Game Design Design Pillars Extractor

Extract the real pillars a design is built around, not the polite slogans attached to it.

Use this skill when a team has a pile of mechanics, references, and ambitions but no sharp articulation of what the design actually prioritizes. The goal is to reverse-engineer 3 to 5 actionable pillars from the game's systems, loops, and tradeoffs.

Good pillars are directional. They help decide what to keep, what to cut, and what kinds of changes are off-brand. Bad pillars are just nice words wearing capital letters.

Read references/family-conventions.md when you want the shared style, prioritization, and diagnosis rules for this game-design skill family. Read references/output-patterns.md when you want the preferred recommendation and minimal-fix structure.

Core principle

A meaningful design pillar does two things:

• names what the design is trying hard to deliver
• implies what the design is willing to sacrifice to deliver it

If a pillar does not create a constraint, it is not a pillar yet.