A collection of 11 Claude Code skills for auditing and reviewing game designs and game codebases. Each skill targets a specific design dimension — from emotional impact to input feel — and produces structured findings with actionable recommendations.
Built for the Claude Code .claude/skills/ system. Drop them into any game project and invoke them by name or let the Game Design Director route your request to the right combination.
| Skill | What it audits |
|---|---|
| game-design-director | Orchestrator. Routes broad requests to the right specialist skills, sequences multi-lens audits, and merges findings into one report. Start here for full reviews. |
| emotion-engine-audit | Whether mechanics produce feelings players care about. Traces the chain from rules to play events to emotional response. Foundation lens — run first when the problem is vague. |
| elegance-audit | Whether mechanics earn their complexity. Interaction matrices, cut candidates, degenerate strategies, and exploit surfaces in code. |
| skill-curve-audit | Difficulty, learning curves, failure states. Hunts softlocks, failure traps, missing resource floors, and checkpoint bugs. |
| decision-flow-audit | Whether decisions are interesting or just present. Information balance, cognitive load over time, randomness placement, AI readability. |
| reward-psychology-audit | Progression, loot, retention loops. Includes a mandatory ethics check for manipulative patterns (streak punishment, FOMO timers, purchase-adjacent variable-ratio schedules). |
| game-narrative-tools | Story structure, dialogue systems, environmental storytelling, emergent narrative, and LLM-driven narration with constraint auditing. |
| game-interface-audit | HUD clarity, input latency, control feel, player guidance, notification stacking, and accessibility hooks. |
| game-feel-audit | The feedback layer: screenshake, hitstop, camera feel, impact particles, audio layering, permanence. Adapted from Jan Willem Nijman's "The Art of Screenshake" talk. |
| multiplayer-dynamics-audit | PvP/co-op strategic depth, counter structures, grief surfaces, goal alignment, matchmaking, and information leaks to clients. |
| playtest-protocol | Development process: what to test next, dependency stacking, graybox hygiene, feedback interpretation, and iteration friction in the repo. |
Nine of the specialist skills adapt concepts from Tynan Sylvester's Designing Games (O'Reilly, 2013). The game-feel-audit adapts Jan Willem Nijman's "The Art of Screenshake" (Vlambeer, 2013). Neither source's text is reproduced; ideas are rewritten in original language.
Copy the skills/ folder into your project's .claude/skills/ directory:
your-game-project/
.claude/
skills/
game-design-director/
SKILL.md
emotion-engine-audit/
SKILL.md
elegance-audit/
SKILL.md
...
Or clone the whole repo into .claude/skills/:
cd your-game-project/.claude/skills
git clone https://github.com/Lagunaswift/GameDevelopmentAudit.gitThe skills activate automatically in Claude Code when their trigger phrases match your request. See each skill's description field in its YAML frontmatter for the full trigger list.
Ask Claude Code any game design question and the matching skill activates:
- "Why is my game boring?" → emotion-engine-audit
- "Full design audit" → game-design-director (orchestrates multiple lenses)
- "Players rage quit at level 3" → skill-curve-audit
- "Add juice to my combat" → game-feel-audit
- "Is my loot system predatory?" → reward-psychology-audit (with mandatory ethics check)
Each skill has two workflows: design review (for documents and discussions) and repo audit (for codebases, with file paths in findings).
See CONTRIBUTING.md.