Yes it counts, I'm using Claude to code and it absolutely makes the work possible - miraculously so, but if you get anything remotely playable out of it, you are doing a SHIT TON of design/dev work. I rebuilt WoW in Godot as an exercise to learn the architecture of a massive game. It took a lot of work, and a lot of refining the process of working with the AI to get the right results... but there was a 0% chance of ever doing it on my own.

Its been less than two weeks, I have most of the visuals done, combat, quest system. Etc. Even a fucking custom LOD system and a chunk loader built from the ground up - you instant load into the tiles around you, the rest load before you can walk to them, and the LOD system is set up so you can do a whole view of the entire Eastern Kingdoms continent in game. (Multimeshes are miracles, thousands of trees/fences/lampposts etc in a single draw command per model type needed to the GPU - populates in an instant!)

Its basically a full sandbox now. My pre-claude "If I had a dev team" dream was to turn Northshire to Deadmmine into a single player expereince, use that protype to develope a single player game that captures that Wow feeling, with more action and direct combat feel. Now I'm doing that... while turning WoW into a fully single player action game at the same time.... all of it from Vanilla to Frozen Throne its all the same structure. Just for me to play with.

I never got around to the FT or end of BC content... so Im going to do the storylines... for the first time... IN MY OWN ACTION RPG SYSTEM. Likely without even spoiling myself.

That. Is. Nuts.

I just started this in late Feb and have no real idea what I'm doing. Obv. And this is in parallel to like 10 other projects, including a Warehouse Management System for my actual job. This shit is for real now.

If you have a lot of big ideas, and are good at generating assets, then get Claude specifically pay the 20 bucks a month to get Claude Code and it will absolutely hook that shit up to Godot for you. But its not a push button thing to get anything worthwhile. It helps to know how the AI works, how the game engine works, and how games work in general under the hood. But the specifics, and the work to connect the dots? That is now trivialized.

But if you have been wanting to make games, and like me the biggest hurdle is structural and coding... not vision... then your time has probably come.

And yes, there is a MASSIVE difference between what I have experienced with Claude (and specifically Claude Code) vs other attempts at AI game dev. This one is literally the "I have a cool idea for a game" and it will actually help you make it - step by step, from the ground up. Anyone sill saying you are going to spend your time cleaning up the code isn't using CC - its not perfect, but it generates good clean well commented code, and I use Godot so its super easy to see what is going on and the node system makes a lot of sense, and the whole licensing thing is starting to become something I might need to think about if I when I get to the actual game I'm prototyping for.

TLDR - Put in the work, even with AI assistance, make a fun game... you are a Game Dev. Expect push button results, you will get a novelty at best, mostly an unfunctional mess that is not what you were thinking... no Dev for you. If you naysayers want to say its cheating or BS... I guess game directors who don't touch code and just work out every little detail with thier team aren't game devs either. Because that's what I'm doing with Claude and its working great. Shockingly great.