dm-game

Use when designing any player-facing feature, evaluating a game for accessibility, responding to accessibility feedback, designing difficulty or assist options, adding subtitle/caption systems, implementing input remapping, or when a player reports they can't play. Covers the four accessibility pillars (visual, auditory, motor, cognitive), implementation tiers, colorblind design, subtitle standards, input accessibility, and testing methodology. Accessibility is a design discipline, not a post-launch checklist.

Use when designing how audio communicates game state, creates emotion, and serves as a feedback system. Activate for sound effect design, adaptive music systems, spatial audio, ambient soundscapes, audio priority and ducking, emotional audio design, and audio accessibility. Also activate when audio feels disconnected from gameplay, when players routinely play on mute (a design failure signal), when evaluating whether the audio stack has appropriate layering and variation, or when planning how music responds to gameplay context. This skill treats audio as a design system — not audio engineering or production, but the intentional design of what players hear, when, and why. Covers the full audio stack from music and ambience through sound effects, UI audio, and voice.

Use when setting up game analytics, designing telemetry events, interpreting player behavior data, running A/B tests, building dashboards, or making design decisions informed by metrics. Activate for any work involving retention analysis, funnel optimization, cohort comparison, economy health monitoring, or live ops data pipelines. Covers the full data lifecycle from instrumentation through interpretation. Essential for live-service games but valuable for any game that ships updates. Bridges structured playtesting (qualitative observation) with ongoing quantitative measurement. Emphasizes data-informed design over purely data-driven optimization — metrics reveal what is happening, but design judgment determines why and what to do about it.

Resource flow architecture, currency system design, inflation/deflation diagnosis, sink/source balancing, crafting economies, LiveOps event budgeting, and economy simulation modeling. Use when designing resource systems from scratch, adding currencies or stores, setting crafting costs or reward magnitudes, diagnosing inflation or wealth stratification, planning monetization, designing LiveOps events, or when veteran players stockpile while new players feel locked out. Goes deeper than game-balance's economy health check — this is the architectural skill for building and sustaining entire economic systems.

Spatial design, enemy behavior, encounter composition, and environmental flow. Use when designing combat encounters, enemy AI, level layouts, boss fights, environmental puzzles, placing enemies or items in space, designing world structure, or when encounters feel repetitive, unfair, or tactically flat. Covers the Encounter Triangle (space, adversaries, resources), combat space vocabulary, enemy archetypes, AI behavior patterns, encounter pacing, environmental guidance, world structure, and environmental storytelling.

Engagement loop design, pacing frameworks, the experience triangle, emotion layering, and meaningful choice evaluation. Use when designing core loops, evaluating why gameplay feels flat, structuring emotional arcs, or answering 'why isn't this fun?'

Economy tuning, progression math, transitive/intransitive systems, cost curves, and dominant strategy detection. Use when designing item stats, pricing systems, combat numbers, upgrade trees, or any system where game objects have numeric attributes that must relate fairly to each other.

Use when designing game mechanics, evaluating gameplay feel, tuning game systems, reviewing player experience, debugging why something feels wrong, balancing combat, designing progression, or working on any player-facing game feature. Provides a constraint system for evaluating mechanics with focus on player experience over feature completion.

Juice checklists, feedback loop tightening, screen shake/particles/sound timing, the perception-action cycle, and 'why does this feel bad?' diagnostics. Use PROACTIVELY when implementing player actions, combat hits, collectibles, UI transitions, or any moment where the player should *feel* something.

Optimize game code for per-frame performance and GC pressure. Use PROACTIVELY when editing game loops, update functions, render code, or any code that runs every frame. Identifies allocation anti-patterns and provides zero-allocation alternatives.

Use when starting a new game project, pivoting a concept, evaluating whether an idea is worth building, or when prototyping has stalled without clarity. Provides a layered Vision Stack for going from raw concept to validated, structured design. Use BEFORE other game design skills — this is the upstream skill that establishes core fantasy, experience pillars, and core loop so that downstream skills (game-design, experience-design, systems-design, game-balance) have a clear target to work toward. Also use when a team cannot agree on what the game IS, or when scope keeps expanding without a north star.

Player motivation psychology, reward scheduling, intrinsic vs. extrinsic drives, Self-Determination Theory, loss aversion, collection drives, social motivation, and ethical guardrails. Use when designing reward systems, diagnosing why players aren't returning, building achievement or social features, evaluating retention mechanics, or when players say 'I don't know why I'd keep playing.' Bridges the gap between progression math (see progression-systems) and the psychology of why players stay.

Multiplayer game design across cooperative, competitive, asymmetric, social, and asynchronous modes. Matchmaking algorithms, ranked ladder design, anti-toxicity systems, shared economies, team composition, spectator readability, and community health. Use when designing PvP or co-op modes, building matchmaking or ranking systems, designing guilds or social features, planning shared economies or trading, evaluating spectator clarity, handling toxicity as a design problem, designing asynchronous competition, or when players say 'matchmaking is unfair' or 'the community is toxic.' This is the design skill for multiplayer systems — for networking implementation, use engineering resources instead.

Quest structure, branching narrative architecture, environmental storytelling, dialogue design, and narrative pacing. Use when designing quest systems, writing branching dialogue, structuring story arcs, when narrative feels disconnected from gameplay, when players skip cutscenes, when story contradicts mechanics, or when quests feel like checklists instead of journeys. Treats narrative as a GAME SYSTEM that interacts with other systems — not a layer painted on top. Deepens experience-design's brief Narrative Integration section into full quest architecture, branching patterns, player agency, and narrative health evaluation.

Bootstrap browser-based games with PixiJS 8 and a modern retro/vector aesthetic (Geometry Wars, Asteroids, Tempest, Tron). Use when creating a new game, starting a browser game project, building an arcade game, prototyping a game, setting up PixiJS, or when the user mentions vector graphics, neon aesthetics, or arcade-style gameplay. Provides project scaffolding, ECS-lite architecture, performance patterns (pooling, spatial hashing, fixed timestep), and visual design system.

Cognitive load management, perception/attention/memory framework, Gestalt principles for game UI, onboarding design, and accessibility checklists. Use when designing UI/HUD, writing tutorials, debugging 'confusing' feedback, evaluating accessibility, or when players can't figure out what to do.

Question generation for playtests, what to observe vs. ask, metrics to track, and how to interpret playtest data without confirmation bias. Use when planning a playtest session, designing a feedback survey, setting up analytics, or when you have playtest data and need to make decisions from it.

Difficulty curves, flow channel targeting, power curve math, unlock pacing, reward scheduling, and XP/level formulas. Use when designing level-up systems, tuning difficulty ramps, pacing content unlocks, implementing adaptive difficulty, or when players report 'too easy', 'too hard', or 'grindy'.

System interaction architecture, emergence analysis, coupling evaluation, and possibility space design. Use when designing a new game's system architecture, adding a system to an existing game, evaluating system health, diagnosing 'why doesn't this feel deep?', or when a game has many features but no emergent depth. The central structural skill — bridges individual mechanic evaluation (game-design) with architectural questions about how systems interact to create depth.