game-design-theory

Game Design Theory is a reference and concept-guide skill covering the fundamentals of what makes games fun. It aims to give designers a shared vocabulary and mental models for reasoning about player experience, addressing the problem of designing engagement by intuition alone. The skill packages several well-known frameworks into ASCII-diagrammed explanations, including the MDA framework (Mechanics, Dynamics, Aesthetics), the core engagement loop, Csikszentmihalyi's flow channel, Bartle's player types, and Self-Determination Theory motivation drivers.

Beyond the core theory, it documents intrinsic and extrinsic reward systems and reward-scheduling patterns (fixed ratio, variable ratio, fixed interval, milestone), balance principles across mechanical, economic, difficulty, and competitive dimensions, and a troubleshooting section that maps common problems such as players finding a game boring or quitting to likely root causes and solutions. The SKILL.md includes structured frontmatter declaring optional framework and game-type parameters, a retry policy, and observability logging and metrics, and the skill ships supporting files including a design configuration YAML, a longer design guide reference, and a design_analyzer.py script.

It is aimed at game designers, developers, and students who want to understand player psychology, balance, and progression, or diagnose why a game is not engaging. It functions primarily as an educational concept reference tied to a 'game-designer' agent rather than a tool that ships or runs a game; the accompanying analyzer script provides local design analysis rather than any external or system-level operations.