-CoreCLR editor, Mono gone, .NET 10 + C# 14.
First-party MCP (per-project, not in mcp-servers.txt by design): add the com.unity.ai.assistant pre-release package, then follow its unity-mcp-get-started page — the editor auto-launches an MCP bridge and Claude Code spawns a relay from ~/.unity/relay/ over stdio. Editor must be running.
Fallback if the pre-release MCP disappoints: CoplayDev/unity-mcp — 47 tools including play-mode tests, profiling, and builds.

Licensing: Personal tier is free under $200k revenue; the 2023 runtime fee was cancelled in 2024. In-editor Unity AI (Assistant/Generators) is metered via AI-gateway points — the MCP path is the agent surface, not that.

UE6 (wanted ASAP — nothing installable yet)

UE6 was announced June 2026: UE5+UEFN unification, gameplay in Verse, native MCP integration. Early Access lands ~late 2027, final ~mid-2029. Until then:

Link an Epic account for GitHub source access; watch ue5-main and Lore (Epic’s open-sourced Rust VCS).
Verse runs today only inside UEFN, which is Windows-only — on macOS, learn the language from Epic’s docs and wait.
Day one of EA: install via cask "epic-games", wire the native MCP, re-run the engine bake-off against Godot/Bevy.

Roadmap (plan Phases 1-2, not yet applied)

From GAMEDEV_PLAN_CLAUDE.md: casks godot, krita, affinity, material-maker, reaper; godot-mcp registration; Aseprite (paid, no cask possible). On-demand: Plasticity, Cascadeur, Houdini Apprentice, Tripo/Meshy credits, ElevenLabs SFX. Avoid: Suno/Udio for shipped-game music (mid-litigation), Luma Genie and Quixel Mixer (dead).