GameFunds MCP

MCP server for browsing a local copy of the GameFunds directory (publishers, grants, VCs) and tracking your personal outreach pipeline.

What it does — and what it does not

Does:

• Search and filter 200+ funding sources from the GameFunds directory
• Match your project (genre, budget, stage, country) to publishers, grants, and investors
• Return submission briefs, pitch rubrics, and deterministic deck checks
• Keep your pipeline state locally (contacts, notes, follow-ups)

Does not:

• Know about adult/NSFW games — the upstream catalog has almost no coverage there; genre_signal: none is honest, not a bug
• Guarantee grant amounts — many entries say "varies" or omit numbers; grants without budget data get confidence: low
• Match genres in languages other than English — queries like "przygodowa" won't map to catalog terms
• Replace legal or financial advice — it surfaces directory notes, not deal terms

Tools

Thirteen tools, grouped by what they touch. Catalog tools are public (read scope); pipeline tools are private to the server owner (write scope).

Scoring

match_project uses a deterministic heuristic — no LLM. Results are grouped by funding type (publisher, vc_equity, project_investor, grant), and scores are comparable only within a group: a grant scoring 15 is not "worse" than a publisher scoring 66, they are different funding paths.

Each candidate carries a breakdown (budget / country / stage / genre / comm), a confidence (high / medium / low), and human-readable reasons. Two design choices are worth knowing:

• Genre outweighs country for publishers. A cozy-game publisher in the US beats a generic publisher in your own country — country is a tie-breaker (weight 5), not the driver. For grants, country is near-decisive (weight 28), because grants are regional.
• Missing data is not zero. breakdown.budget: null and confidence: low mean the catalog lacks the data, not that it scored poorly. genre_signal: none means no catalog entry matches your genre at all — the ranking is then budget-and-stage only, flagged with genre_warning, and you should verify by hand.

Hard filters remove sources that cannot work (counted in hard_filtered): budget off by 2+ tiers, a grant outside your country, or a genre-exclusivity clash (a sandbox game against a publisher that says "strictly no sandbox", a cozy sim against "horror only"). These are dropped, not down-ranked.

The full weight table lives in data/help/scoring.md and is available at runtime via gamefunds_help("scoring").

Data attribution

Directory data comes from github.com/GameDevGrzesiek/GameFunds © Grzegorz Wątroba, MIT license.

data/rubrics.json is derived from Grzegorz's PitchDeckTutorial.md in that repository.

Grzegorz is a working game dev — his game is Foxy Dumplings on Steam. If this tool is useful to you, wishlisting it is a good way to say thanks.

The database (data/gamefunds.db) and synced guides (data/guides/) are not in git — run gamefunds sync --apply on first use.

Your pipeline (publisher contacts, notes) lives only in your local DB and must never be committed.

Local setup (stdio, no tokens)

git clone <this-repo>
cd gamefunds-mcp
python3 -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate
pip install -e ".[dev]"
gamefunds sync --apply

If gamefunds sync returns a GitHub 403 rate limit error, set an unscoped personal access token and retry:

export GITHUB_TOKEN=<token>   # no scopes needed — the upstream repo is public
gamefunds sync --apply

Create a token at github.com/settings/tokens (classic, no checkboxes). Sync uses at most one api.github.com call per run; guide files are fetched from raw.githubusercontent.com (outside the 60/h unauthenticated API quota).

Stdio mode needs no GAMEFUNDS_TOKEN. Auth applies only to HTTP transport.

Paths to the database, guides, and logs are resolved from the package install location (not the process cwd). Override with GAMEFUNDS_DATA_DIR if needed (e.g. Docker volume at /app/data).

Connect it to an agent

Claude Code (local, stdio)

One command, from any directory:

claude mcp add gamefunds -- /absolute/path/to/gamefunds-mcp/.venv/bin/python -m gamefunds.server

Use the absolute path to the virtualenv's Python, not bare python — the agent launches the server as a subprocess and will not inherit your activated venv.

Add --scope project to write it into the project's .mcp.json (shareable with a team) instead of your personal config.

