Game Design Novelty Spectrum Audit

Evaluate whether a design is innovating in the right way, at the right intensity, for the right audience.

Use this skill to assess how a proposal sits on the spectrum between overly familiar and overly novel. The goal is not to praise originality for its own sake. The goal is to judge whether the design balances novelty against player expectations strongly enough to feel fresh, but not so aggressively that it creates avoidable cognitive dissonance or adoption risk.

Read references/mental-model-layers.md when identifying which player expectations matter most. Read references/innovation-patterns.md when classifying what kind of novelty the design is attempting. Read references/verdict-scale.md when selecting a final novelty-spectrum judgment.

What to produce