game-reverse-document

A workflow that reads an existing game project and writes human-readable documentation explaining its design, architecture, and game systems.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to onboard developers, record how the game works, and investigate systems or inconsistencies without reading every file from scratch.
Why use it?
It helps when a working codebase has grown without written explanations, making it easier to understand the project and preserve the reasons behind past decisions.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/alterlab-ieu/alterlab_gameforge/game-reverse-document
Any agent
npx skills add AlterLab-IEU/AlterLab_GameForge --skill game-reverse-document
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/AlterLab-IEU/AlterLab_GameForge

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 73 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 4,434 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00073 $0.04434
Opus 5 $0.00036 $0.02217
Sonnet 5 $0.00015 $0.00887
Haiku 4.5 $0.00007 $0.00443

Measured 2d ago against content hash a63ee6df0f4f, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

game-reverse-document scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 2d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

skills/workflows/game-reverse-document/SKILL.md · 474 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 474 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

AlterLab GameForge -- Reverse Documentation Workflow

Most game projects start with passion, not paperwork. A developer prototypes, iterates, and builds. Weeks later, the codebase works but nobody -- including the original author -- can explain its architecture without reading every file. There is no design document because the design emerged from code. There is no architecture decision record because decisions were made in the moment and never written down. This is the normal state of indie development, and pretending otherwise is dishonest.

This workflow reverses the traditional documentation flow. Instead of document-then-build, it reads existing code and produces the documentation that should have existed from the start. The output is not auto-generated API docs -- it is human-readable design documentation that captures intent, architecture, and game systems in the language of game development, not the language of code.

Reverse documentation serves three critical needs: onboarding (a new team member understands the project in hours, not weeks of code archaeology), preservation (the original developer's decisions are captured before they forget why), and diagnosis (inconsistencies between systems become visible when documented side by side).

Purpose & Triggers

Use this workflow when:

  • A prototype works but has zero documentation
  • A new team member needs to understand an existing codebase
  • The original developer is leaving and knowledge must be transferred
  • The project has grown complex enough that the author loses track of systems
  • Someone says "document this" or "what does this code do?"
  • A game jam prototype is being promoted to a full project and needs formal docs
  • An existing project needs a design document for publishers, investors, or team alignment

Problems this solves:

  • Working code that nobody can explain or safely modify
  • Onboarding that takes weeks of code-reading instead of hours of doc-reading
  • Architectural decisions that are invisible -- embedded in code but never recorded
  • Game mechanics that exist in code but are not described in any design document
  • Systems that contradict each other because nobody mapped their interactions
  • Orphaned code that does nothing but nobody is confident enough to delete

Read the full file on GitHub · 474 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 2d ago First seen · 474 lines · 73 tokens per session scan A a63ee6df0f4f

Subscribe to this mod's changes

game-reverse-document is a skill published in the GitHub repository AlterLab-IEU/AlterLab_GameForge (34 stars, last pushed 5mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 73 tokens to every session and 4,434 once invoked, about $0.0004 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

Related

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