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "gamefunds": {
      "command": "/absolute/path/to/gamefunds-mcp/.venv/bin/python",
      "args": ["-m", "gamefunds.server"]
    }
  }
}

Claude Code (remote, HTTP + token)

If you deployed the server (see HTTP deployment):

claude mcp add --transport http gamefunds https://your-host.example/mcp \
  --header "Authorization: Bearer $GAMEFUNDS_TOKEN"

Claude Desktop

Edit the config file directly, then restart the app:

• macOS — ~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json
• Windows — %APPDATA%\Claude\claude_desktop_config.json

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "gamefunds": {
      "command": "/absolute/path/to/gamefunds-mcp/.venv/bin/python",
      "args": ["-m", "gamefunds.server"]
    }
  }
}

cwd is optional — data paths resolve from the package install location, not the process working directory.

Cursor

Same JSON as above, in .cursor/mcp.json (per project) or ~/.cursor/mcp.json (global).

Verify it works

In Claude Code, run /mcp — gamefunds should be listed as connected, exposing 13 tools and 6 resources. If it is not, check that gamefunds sync --apply has run and that the Python path is absolute.

Editing the server code? The agent starts the server once and keeps the process alive. Code changes are not picked up until you reconnect (/mcp → reconnect, or restart the agent). Testing against a stale process is the fastest way to conclude a working fix is broken.

Then ask it something

The tools are self-describing, so plain language works:

I'm making a cozy pottery sim. Two-person studio in Poland, $180k budget,
vertical slice done. Where should I look for funding?

What does Team17 want in a pitch, and how do I submit to them?

Review this deck for Whitethorn Games: <paste your pitch deck as markdown>

Log that I sent Kiln to Anshar today, follow up in two weeks.

Genre matching works against an English catalog — describe the genre in English (cozy crafting sim, turn-based tactics), even if you talk to the agent in another language. If nothing in the catalog matches your genre, match_project tells you so (genre_signal: none) rather than inventing a shortlist.

CLI

HTTP deployment

HTTPS is mandatory. A bearer token sent over plain HTTP is visible on the first request. Never expose HTTP publicly without TLS termination.

The server refuses to start in HTTP mode without GAMEFUNDS_TOKEN. Full and read-only tokens must be different values.

Private owner token (GAMEFUNDS_TOKEN) — write access + pipeline visibility. Never publish this.

gamefunds token          # FULL token — Do NOT share
export GAMEFUNDS_TOKEN=...

Shared read-only token (GAMEFUNDS_TOKEN_READONLY) — catalog only; safe to post on a forum or demo. Pipeline tools are refused; get_entity omits pipeline data.

gamefunds token --readonly   # SAFE to share publicly
export GAMEFUNDS_TOKEN_READONLY=...

Never publish GAMEFUNDS_TOKEN — it exposes your pipeline. Share only the read-only token.

gamefunds serve --transport http --port 8080

Generate .env from .env.example and set both variables as above.

Rate limiting

Owner token: 60 requests/minute (GAMEFUNDS_RATE_LIMIT). Shared read-only token: 300/minute (GAMEFUNDS_RATE_LIMIT_READONLY) — higher because many forum users share one token. One LLM conversation uses ~10–50 tool calls. Limits are keyed by SHA-256 hash of the bearer token — the raw token never appears in logs or rate-limit storage.

Docker

cp .env.example .env   # set GAMEFUNDS_TOKEN
docker compose up -d --build

• Binds to 127.0.0.1:8080 by default — put nginx, Caddy, or Traefik in front with TLS
• GAMEFUNDS_DATA_DIR (default /app/data in the image) holds DB, synced guides, and logs — mount it as a volume
• Fresh container auto-runs gamefunds sync --apply if no DB exists
• Memory limit: 256 MB

Scopes

Read-only tokens calling pipeline tools get a clear message pointing to the open-source repo — not a 500, and no private data.

Development

pip install -e ".[dev,http]"
pytest

Security checklist

• GAMEFUNDS_TOKEN set before HTTP start
• TLS terminates before traffic hits the app
• .env not committed (in .gitignore)
• data/*.db and data/guides/ not committed
• GAMEFUNDS_LOG_ARGS=0 in production (default — no argument logging)

License

MIT — see LICENSE. GameFunds directory data © Grzegorz Wątroba, used under MIT with attribution.