design-pillars

design-pillars is a skill for Claude Code from GoogilyBoogily/googilyboogily-claude-power-tools. It costs 55 tokens per session (1,607 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A reference guide for creating design pillars: three to five rules that shape a game's major decisions. It explains how to make these rules specific, memorable, and clear about which features they exclude.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to define a game's non-negotiable design principles and test proposed features against them.
Why use it?
It helps teams resolve conflicting ideas and avoid vague principles that cannot guide actual game design choices.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: allowed-tools in frontmatter. Also seen: model in frontmatter.

Part of the game-design-bible plugin — 28 skills, 1 agent shipped together

Good fit Use it to define a game's non-negotiable design principles and test proposed features against them.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/googilyboogily/googilyboogily-claude-power-tools/design-pillars
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 GoogilyBoogily/googilyboogily-claude-power-tools --skill design-pillars
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/GoogilyBoogily/googilyboogily-claude-power-tools

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install game-design-bible, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 28 skills, 1 agent.

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 design-pillars

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/googilyboogily/googilyboogily-claude-power-tools/design-pillars/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/googilyboogily/googilyboogily-claude-power-tools/design-pillars)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/googilyboogily/googilyboogily-claude-power-tools/design-pillars"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/googilyboogily/googilyboogily-claude-power-tools/design-pillars/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for design-pillars

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/googilyboogily/googilyboogily-claude-power-tools/design-pillars"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/googilyboogily/googilyboogily-claude-power-tools/design-pillars.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 55 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,607 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 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 $0.00055 $0.01607
Opus 5 $0.00028 $0.00804
Sonnet 5 $0.00011 $0.00321
Haiku 4.5 $0.00006 $0.00161

Measured 9d ago against content hash 23a828baf6eb, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

design-pillars 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 9d 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.

plugins/game-design-bible/skills/design-pillars/SKILL.md · 118 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 118 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Design Pillars Reference

Design pillars are the 3-5 non-negotiable principles that every feature, system, and piece of content must serve. They are the supreme court of design decisions — when two good ideas conflict, pillars break the tie.

The Power of Counterexamples

A pillar that says "Crafting creates strategy" is abstract. A pillar that says "This rules out: abundant ammo, auto-crafting, single optimal builds" is instantly understood. People grasp boundaries faster than descriptions — your brain builds a sharper mental model from "here's what we're NOT doing" than from "here's what we're doing."

When communicating pillars to a team, lead with what each pillar rules out. If someone reads only the counterexamples, they should already understand the design intent.

What Makes a Good Pillar

A strong design pillar is:

  • Defined by exclusion: You can name 3+ plausible features it rules out. If you can't, the pillar is too vague.
  • Actionable: Can be used to make decisions ("Does this feature serve this pillar?")
  • Memorable: Short enough to recite from memory (2-5 words ideal)
  • Unique to your game: Not generic truths ("fun gameplay" is not a pillar)
  • In tension with alternatives: Choosing this pillar means NOT choosing its opposite — and you can point to the excluded alternatives

Pillar Formulation Process

Step 1: Identify the Core Fantasy

What emotional experience are you selling? Not mechanics — feelings.

  • "The thrill of barely surviving" (not "combat system")
  • "Building something beautiful from nothing" (not "crafting mechanics")

Step 2: Define by Exclusion First

For each candidate pillar, write its "What This Rules Out" list BEFORE writing what it approves:

  • List 3+ concrete, plausible features or approaches this pillar rejects
  • If you can't list 3 things it rejects, the pillar isn't sharp enough yet
  • Then list what it approves — but the rejections come first
  • Together, the pillars' exclusion lists should describe a game only YOUR game could be

Read the full file on GitHub · 118 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. 9d ago First seen · 118 lines · 55 tokens per session scan A 23a828baf6eb

Subscribe to this mod's changes

design-pillars is a skill published in the GitHub repository GoogilyBoogily/googilyboogily-claude-power-tools (2 stars, last pushed 4mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 55 tokens to every session and 1,607 once invoked, about $0.0003 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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