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.