design-npc

design-npc is a skill for Claude Code from SummerEngine/summer-engine-agent. It costs 101 tokens per session (7,069 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A design guide for an NPC's behavior, including what it notices, wants, does, signals to the player, and how it is defeated. NPC means a game character controlled by the game rather than the player.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to design enemies, bosses, companions, quest-givers, civilians, or groups of enemies, including their perception, actions, and defeat behavior.
Why use it?
It turns vague enemy or civilian behavior into clear states and decisions that players can read and respond to.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: allowed-tools in frontmatter. Also seen: mentions Claude Code; mentions Codex.

Part of the summer plugin — 80 skills, 2 commands, 2 hooks, 1 MCP server shipped together

Good fit Use it to design enemies, bosses, companions, quest-givers, civilians, or groups of enemies, including their perception, actions, and defeat behavior.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/summerengine/summer-engine-agent/design-npc
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 SummerEngine/summer-engine-agent --skill design-npc
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/SummerEngine/summer-engine-agent

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install summer, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 80 skills, 2 commands, 2 hooks, 1 MCP server.

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-npc

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/summerengine/summer-engine-agent/design-npc/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/summerengine/summer-engine-agent/design-npc)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/summerengine/summer-engine-agent/design-npc"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/summerengine/summer-engine-agent/design-npc/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-npc

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/summerengine/summer-engine-agent/design-npc"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/summerengine/summer-engine-agent/design-npc.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 101 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 7,069 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 $0.00101 $0.07069
Opus 5 $0.00051 $0.03535
Sonnet 5 $0.00020 $0.01414
Haiku 4.5 $0.00010 $0.00707

Measured 9d ago against content hash 34aa846f15c5, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-09, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

design-npc 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.

Origin

Copies of this mod

1 near-identical copy found in the catalogue:

skills/ai-and-npcs/design-npc/SKILL.md · 506 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 506 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

/design-npc — Design an NPC's Behavior End-to-End

Overview

A good NPC is legible and alive. The player can read its mood, predict its next move, and feel the consequence of theirs — and the four enemies in a patrol squad don't all behave like clones of one designer-authored script. This skill walks the canonical NPC AI pattern from the inside out: what the NPC perceives, what it wants (intent), what it does (action), what tells signal each state, and how it dies.

Core principle: behavior is what the player sees. Two layers separate doing from wanting: an action state machine the body runs, and an intent layer above it that reads perception + personality and tells the action SM what to aim at.

Second principle: identical NPCs are predictable, and predictable is boring. Every spawned instance jitters its personality knobs so a squad of four grunts produces emergent variety with zero designer authoring.

Steps

1. Pick the NPC archetype

Open with the question. Wait.

What's the NPC for? Pick the closest:

  • Basic enemy (melee/ranged grunt, dies in 1–3 hits)
  • Boss (named, scripted phases, 30–120 sec fight)
  • Quest-giver (talks, gives objectives, doesn't fight)
  • Friendly companion (follows player, helps in combat)
  • Civilian / ambient (reacts to events, no combat AI)
  • Wave-spawned mob (cheap, many at once, simple behavior)

Each archetype maps to a different complexity budget:

Archetype Action states Intents Perception Personality range
Basic enemy 4 (calm / alert / aggressive / defeated) 5 (idle / investigate / hunt / kill / retreat) Sight cone + LOS raycast Wide
Boss 6–10 (per phase) 5–7 incl. RESCUE_ALLY Sight + hearing + scripted Narrow, biased high
Quest-giver 2 (idle / talking) 1 (idle) Trigger area None — fixed
Companion 5 4 (follow / support / engage / retreat) Sight + group Narrow, biased low aggression
Civilian 3 (wander / panic / dead) 2 (idle / retreat) Hearing Caution biased high
Wave mob 2 (charge / dead) 1 (kill) Direct line to player None

Read the full file on GitHub · 506 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 · 506 lines · 101 tokens per session scan A 34aa846f15c5

Subscribe to this mod's changes

design-npc is a skill published in the GitHub repository SummerEngine/summer-engine-agent (59 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed MIT. It adds 101 tokens to every session and 7,069 once invoked, about $0.0005 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.

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