game-design

game-design is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from ericrisco/rsc-harness. It costs 78 tokens per session (3,421 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guide to designing game mechanics and the loops that keep players engaged across moments, sessions, and longer progression. It focuses on game design rather than engine programming or story writing.

In plain words
What is it for?
It supports designing player actions, progression, economies, difficulty curves, strategies, game feel, prototypes, and scope.
Why use it?
It helps teams test whether a game is fun and balanced before spending time on full production.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one.

Good fit It supports designing player actions, progression, economies, difficulty curves, strategies, game feel, prototypes, and scope.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/ericrisco/rsc-harness/game-design
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.

Any agent
npx skills add ericrisco/rsc-harness --skill game-design
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/ericrisco/rsc-harness

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for game-design

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/ericrisco/rsc-harness/game-design.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/ericrisco/rsc-harness/game-design)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/ericrisco/rsc-harness/game-design"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/ericrisco/rsc-harness/game-design.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 78 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 3,421 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe. Third-party audits
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector pass 7 Sept 2026
How audits are shown
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 5.1 $0.00078 $0.03421
Opus 5 $0.00039 $0.01710
Sonnet 5 $0.00016 $0.00684
Haiku 4.5 $0.00008 $0.00342

Measured 5d ago against content hash 9ee4a050ada0, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-08, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

game-design 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 5d 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/game-design/SKILL.md · 147 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 147 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Design games that are fun on purpose

Engine-agnostic game design: mechanics, loops, progression, economy, balance, feel, and the discipline of prototyping and scope. No engine APIs live here — when the design is settled, the implementation belongs to godot, unity, or unreal.

Two premises govern everything below. Fun is discovered, not designed — you cannot reason your way to a fun game on paper, you find it by building the smallest playable version and playing it, so every hour spent planning a mechanic you have not prototyped is an hour spent guessing. And a game is the set of verbs it gives the player plus the loops those verbs live in — art, story, and levels dress that skeleton; if the skeleton is not fun in greybox, nothing dresses it into fun.

Route elsewhere when the ask is not design:

The ask Route to Why not here
Write the movement/AI/shader/save code godot / unity / unreal This skill decides what to build; the engine skill builds it.
Author the story, dialogue, characters, lore game-storytelling Narrative design is its own craft; this skill owns systems and verbs.
Lay out a level, encounter, or world map level-design Spatial/encounter design applies the mechanics this skill defines.
Netcode, prediction, lag compensation gamedev-multiplayer A technical domain, not core design intent.
Ship / store page / build pipeline gamedev-shipping Release logistics, not design.

Loops: moment-to-moment → session → meta

A game is loops nested inside loops. Each layer must reward on its own and feed motivation to the layer above it.

moment-to-moment  (seconds)   the primary verb: aim+fire, jump, place, click, parry
        │  feeds
session loop      (minutes)   a run / match / mission: setup → tension → resolution
        │  feeds
meta loop         (sessions)  mastery, unlocks, collection, rank — why you return tomorrow

Read the full file on GitHub · 147 lines

Files

What ships with it

5 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

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. 5d ago First seen · 147 lines · 78 tokens per session scan A 9ee4a050ada0

Subscribe to this mod's changes

game-design is a skill published in the GitHub repository ericrisco/rsc-harness (70 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed MIT. It adds 78 tokens to every session and 3,421 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 2026-09-03.

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