Game Design Flow Audit

Audit a design by asking whether it keeps players in a productive state of engagement over time.

Use this skill to evaluate whether challenge rises in step with player skill, where the experience becomes boring or overwhelming, and which moments break the player's sense of momentum. Focus on temporal experience and pacing, not static difficulty labels.

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

Flow emerges when challenge and player skill stay in meaningful tension and grow together over time.

Typical failure shapes:

• Challenge above skill -> anxiety, confusion, frustration
• Skill above challenge -> boredom, autopilot, disengagement
• No visible skill growth -> stagnation, flatness, drop-off

A flow audit is not just about whether the game is hard. It is about whether the game keeps giving the player something they can meaningfully rise to.