Claude Code Game Studio Architecture

Overview

A tiered agent hierarchy that mirrors a real indie game studio’s organizational structure. 49 agents organized across leadership, department heads, leads, and specialists — coordinated through structured delegation, consultation, and conflict resolution rules.

Agent Hierarchy

[creative-director]     ← Creative authority (Opus)
      ↑
[art-director] [audio-director] [narrative-director] [game-designer] [lead-programmer] [producer] [qa-lead] [community-manager]
      ↑                       ↑                    ↑
[technical-artist] [ux-designer] [writer] [sound-designer] [world-builder] [economy-designer] [level-designer] [systems-designer] [live-ops-designer]
      ↑
[gameplay-programmer] [engine-programmer] [ai-programmer] [network-programmer] [ui-programmer] [tools-programmer]
[specialists per engine: godot-*, unity-*, ue-* specialists]

Model Tier Assignment

Skills and agents are assigned to model tiers based on task complexity:

Skills by Tier

Haiku skills:

• /help, /sprint-status, /story-readiness, /scope-check, /project-stage-detect, /changelog, /patch-notes, /onboard

Opus skills:

• /review-all-gdds, /architecture-review, /gate-check

All other skills default to Sonnet. When creating new skills: assign Haiku if only reads/formatting; assign Opus if synthesizing 5+ documents with high-stakes output; otherwise leave unset (Sonnet).

Coordination Rules

Five Core Rules

1. Vertical Delegation: Leadership agents delegate to department leads, who delegate to specialists. Never skip a tier for complex decisions.
2. Horizontal Consultation: Agents at the same tier may consult each other but must not make binding decisions outside their domain.
3. Conflict Resolution: When two agents disagree, escalate to shared parent. If no shared parent, escalate to creative-director (design) or technical-director (technical).
4. Change Propagation: When a design change affects multiple domains, the producer agent coordinates propagation.
5. No Unilateral Cross-Domain Changes: An agent must never modify files outside its designated directories without explicit delegation.

Conflict Escalation Map

game-designer ↔ narrative-director → creative-director (ludonarrative alignment)
art-director ↔ audio-director → creative-director (aesthetic coherence)
any "changes identity of the game" → creative-director
technical conflicts → technical-director
scheduling conflicts → producer
resource contention → producer

Subagents vs Agent Teams

Subagents (current, always active)

Spawned via Task within a single Claude Code session. Used by all team-* skills and orchestration skills.

• Subagents share the session’s permission context
• Run sequentially or in parallel within the session
• Return results to the parent agent

When to spawn in parallel: If two subagents’ inputs are independent (neither needs the other’s output to begin), spawn both Task calls simultaneously rather than waiting.

Example: /review-all-gdds Phase 1 (consistency) and Phase 2 (design theory) are independent → spawn both at the same time.

Agent Teams (experimental — opt-in)

Multiple independent Claude Code sessions running simultaneously, coordinated via a shared task list. Each session has its own context window and token budget.

Use agent teams when:

• Work spans multiple subsystems that will not touch the same files
• Each workstream would take >30 minutes and benefits from true parallelism
• A senior agent (technical-director, producer) needs to coordinate 3+ specialist sessions working on different epics simultaneously

Do not use agent teams when:

• One session’s output is required as input for another (use sequential subagents)
• The task fits in a single session’s context (use subagents instead)
• Cost is a concern — each team member burns tokens independently

Current status: Not yet used by default. Document usage when first adopted.

Parallel Task Protocol

When an orchestration skill spawns multiple independent agents:

1. Issue all independent Task calls before waiting for any result
2. Collect all results before proceeding to dependent phases
3. If any agent is BLOCKED, surface it immediately — do not silently skip
4. Always produce a partial report if some agents complete and others block

Team Skills (72 total)

Team Composition Skills

• team-audio — Audio design team
• team-combat — Combat design team
• team-level — Level design team
• team-live-ops — Live operations team
• team-narrative — Narrative team
• team-polish — Polish and feel team
• team-qa — QA team
• team-release — Release management team
• team-ui — UI/UX team

Workflow Skills

• adopt — Adopt a skill from library
• architecture-decision — Create ADR through guided flow
• architecture-review — Validate ADRs
• brainstorm — Professional ideation with MDA/SDT analysis
• bug-report, bug-triage — Issue management
• changelog — Generate changelog
• code-review — Review code changes
• consistency-check — Cross-document consistency
• create-architecture — Create architecture document
• create-epics, create-stories — Story decomposition
• design-review — Validate design documents
• dev-story — Implement from story
• estimate — Effort estimation
• gate-check — Phase gate validation
• help — Built-in help
• hotfix — Hotfix workflow
• localize — Localization workflow
• milestone-review — Milestone validation
• onboard — Project onboarding
• patch-notes, playtest-report, qa-plan
• scope-check, skill-improve, skill-test
• smoke-check, soak-test — Stability testing
• sprint-plan, sprint-status, story-done, story-readiness
• tech-debt — Technical debt tracking
• test-evidence-review, test-flakiness, test-helpers, test-setup
• ux-design, ux-review — UX design and review

Gate Verdict System

Agents emit structured verdicts at phase gates:

[GATE-ID]: APPROVE   ← passes gate
[GATE-ID]: CONCERNS  ← passes with concerns noted
[GATE-ID]: REJECT    ← blocks progression
[GATE-ID]: REALISTIC / UNREALISTIC (producer gates)

Calling skills read the first line for the verdict token.

Related

• claude-code-game-studios（已归档） — Project overview entity page
• claude-code-game-studio-collaboration-protocol — Question → Options → Decision → Draft → Approval pattern
• claude-code-game-studio-directory-structure — Project directory structure
• multi-agent-ai-simulation — General multi-agent AI concepts