Game Design Peak-End Audit

Audit a design by asking which moments dominate memory and whether the experience earns the memory it leaves behind.

Use this skill when the important question is not just how the experience feels moment to moment, but how players will remember it afterward. The goal is to identify the emotional peaks, the ending shape, and the aftertaste that determine whether a session, level, feature, event, or sequence is remembered as exciting, exhausting, disappointing, triumphant, or forgettable.

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

Players do not remember an experience as an average of every second they lived through.

They disproportionately remember:

• the strongest emotional peaks
• the ending
• the story those moments imply afterward