Team Combat

Argument check: If no combat feature description is provided, output:

"Usage: /team-combat [combat feature description] [--review full|lean|solo] — Provide a description of the combat feature to design and implement (e.g., melee parry system, ranged weapon spread)." Then stop immediately without spawning any subagents or reading any files.

When this skill is invoked with a valid argument, orchestrate the combat team through a structured pipeline.

Decision Points: At each phase transition, use AskUserQuestion to present the user with the subagent's proposals as selectable options. Write the agent's full analysis in conversation, then capture the decision with concise labels. In collaborative mode, the user must approve before moving to the next phase. In guided mode the pipeline advances automatically unless a phase is BLOCKED; in autonomous mode it runs end to end, recording each phase outcome via log_decision. Decisions in automation_always_ask categories (is_always_ask_category helper) always prompt regardless of mode. See .claude/docs/automation-modes.md.

Phase 0: Resolve Config

!bash "${CLAUDE_SKILL_DIR}/../../hooks/yaml-helper.sh" resolve_config --keys review_mode,automation,team.size,workflow

Resolved above — use as-is; --review overrides review_mode. No block → defaults in .claude/docs/config-resolution.md.

review_mode sets director-gate depth, and this pipeline has no director gate: no phase below spawns CD-, TD-, PR- or AD-PHASE-GATE, at any review_mode. Its phase gates are the pipeline's own decision points (defined under team.size below), and the agents that work at them are team members, not director gates.

automation drives the Decision Points note above. See the Decision Points note above and .claude/docs/automation-modes.md for how each mode changes pipeline behavior.

workflow sizes the Phase 1 design document the way /design-system does: ## Summary plus all 8 sections at full; at standard, Overview, Detailed Design, Edge Cases, Dependencies and Acceptance Criteria, plus Formulas whenever the mechanic defines numeric rules (a combat mechanic almost always does); at minimal the game brief is the design record and the GDD is optional — draft those five sections and tell the user it is optional at this workflow level.

team.size: which agents are active (orthogonal to review_mode gate-depth and workflow docs).

• individual (default): gameplay-programmer runs the pipeline; escalate ai-programmer only if the feature flags AI work. Other Team Composition agents are consulted via the gameplay-programmer, not spawned separately.
• small: the full Team Composition pipeline below, as documented.
• studio: full pipeline + engine sub-specialists + an adversarial review pass. Engine sub-specialists: the primary engine specialist's prompt says it may hand parts of its review to the sub-specialists its tools: grant names (for example ue-gas-specialist for abilities); below studio it answers alone. Adversarial review pass: Phase 5's qa-tester is told "your job is not to confirm this works — find how it breaks", and the report says the pass ran. A non-core agent needed at individual routes through the nearest active core agent with an informational note. "Phase gate" means any phase that ends in an AskUserQuestion decision point this pipeline itself lists — a transition under Decision Points above, or a Gate step written into the pipeline below — whatever the automation mode. guided and autonomous change how a gate is passed (it auto-advances, or is recorded with log_decision), not whether it is one, so bounded-exception condition (3) below holds at it in every mode. An agent restricted to "phase gates only" is spawned at those points and no others. This active-set scoping applies throughout the pipeline below: any phase that names an agent outside the active set routes through the nearest core agent rather than spawning it.

Announce the active set before Phase 1 — never let the collapse be silent. Before spawning anything, state in one line which agents this run will actually spawn, and which the pipeline below names but will not spawn at the resolved team.size. For example:

Active set (team.size: <resolved>): <the agents listed for that size above>. Not spawned this run: <every other agent this pipeline names> — consulted through <nearest active core agent>. Raise team.size (or modes.rigor) to widen.

Fill it from the team.size list directly above and the agents this file's own pipeline names — not from an example. Both sets differ per orchestrator.

