game-production-stages

name	game-production-stages
description	Plan and route a game or playable 3D demo through art direction, sandbox, environment, character, assembly, atmosphere, gameplay, and shipping. Use at the start of any game-shaped project or when replanning one mid-flight. Coordinates reference-pack-authority, asset-judge-loop, 3d-asset-quality, and verify-by-playing, with a playable placeholder sandbox required before production assets.

Stages, gates, and which skill owns each

This is a routing document. The craft lives in the specialist skills; this map exists so they load at the right moments instead of by trigger luck, and so ordering mistakes that have each cost real projects real rounds are not re-made.

The map

stage	work	exit gate	loads
0 — Art direction	Hero image, site plan, section, elevations, materials sheet, character sheet — generated, pinned, hashed	Operator approves the hero (cheapest rejection point) + congruence pass done, spec-as-text written	reference-pack-authority
1 — Playable sandbox	Template adopted WHOLE if one is used; capsule player; greybox world built from the layout's own collision data; core loop playable	verify-by-playing — real input, route traversed, camera owned	verify-by-playing
2a ∥ Environment	Batch assets, coherent PBR surfaces, layout geometry	Judge passes the batch	asset-judge-loop, 3d-asset-quality
2b ∥ Character	Model, rig, clips (generate high-poly → bake route)	Rig proven by MEASURED joint motion; sockets by read-back through the actual loader	3d-asset-quality
2c ∥ Perf datum	Measure the frame floor on greybox + first assets, quiet machine, backend named	A number with a distribution, not a mean	—
3 — Assembly	World + character + mechanics integrated. Lighting and grade ONLY now, after geometry passes	Assembly judge round + verify-by-playing again	asset-judge-loop
4 — Atmosphere	Weather, fog, ambience beds, music	Look-check against the pinned Tier-2 targets	—
5 — Gameplay depth	Combat feel, AI, and the gameplay SFX WITH it	Played; cadence and feel measured, not asserted	verify-by-playing
6 — Ship gate	Clean perf measurement, checkpoint tag, handover doc	Numbers + tag + HANDOVER.md	—

The ordering rules — each one paid for

1. Sandbox before assets, with a capsule, not the character. Mechanics need a floor and a box, not a rigged hero. Projects that built assets first shipped a dead keyboard and a sealed level, because playability came last; the project that grey-boxed first found every later defect findable. If a template provides the mechanics, adopt it whole at stage 1 — cherry-picking a template cost one project a complete redo ("bring everything, or the moveset silently doesn't work").
2. Stage 2 is parallel tracks, not a sequence. Textures, environment geometry and character generation run concurrently — submit generation jobs, author while they cook. The tracks join at stage 3's gate; they do not wait on each other.
3. Lighting and grade come AFTER geometry passes its judge round. Shading is a multiplier on geometry; applied early it becomes the escape route by which a score is gamed while box houses rot (observed: ten hours of shader work on a village that still read as boxes; a relight that drove a judge's cited statistic to zero without moving the score).
4. Gameplay audio ships with its mechanic (stage 5), not at the end. The enemy's attack shout is a telegraph and the deflect ting is the player's confirmation of the hardest timing in the game — readability, not decoration. Ambience and music genuinely can wait (stage 4). Generated audio is never usable as shipped: measure onset, cut single strikes, export WAV (a clip once carried 1.16 s of leading silence and 3–7 strikes per file).
5. verify-by-playing is not a stage — it is the exit criterion of every stage that yields something playable (1, 3, 5, and always before handing the operator a build). Every defect that ever shipped past green gates was findable by playing.
6. The perf datum is taken early (2c) and re-taken clean at 6. Optimising against an unknown baseline wasted a round once (a ship decision made on a contended 40 fps that was really 58); a floor measured early is what later ablations are read against. First thing to check on any perf complaint: the actual rendered resolution (a "1080p" build once shipped rendering 4K — 92.7 ms of a 93 ms problem).
7. Back-edges are normal, not failures. Assembly-judging routinely sends work back to asset creation — that loop is asset-judge-loop's job. Budget rounds for it. What is NOT normal: skipping the re-judge after the fix, or letting an ACCEPTED defect go un-rederived (one hid an undefined requirement for eleven rounds — see reference-pack-authority).
8. Checkpoint at every playable milestone (git tag + one-paragraph state note), and a HANDOVER.md when a session ends mid-project: where things live, what works, the open list in value order, and the hard-won gotchas. Recovery from a dead session has been cheap exactly when this existed and expensive exactly when it did not.

Orchestration (when subagents do the work)

The parent orchestrates and never builds or judges its own output — roles, batch caps, judge independence and the parallel-builder mechanics are asset-judge-loop's contract and apply from stage 2 onward. Two additions at the map level:

• One stage's agents do not edit while another stage's agent measures. Perf numbers taken during concurrent edits have disagreed by 2× purely from contention and hot-reloads; the clean measurement is a solo activity on a quiet tree.
• File-ownership boundaries per agent, stated in every brief. The shared-file collisions that cost time were always where two briefs overlapped silently.

Tooling notes per stage (defaults, not law)

• Stage 0 images: use the available image-generation tool and pin accepted outputs. For environment surfaces, use complete photoscanned PBR sets with declared real-world scale rather than generated albedo-only images.
• Stage 2b animation: Meshy rig/animate, Mixamo, Mesh2motion; one rig serves every clip. Loader name-mangling is real (foot.L → footL, mixamorig:Hips → mixamorigHips) — always read names back through the engine's actual loader.
• Stage 2a at scale: parallel headless Blender per builder, or an approved remote Blender environment with spend authorization and automatic teardown.
• Stage 6 measurement: uncapped medians for cost, paced p95/worst for smoothness; a single capture receipt is ±25%; headless compositors run 120 Hz so rAF lands on an 8.33 ms grid.