Game Design

A designer's reference, written from play. Use it to decide what to design and why it works; godot handles how to implement it in the engine, and on a change that is both at once, run them together rather than letting one defer to the other. It carries a cross-game pattern catalog distilled from 17 dissected games, the durable design frameworks, an interface and UX layer (menus, screens, teaching, dialogue, feedback, accessibility), and a stance: opinionated but anti-dogmatic. Both work, for different games. Pick a stance, and be ready to argue with this one.

This fires whenever game design is on the table: a new game idea that needs a concept and a home for it, a mechanic that feels off, a rework, a balance question, a menu or HUD or tutorial or dialogue screen that needs designing, "is this fun / too grindy / a dominant strategy", or the agent making its own design and interface calls while building a game. The depth lives in the OKF bundle in references/; this file is the procedure.

Reach for this first

This is the first stop on any design-touching change or discussion, not a reference of last resort, and not only when someone says the word "design". Before you commit to a balance number, an enemy or difficulty scaling curve, a drop rate, a shop price, an economy value, an inventory rule, a menu flow, or a progression gate, run it through the lens and the patterns here instead of improvising from training data. This holds mid-implementation: when you are editing GDScript or a scene and the change encodes a design decision, the engine work and this design work run together, so load this and reason from it before you answer. If you catch yourself about to give a design answer from general knowledge, stop and open the relevant reference file first. That habit is the whole point of the skill, and it is what keeps it influential across a long coding session rather than firing once and fading.

To make this automatic in a real game project (so it is consulted on every design-touching change without anyone asking), wire it on the project side: a path-scoped CLAUDE.md rule, a paths:-activated rule, or a UserPromptSubmit hook that nudges consulting this skill on design keywords. Run /game-design wire to scaffold these into the current project; the mechanics and copy-paste snippets are in INTEGRATION.md.

The lens: how to read any game or mechanic

Run anything you are analyzing through these axes (the full method is in method.md):