claude-code-game-studios

Turn a single Claude Code session into a full game development studio.

49 agents. 74 skills. One coordinated AI team.

Why This Exists

Building a game solo with AI is powerful — but a single chat session has no structure. No one stops you from hardcoding magic numbers, skipping design docs, or writing spaghetti code. There's no QA pass, no design review, no one asking "does this actually fit the game's vision?"

Claude Code Game Studios solves this by giving your AI session the structure of a real studio. Instead of one general-purpose assistant, you get 49 specialized agents organized into a studio hierarchy — directors who guard the vision, department leads who own their domains, and specialists who do the hands-on work. Each agent has defined responsibilities, escalation paths, and quality gates.

The result: you still make every decision, but now you have a team that asks the right questions, catches mistakes early, and keeps your project organized from first brainstorm to launch.

Table of Contents

• What's Included
• Studio Hierarchy
• Slash Commands
• Does it produce games, or documents?
• Getting Started
• Configuration
• Upgrading
• Project Structure
• How It Works
• Design Philosophy
• Customization
• Platform Support
• Community
• Supporting This Project
• License

What's Included

Studio Hierarchy

Agents are organized into three tiers, matching how real studios operate:

Tier 1 — Directors
  creative-director    technical-director    producer

Tier 2 — Department Leads
  game-designer        lead-programmer       art-director
  audio-director       narrative-director    qa-lead
  release-manager      localization-lead

Tier 3 — Specialists
  gameplay-programmer  engine-programmer     ai-programmer
  network-programmer   tools-programmer      ui-programmer
  systems-designer     level-designer        economy-designer
  technical-artist     sound-designer        writer
  world-builder        ux-designer           prototyper
  performance-analyst  devops-engineer       analytics-engineer
  security-engineer    qa-tester             accessibility-specialist
  live-ops-designer    community-manager

Each agent declares a model in its frontmatter: the three directors ask for Opus, lead-programmer and fifteen specialists name Sonnet, and the remaining thirty inherit your session's model. Treat the tiers as seniority of role, not as a billing plan — most of the studio runs on whatever model you are already using.

Engine Specialists

The template includes agent sets for all three major engines. Use the set that matches your project:

Slash Commands

Type / in Claude Code to access all 74 skills:

Onboarding & Navigation /start /help /project-stage-detect /setup-engine /adopt /settings

Game Design /brainstorm /map-systems /design-system /quick-design /review-all-gdds /propagate-design-change

Art & Assets /art-bible /asset-spec /asset-audit

UX & Interface Design /ux-design /ux-review

Architecture /create-architecture /architecture-decision /architecture-review /create-control-manifest

Stories & Sprints /create-epics /create-stories /dev-story /sprint-plan /sprint-status /story-readiness /story-done /estimate

Reviews & Analysis /design-review /code-review /balance-check /content-audit /scope-check /perf-profile /tech-debt /gate-check /consistency-check /security-audit

QA & Testing /qa-plan /smoke-check /soak-test /regression-suite /test-setup /test-helpers /test-evidence-review /test-flakiness /skill-test /skill-improve

Production /milestone-review /retrospective /bug-report /bug-triage /reverse-document /playtest-report

Release /release-checklist /launch-checklist /changelog /patch-notes /hotfix /day-one-patch

Creative & Content /prototype /vertical-slice /onboard /localize

Team Orchestration (coordinate multiple agents on a single feature) /team-combat /team-narrative /team-ui /team-release /team-polish /team-audio /team-level /team-live-ops /team-qa

Does it produce games, or documents?

A fair question, and the answer is a measurement rather than a sample project. Four games were built from one brief at different modes.rigor levels and the documents each wrote before its first line of game code were counted:

All of them produced a running, tested game. Two blind reviewers and a human playtest then ranked the standard build last — the extra 29 documents bought traceability, not a better game.

It runs the game and looks at it

The measurement above is about cost. The other half is whether the thing works, and for a game that means someone has to look at it — a passing test says nothing about a menu drawn off-screen. So a story that changes anything the player sees is not closed until the game has been launched, observed, and a screenshot retained in production/qa/evidence/. A parse check is not a run. This holds at every rigor level, including minimal, where automated tests are waived but the look is not.

The games themselves are deliberately not shipped here: this is a template you clone to start your own project, and somebody else's game in your repo is clutter, not evidence.

Getting Started

Prerequisites

• Git
• Claude Code — the native installer is recommended (npm install -g @anthropic-ai/claude-code also works, on Node.js 22+)
• Python 3 — reads project.yaml for every skill and hook; without it every setting silently falls back to its default
• Bash — runs every hook; built into macOS and Linux, and on Windows it comes with Git for Windows
• Recommended: jq (for hook validation)

Hooks fail gracefully if optional tools are missing — you just lose validation — with one deliberate exception: a commit that stages data JSON is blocked when there is no Python to validate it.

Setup

1. Clone or use as template:

   git clone https://github.com/Donchitos/Claude-Code-Game-Studios.git my-game
   cd my-game
   

2. Open Claude Code in the project's root folder (the one holding CLAUDE.md and project.yaml) and start a session:

   claude
   

   Starting it in a subfolder such as src/ skips the project's hooks, deny rules and ask-first permission mode.

3. Run /start — the system asks where you are (no idea, vague concept, clear design, existing work) and guides you to the right workflow. No assumptions.

   Or jump directly to a specific skill if you already know what you need:

   • /brainstorm — explore game ideas from scratch
   • /setup-engine godot 4.7 — configure your engine if you already know
   • /project-stage-detect — analyze an existing project

Configuration

project.yaml at the repo root is the single source of truth for how the studio behaves on your project — engine, naming conventions, and a modes block that controls how much process every skill enforces. /start writes it for you; you rarely need to hand-edit it.

The one question that matters most is modes.rigor — minimal, standard, or full. It's a single front door over six separate knobs (workflow — which GDD sections are required, docs.density, qa.level, story_granularity, review_mode — how many director agents review your work, and team.size), so /start asks it once instead of six times:

• minimal (default) — jam-game speed. No GDDs required, terse docs, minimal QA evidence, solo review. /start → /setup-engine → /brainstorm (a one-page brief) → /create-stories → /dev-story ↔ /story-done.
• standard — 5 required GDD sections, balanced doc depth, standard QA evidence, lean review.
• full — all 8 GDD sections, thorough docs, full QA evidence on every story type, full director review.

minimal is the default because the heavier tier costs more to reach working code without producing a better result, and gives nothing back when someone new picks the project up. Raise it in one /settings call when your project grows — /help and /gate-check will suggest it when they see the signs.

Two escape hatches keep one setting from being a blunt instrument. system_overrides holds a single system to a higher standard than the rest of the project — your combat system gets the full treatment while everything else stays light. testing.strict sets, per test type (logic, integration, visual, UI, config), whether missing evidence blocks a story or merely warns.

Any of the six underlying knobs can still be set individually if you want a mix (e.g. workflow: full with docs.density: terse — comprehensive but compact). Two of them — review_mode (full / lean / solo) and team.size — are also personal: rigor sets the team-wide default, but you can override them per-developer in a gitignored project.local.yaml without touching the shared