vertical-slice

vertical-slice is a skill for Codex from frabcd/codex-ai-game-studio. It costs 66 tokens per session (3,927 once invoked), scanned A, a copy of vertical-slice, MIT.

A near-production game build that tests one complete game loop before full production begins. It checks whether the planned quality, technology, schedule, and gameplay are achievable.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it after the game design document, architecture, and user-experience plans are ready to decide whether to proceed, change direction, or stop.
Why use it?
It exposes production and design problems early, before the team commits to building the entire game.

Skill for Codex

Written for Codex: agents/openai.yaml present. Also seen: mentions subagents; mentions AGENTS.md; mentions Codex.

Good fit Use it after the game design document, architecture, and user-experience plans are ready to decide whether to proceed, change direction, or stop.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/frabcd/codex-ai-game-studio/vertical-slice
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 frabcd/codex-ai-game-studio --skill vertical-slice
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/frabcd/codex-ai-game-studio

Made for: 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 vertical-slice

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/frabcd/codex-ai-game-studio/vertical-slice.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/frabcd/codex-ai-game-studio/vertical-slice)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/frabcd/codex-ai-game-studio/vertical-slice"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/frabcd/codex-ai-game-studio/vertical-slice.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 66 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 3,927 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.
Origin 92% copy Near-identical to another mod 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 $0.00066 $0.03927
Opus 5 $0.00033 $0.01963
Sonnet 5 $0.00013 $0.00785
Haiku 4.5 $0.00007 $0.00393

Measured 3d ago against content hash a63266ba6854, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-07, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

vertical-slice 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 3d 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.

Origin

This is a copy

92% identical to vertical-slice — 50 lines differ, which has more behind it and is treated as the original. This page carries a canonical link to it rather than competing with it.

plugins/ai-game-studio/skills/vertical-slice/SKILL.md · 360 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 360 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Port provenance: adapted from the pinned upstream source at 984023ddac0d5e27624f2baacde6105e45de375f under MIT; see the repository parity ledger for the exact path and blob.

Purpose

The vertical slice answers a different question from the concept prototype: "Can we build this full game loop at production quality, on schedule?"

Default use — run late in Pre-Production, after GDDs, architecture, and UX specs are complete. It is a near-production-quality build demonstrating one complete [start → challenge → resolution] cycle.

Post-pivot? If a PIVOT verdict from an earlier vertical slice sent you back to revise GDDs and architecture, run this again after revisions to re-validate. It can be run as many times as needed until a PROCEED or KILL verdict is reached.

It validates:

  1. The pipeline (can the team actually produce this quality of content?)
  2. Execution feasibility (are the architecture decisions correct for this game?)
  3. Fun survival (does the fun from the concept prototype survive full design?)
  4. Velocity (how long did this take? That's your real production rate estimate.)

Earlier in the project? If you haven't written GDDs yet and want to validate whether the core idea is worth designing, run $ai-game-studio:prototype (concept prototype) instead.


Phase 1: Resolve Review Mode and Load Context

Resolve the review mode:

  1. If --review [full|lean|solo] was passed → use that
  2. Else read production/review-mode.txt → use that value
  3. Else → default to lean

See the installed Codex role-gate protocol for the full check pattern.

Read the following files to understand the full design intent:

  • AGENTS.md — tech stack and engine
  • design/gdd/game-concept.md — core fantasy and game pillars
  • design/gdd/systems-index.md — MVP systems and their priorities
  • docs/architecture/architecture.md — layer structure
  • docs/architecture/control-manifest.md — technical rules for implementation
  • Key GDDs for the systems being sliced

Read the full file on GitHub · 360 lines

Files

What ships with it

1 file 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. 3d ago First seen · 360 lines · 66 tokens per session scan A a63266ba6854

Subscribe to this mod's changes

vertical-slice is a skill published in the GitHub repository frabcd/codex-ai-game-studio (9 stars, last pushed 7d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 66 tokens to every session and 3,927 once invoked, about $0.0003 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. It is 92% identical to vertical-slice, differing in 50 lines, and is treated as a copy.

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