design-lenses

design-lenses is a skill for Claude Code from kyh/vibedgames. It costs 118 tokens per session (2,355 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A structured way to review a game by looking at its rules, player experience, feedback, difficulty, and other design areas from several viewpoints.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to review a game before release, investigate why players lose interest, or improve a game's core loop, feedback, accessibility, and challenge.
Why use it?
It helps explain why a game feels boring, confusing, or emotionally flat, instead of only showing that something is wrong. Each issue is ranked and paired with a concrete fix.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin.

Part of the game-craft plugin — 12 skills shipped together

Good fit Use it to review a game before release, investigate why players lose interest, or improve a game's core loop, feedback, accessibility, and challenge.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/kyh/vibedgames/design-lenses
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 kyh/vibedgames --skill design-lenses
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/kyh/vibedgames

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install game-craft, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 12 skills.

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-lenses

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/kyh/vibedgames/design-lenses/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/kyh/vibedgames/design-lenses)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/kyh/vibedgames/design-lenses"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/kyh/vibedgames/design-lenses/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-lenses

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/kyh/vibedgames/design-lenses"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/kyh/vibedgames/design-lenses.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 118 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,355 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 $0.00118 $0.02355
Opus 5 $0.00059 $0.01177
Sonnet 5 $0.00024 $0.00471
Haiku 4.5 $0.00012 $0.00235

Measured 11d ago against content hash 9efb959b9feb, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-11, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

design-lenses 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 11d 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-craft/skills/design-lenses/SKILL.md · 175 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 175 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Design lens review

A lens is a viewpoint plus questions, not a rule (Schell). This skill runs a battery of lenses against a game and outputs findings an agent can implement. The defining failure of prompt-built games: mechanically correct, sensorially and emotionally dead. The lenses find where.

Procedure

  1. Play first, cold. Load like a first-time visitor. Record: time to first input, time to first win/lose feedback, what you understood without instructions, where you got bored. Play twice — once naive, once trying to break it (spam inputs, resize, lose on purpose, idle).
  2. Write the MDA sentence: "This game wants the player to feel X via dynamic Y produced by mechanics Z." Can't write it? That's finding #1 — no essential experience. Then write the loop contract: "player does [verb] to achieve [objective] while [pressure] creates risk; success → [reward], failure → [cost/retry]". Any bracket you can't fill is a finding too.
  3. Run the rejection gates (below). Each failed gate is an automatic blocker — no lens needed.
  4. Pick 8–12 lenses. Always: Essential Experience, Fun, Feedback, Juiciness, Accessibility. Add by genre (Skill vs Chance for arcade, Curiosity for puzzle, the Toy for sandbox/physics).
  5. Answer with evidence — a timestamp, a code path, a missing sound — never vibes.
  6. Severity: blocker (player quits or never understands), major (understood but flat), minor (polish), idea (opportunity).
  7. Findings as lens → evidence → fix, fixes concrete ("80ms hit-stop + 4px shake on collision", not "juicier"). Order: blockers, then cheapest major wins (audio + shake + score popups = highest fun-per-line).
  8. Re-play after fixes, re-asking only the failed lenses and gates.

Rejection gates

Binary go/no-go tests, self-applied in active play before claiming a game is fun. Any "true" = automatic blocker; fix or iterate before polishing:

  • The first 30 seconds lack a real decision.
  • The player can ignore the main mechanic and still progress.
  • The objective is unclear without reading source code or instructions.
  • Failure arrives before the player can understand why.
  • Challenge is only "more things", never better combinations.
  • Rewards change nothing — not strategy, score, progression, or feel.
  • The space is decorative and shapes no decisions.
  • The game is fun only in the designer's explanation, not in active play.

Read the full file on GitHub · 175 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. 11d ago First seen · 175 lines · 118 tokens per session scan A 9efb959b9feb

Subscribe to this mod's changes

design-lenses is a skill published in the GitHub repository kyh/vibedgames (55 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed MIT. It adds 118 tokens to every session and 2,355 once invoked, about $0.0006 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.