design-research

design-research is a skill for Claude Code from tykisgod/quick-question. It costs 59 tokens per session (444 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A research guide for comparing how different games solve a particular design problem, such as progression or trading.

In plain words
What is it for?
It is for researching game mechanics, loops, systems, and economies through analyses, talks, and postmortems.
Why use it?
It gives a developer design references before they write a feature plan, reducing guesswork about player experience.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: $ARGUMENTS substitution. Also seen: mentions CLAUDE.md.

Part of the qq plugin — 27 skills, 5 hooks shipped together

Good fit It is for researching game mechanics, loops, systems, and economies through analyses, talks, and postmortems.

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

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install qq, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 27 skills, 5 hooks.

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-research

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

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/tykisgod/quick-question/design-research"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/tykisgod/quick-question/design-research.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 59 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 444 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 $0.00059 $0.00444
Opus 5.5 $0.00024 $0.00178
Sonnet 5.5 $0.00012 $0.00089
Haiku 4.5 $0.00006 $0.00044

Measured 1mo ago against content hash 979aa4fb1704, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-10-07, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

design-research 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 1mo 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/design-research/SKILL.md · 29 lines

What it actually says

Respond in the user's preferred language (detect from their recent messages, or fall back to the language setting in CLAUDE.md).

Search for game design references to the problem currently being discussed.

Arguments: $ARGUMENTS

Process

  1. Identify the core design question (e.g., "how trading between cities creates interesting choices")
  2. Search for game design analyses, GDC talks, postmortems, and design breakdowns using WebSearch
  3. Organize into a comparison table:
Game How they do it What makes it fun What we could borrow
  1. Recommend which approach best fits this project's scope and feel, and why
  2. Save the result, sources included, to Docs/qq/<branch-name>/<topic>_design-research.md (or wherever the project already keeps research notes; branch name from git branch --show-current | tr '/' '_'). If the project's instructions ask for research notes to be committed, commit that file alone, following them; otherwise leave it for /qq:commit-push

Notes

  • Focus on the player experience, not implementation — "RimWorld uses a bill queue per workbench that lets players set min/max thresholds" is good; "WorkGiver_DoBill class" is not
  • Prefer games the team has likely played or that are well-documented
  • Include at least one game from a different genre if it solves the same design problem in an interesting way
  • Tag every conclusion with its source: official material (dev blog, GDC talk, postmortem; link it), third-party analysis (link it), game source you actually read (for example, an open-source game), or own knowledge. If searching yields thin results, lean on your own knowledge of game design, tagged as such
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. 1mo ago Changed · -2 lines 979aa4fb1704
  2. 2mo ago First seen · 31 lines · 59 tokens per session scan A 74334e626d9c

Subscribe to this mod's changes

design-research is a skill published in the GitHub repository tykisgod/quick-question (13 stars, last pushed 13d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 59 tokens to every session and 444 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5.5. 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.

Related

design-research compared with skills from other repositories

design-research next to 6 skills from other repositories
ModTypeStarsLast pushLicenceScanTokensWorks with
design-researchtykisgod/quick-questionSkill1313d agoMITA59Claude Code
gemininowork-studio/notfair-pluginSkill4.1k8d agoMITA184Claude Code
auditoliver-kriska/claude-elixir-phoenixSkill574yesterdayMITA35Claude Code
boundariesoliver-kriska/claude-elixir-phoenixSkill574yesterdayMITA33Claude Code
triageoliver-kriska/claude-elixir-phoenixSkill574yesterdayMITA32Claude Code
security-architecture-reviewcbrock84/headcountSkill2.6k19d agoMITA78Claude Code
pr-threads-addressposit-dev/skillsSkill5544d agoMITA48Claude Code