Night School

How to Build a Game With AI — No Coding, No Art Team

Wednesday, August 5, 2026 · 5:00 PM CT / 6:00 PM ET · Matt Hulme

About this lecture

You don't need an art team to ship a real game anymore. Matt Hulme built QuizCaster's characters, animations, and sound with AI — then used his own judgment on everything that keeps it from looking generated.

Not long ago, shipping a game meant an art team, animators, engineers, and knowing how to code. That barrier just fell. QuizCaster — a casual educational web game with 35 weapons, 9 enemy types, and both prebuilt K–5 decks and custom flashcard upload — went from idea to finished build in about a month, with every character, animation, and visual generated by AI and then refined by hand. Matt Hulme, lead engineer on QuizCaster, walks through the whole pipeline live: the actual toolchain (Claude Code, Phaser, Pixel Lab, ElevenLabs, Aseprite), the MCPs and skills that speed up both the creative assets and the marketing, and the specific points where a human still has to make the call — because AI will hand you assets, but it won't hand you taste. You'll leave knowing exactly what's realistic to build yourself, at whatever level of effort you're willing to put in.

“With zero coding and zero game-development knowledge, building a game is possible with AI.” — Matt Hulme

In this lecture

  • The exact toolchain behind QuizCaster — Claude Code, Phaser, Pixel Lab, ElevenLabs, Aseprite — and what each one is actually for, so you can wire up your own stack instead of guessing
  • A realistic effort map for your own idea: what's buildable in a weekend as a prototype, what a $20/month mini-game looks like, and what it takes to get to a month-long build with real depth
  • How to use MCPs and skills to automate the creative pipeline and the marketing around it — not just the code, which is the part most builders skip
  • The specific points where AI-generated art and animation still need a human hand — the taste calls that separate 'polished' from 'obviously generated'
  • How to generate and iterate on game audio with ElevenLabs
  • A clear before/after picture of what one engineer with no formal game-dev background shipped, so you can size your own project against a real reference point

About the instructor

Matt Hulme is a Gauntlet grad and the lead engineer on QuizCaster, an educational web game whose art, characters, animation, and audio are entirely AI-generated and then hand-refined — 35 weapons, nine enemy types, and custom flashcard decks, all shipped in about a month. Before QuizCaster, he spent five years as a front-end and data engineer working in React, TypeScript, and Python, with a background in advertising and multiple companies founded along the way. He is a firm believer in keeping a human in the loop: AI moves fast, but taste and judgment are still what separate polished from generic. QuizCaster is his first game — which is the point, since he built it with no game-dev background and no art team.