game-design-process

name

game-design-process

description

The orchestrator for designing a game end to end. Use when starting or steering a game's design — "I'm making a game", "where do I start", "design this game with me", "what's next in the design", or running headless to take a concept to generated, reviewed content. Engine-agnostic; tuned for procedural / AI-authored games (e.g. a procgen open-world RPG in Godot). Sequences the pipeline and names which knowledge/process skill to pull at each phase. Stops at design/spec — does not write gameplay code.

Game-Design Process

Preamble (auto-loaded)

!cat "${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/shared/PREAMBLE.md"; echo; cat "${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/ETHOS.md"

FALLBACK: if the line above rendered literally or empty (your host has disableSkillShellExecution set), Read ${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/shared/PREAMBLE.md and ${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/ETHOS.md now and follow PREAMBLE.md as instructions (load the design bible, detect the engine), then continue.

The spine of the pack. This skill turns a one-line game concept into a designed, generated, self-reviewed game — and tells you which other skill does the work at each step. It is also the first-touch router: when the user describes a game or asks "where do I start / what's next", classify the intent and enter at the right phase below. (Routing is advisory — you invoke the next skill; there is no automatic dispatch.)

First-touch routing

• "I have an idea / starting fresh / where do I start" → Phase 1 (Concept).
• "What's next / health-check the design" → read ./.gamestack/bible/, find the earliest unfinished phase, resume there.
• "It's designed, now build it / which engine" → hand off to engine-router.
• A specific design question (combat, world, loot...) → invoke that knowledge skill directly.
• This is an existing project with design canon already established elsewhere (a CLAUDE.md, a docs//design/ tree, a lore graph) → the preamble's bible-init step (shared/PREAMBLE.md §1) handles adoption-mode detection and pointer-file setup. Once sources.md is written, classify the genre from the existing canon and record it in the bible — do not re-run Phase 1 Concept against docs that already answer it.

The design bible at ./.gamestack/bible/ (loaded by the preamble) is the persistent record of every phase's output and decisions. Read it to know what's done; append decisions to decisions.md as you make them.

Classify the genre, then pull the right lens

This pipeline is genre-aware (see docs/architecture.md). After Phase 1's concept, name the game's genre family (open-world RPG, platformer, shooter, puzzle, strategy, sim, deckbuilder, roguelike…) and record it in the bible (genre). That selection decides which skills you pull:

• 🌐 Universal craft — always in play, every genre: game-design-fundamentals, game-feel-and-juice, level-design, onboarding-and-teaching, ui-ux-and-feedback, difficulty-and-balancing, pacing-and-the-player-journey, art-direction-and-readability.
• 🎯 Genre lens — pull the ones that match: open-world RPG → open-world-design + rpg-systems + worldbuilding-and-lore + narrative-and-quest-design; action/combat → combat-design; high-lethality → permadeath-and-lethality. (More genres are on the roadmap — until a lens exists, apply the universal spine and flag the gap.)
• 🛠️ Technical craft — pull when the game has real-time 3D, or 2D with lighting/shading: 3d-graphics-and-rendering (pipeline, lighting, performance budget), shaders-and-vfx (materials, particles, stylization), animation-systems (rig, blending, IK, motion matching), procedural-geometry (terrain, meshes, structures — pull alongside procedural-generation when content generation includes geometry, not just narrative content).
• 🔧 Technique module — pull when the game uses it: procedural / AI-authored → procedural-generation, ai-authored-content-coherence, systemic-emergent-design.

Phase 2 below is therefore "build this genre's core," not "build a world." The universal skills always apply; the genre lens is what changes.

When to use this

• Kicking off a new game's design, or unsure what the next design move is
• Running headless: an agent loop that designs and generates content without a human in the seat
• Doing a design-health pass on an existing game ("which phase did we skip?")

The core stance

1. Design from interlocking systems and constraints, not content volume. A headless/procedural agent's superpower is authoring rules that generate content, not hand-placing it. Lean into systemic and procedural design.
2. Every element must earn its place. Each system answers "what interesting decision does this create?"; each generated location answers "who made this and what happened here?" If neither, cut it.
3. Hand-author a static backbone; proceduralize the connective tissue. Finite legendary loot, named landmarks, the mythic spine, key quests = hand-authored anchors. Everything between = constrained generation.
4. Gate generated content against hard quality bars before it's committed. This is non-negotiable for procgen — see procgen-review, and ${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/shared/GATE.md for the headless generate→review→repair loop.
5. Stop at the spec, then hand off. This pipeline produces world bibles, system specs, content, and review verdicts. Implementation is a separate, engine-specific step — when the spec is ready, pass it to engine-router, which routes the build to the matching engine pack (Godot/Unreal/Unity). For a tracked production cycle (epics, stories, sprints) once implementation starts, this pack has none — pair with a production-process framework like BMad Game Dev Studio instead (see docs/architecture.md § Relationship to other frameworks).

The pipeline

Read PIPELINE.md for the full phase-by-phase process with entry/exit gates. In brief:

Phase	Goal	Universal craft (always)	Genre lens / technique (selected)
1 · Concept	Fantasy, 3–5 pillars, core loop, signature mechanics. Prove each is an "interesting decision." Then classify the genre.	game-design-fundamentals	—
2 · Build the genre's core	The genre's primary systems & spaces; how it feels, teaches, paces, and balances.	game-feel-and-juice, level-design, difficulty-and-balancing, onboarding-and-teaching, pacing-and-the-player-journey, ui-ux-and-feedback	open-world RPG → open-world-design, rpg-systems, combat-design, systemic-emergent-design; real-time 3D/2D → 3d-graphics-and-rendering, shaders-and-vfx, animation-systems
3 · Content	Lore bible + constraint set; generate content from handcrafted anchors + constrained fill. Each system brought to fidelity via iteration-loop.	art-direction-and-readability	procedural-generation, worldbuilding-and-lore, narrative-and-quest-design, ai-authored-content-coherence; generated geometry → procedural-geometry; per-system fidelity loop → iteration-loop
4 · Review & gate	Run the quality bars: oatmeal, fanfic/retell, cross-instance sameness, intentionality, anti-patterns.	—	procgen-review, design-review
5 · Playtest & iterate	Watch the benchmarks (human + AI playtester); feed failures back to the phase that owns them.	—	iteration-loop (playtesting channel), procgen-review (loop)

Skills marked above that don't exist yet (e.g. some genre lenses, design-review, playtest analysis) are on the roadmap — use the matching section of an existing skill / PIPELINE.md in the meantime, and apply the universal spine regardless of genre.

The one rule for headless loops

Never commit generated content that hasn't passed procgen-review. Generation is cheap and confident; sameness is invisible from inside a single sample. The review pass is what stands in for the human designer's eye.

Start at PIPELINE.md Phase 1, or jump to the phase you're in.

Output

Write phase outputs to the design bible (./.gamestack/bible/) and log decisions to decisions.md. End with a completion status per the preamble protocol: DONE (phase complete, bible updated) / DONE_WITH_CONCERNS / BLOCKED / NEEDS_CONTEXT — plus the named next phase or the engine-router handoff.