The indie AI toolkit

A field guide for solo developers and small teams who want AI in the pipeline without letting it pick the game.

What this is

Lootsmith already lists the tools for free. This guide is the order of operations: which job to automate, which file to expect, and what to check before a build leaves your machine. It is not a coupon book, and it is not a ranking you can buy your way up.

The price on the page is a placeholder, $9–$19. Payments are off until a Stripe Payment Link is pasted and turned on.

Pick a job, not a brand

An indie game does not need one vendor. It needs a short list:

1. Still pictures: concepts, sprites, icons, capsules.
2. Meshes: props and characters.
3. Motion: a clip on a rig, or a video previz.
4. Sound: voice, effects, music.
5. Words in the world: barks, and NPCs that answer when the player leaves the script.
6. The store page.
7. A test pass that is not you, at 1 a.m.

If a tool does not name one of those jobs, do not add it to the project.

A small pipeline

Work in this order so you do not generate assets for a game you have not framed.

1. Write the player verb in one sentence. If you cannot, stop generating art.
2. Greybox the space in your engine. Promethean AI and Blockade Labs Skybox AI can dress or light a space you already blocked. They do not decide where the player walks. Dungeon Alchemist is the map version of the same idea: you draw the rooms, it fills them.
3. Generate a handful of stills. For pixel games start with PixelLab or Retro Diffusion. For painterly concepts, Midjourney or Leonardo.Ai. For a style you must repeat, Scenario or Layer.
4. Promote a still to 3D only after the design is locked. Meshy or Tripo for a base mesh. Kaedim if you want a service instead of a self-serve mesh. Clean it before it is real-time. Polycam only when the object already exists in your room.
5. Rig ordinary humanoids in Mixamo. Use Cascadeur, Plask, Move AI, DeepMotion, or Rokoko when you need a performance. Do not capture a character whose design is still changing.
6. Temp the music with Suno, AIVA, SOUNDRAW, Beatoven.ai, or Stable Audio. Voices and effects: ElevenLabs. Replace temp music if the license on your plan does not cover a shipped game.
7. Write the plot-carrying lines by hand. Use Inworld, Convai, Charisma.ai, or NVIDIA ACE only where a character must answer a player who will not follow the script.
8. Cut the store page last, from real captures. Canva for capsules. CapCut or Descript for the trailer. Opus Clip only after the long video is honest.

A stack that can start without a subscription

These entries are marked free or freemium in the directory. A free tier is a starting allowance. It is not a promise that the shipped game stays inside it.

• Pictures: Leonardo.Ai, Adobe Firefly, ComfyUI, Recraft, remove.bg, Upscayl.
• Meshes: Meshy, Polycam, Spline.
• Motion: Mixamo, Cascadeur, Runway.
• Sound: ElevenLabs, Suno, AIVA.
• Code: GitHub Copilot, Cursor, Claude, GDevelop.
• Store: Canva, Descript, CapCut.

ComfyUI, Upscayl, Mixamo, and GDevelop do not need a subscription to use the tool itself. Mixamo asks for an Adobe login. GDevelop is the engine. The others meter an allowance.

License checks before you ship

Do these for every generated file you keep. If you cannot answer, the file is temporary.

• Does this plan grant commercial use in a game you sell?
• Are you allowed to train a model, or only to generate?
• Did you upload a reference you do not own?
• Voice cloning: do you have the speaker's permission?
• Music: does the plan treat the track as yours, or only as licensed while you pay?
• Does the output include a watermark on the tier you used?

"Freemium" in Lootsmith means a free tier exists. It does not mean the free tier is the one you should ship on.

Into the engine

• Images: export PNG with a transparent background for sprites. remove.bg is a cut-out, not a pixel cleanup. Snap pixel art back to the grid in your editor. PixelLab's Aseprite extension is there for that workflow.
• Meshes: prefer GLB or FBX. Check scale, origin, and whether the texture is actually embedded. Real-time games want a reduced mesh.
• Animation: Mixamo FBX imports into Unity, Unreal, and Godot for standard humanoids. Retarget if your proportions differ.
• Skyboxes: Blockade Labs publishes a Unity integration. An HDRI can light a level in other engines too. It is not collision, and it is not a layout.
• Scene dressing: Promethean AI's main integration is Unreal, with a Unity plugin as well. It places assets you already own.
• NPCs: Inworld and Convai ship Unity and Unreal integrations. NVIDIA ACE's public game path is centered on Unreal. Budget time for latency.
• Code: Unity AI is for Unity projects. The in-editor assistant uses credits. Copilot, Cursor, Claude, and Devin are editors and agents. They do not know your design unless the project files say it.

The store page in an afternoon

1. One sentence on who the game is for.
2. Five real screenshots. Generated key art can support them. It should not replace them.
3. A capsule in Canva at the size the store asks for. Read the spec. Upscayl adds resolution. It does not invent missing detail.
4. A trailer cut in Descript or CapCut from captured footage. Runway or Luma can make a previz shot. Label it to yourself as previz so it does not become the only footage.
5. A short post in Opus Clip only after the long video is honest.

A test pass

modl.ai and nunu.ai are in the directory because they play a build. Use one of them, or a friend, against a list:

• New game, first door, first death, pause, and quit.
• The smallest window, and a gamepad if you claim support.
• One full session on the platform you will sell, not only in the editor.

Automated play does not judge whether the joke landed.

What to leave to a person

• The player verb.
• The final silhouette of a character.
• The line that carries the ending.
• The mix of the shipped soundtrack, if you can afford an hour with someone who mixes.
• The decision that a bug is actually a bug.

How to keep the list short

Add a tool only when a job in this guide has no owner. Remove it when a person takes that job back. The directory can grow every day. Your repo should not.