The pipeline below reads as a multi-agent fan-out and at the shipped default it is one or two agents — team-release names ten and runs one, team-narrative names six across five phases and runs writer alone. The collapse is correct: team.size is rigor-fronted and the narrow default is the token lever. Without saying so, a reader cannot distinguish a correctly-collapsed run from a broken pipeline, and the per-agent "routes through the nearest core agent with an informational note" rule above fires at routing time and never states the shape of the run as a whole.

This is the same rule as the skipped-check reporting elsewhere in this file: a constraint that is enforced but never surfaced is indistinguishable, to the person reading the output, from one that was never enforced.

Team Composition

• game-designer — Design the mechanic, define formulas and edge cases
• gameplay-programmer — Implement the core gameplay code
• ai-programmer — Implement NPC/enemy AI behavior for the feature
• technical-artist — Create VFX, shader effects, and visual feedback
• sound-designer — Define audio events, impact sounds, and ambient combat audio
• engine specialist (primary) — Validate architecture and implementation patterns are idiomatic for the engine (the primary specialist is <engine>-specialist from engine.name — Godot→godot-specialist, Unity→unity-specialist, Unreal→unreal-specialist; fall back to the Primary line of ## Engine Specialists in technical-preferences.md)
• qa-tester — Write test cases and validate the implementation

How to Delegate

Use the Agent tool to spawn each team member as a subagent:

• subagent_type: game-designer — Design the mechanic, define formulas and edge cases
• subagent_type: gameplay-programmer — Implement the core gameplay code
• subagent_type: ai-programmer — Implement NPC/enemy AI behavior
• subagent_type: technical-artist — Create VFX, shader effects, visual feedback
• subagent_type: sound-designer — Define audio events, impact sounds, ambient audio
• subagent_type: [primary engine specialist] — Engine idiom validation for architecture and implementation
• subagent_type: qa-tester — Write test cases and validate implementation

Brief each agent — do not dump context. Read the shared inputs once and pass a distilled brief inline: the lines each agent actually needs, never a file path for a document you have already read (an agent handed a path re-reads the whole file). Pass a path only for a document you have not read and only that agent needs.

End every agent prompt with a return contract: "Write your full output to [path] — that named path is your write authorisation under the bounded exception below, so write it without a separate approval prompt. Return only (1) the path written, (2) a ≤5-bullet summary of decisions, (3) any BLOCKED/CONCERNS items, one line each. Do not restate the documents you read." Without it, an agent returns everything it read back into this session. Implementation files are the exception: an agent writing code or assets first returns the files it will create or change, and its return contract names them only after you have asked once for the set and the user said yes (File Write Protocol) — that answer, not the bounded exception, authorises those writes.

Substitute a real path for [path]. Every phase that produces an artifact names one; most are fixed by the skill that already reads them:

Phase 6 is a spoken status report, not an artifact — no path, and none needed.

Every phase above names a concrete destination, deliberately. The Error Recovery Protocol below says "a named artifact that is not on disk is a failed phase" — a check that cannot run when no path was named.

The two docs/architecture/ entries are a judgement call, not a convention. That directory holds ADRs (adr-NNNN-*.md); a sketch is a precursor to one, not one itself, and nothing in the repo reads either file. Say so when reporting, so the sketch is understood as a record rather than an input to a later gate.

Why this does not violate the Collaboration Protocol. CLAUDE.md requires an agent to ask "May I write this to [filepath]?" before Write/Edit. A subagent spawned here writes without asking, and that is a deliberate, bounded exception rather than an oversight — the same call already made for consistency-check appending to active.md. The exception holds only when all three are true: (1) the path is one you named in the prompt, so the user approved the destination when they approved the phase; (2) it is a new artifact under production/, docs/ or tests/, never an edit to existing source or config; (3) the phase that produced it is itself gated by an AskUserQuestion before the pipeline advances. Outside those three, the agent must ask. Do not "fix" this by asking per subagent — a prompt per agent per phase makes an orchestrator unusable, which is why the exception exists.

Launch independent agents in parallel where the pipeline allows it (e.g., Phase 3 agents can run simultaneously).

Pipeline