---
name: game-content-design
description: Design, revise or generate a game repertoire of encounters, items, places, scenes or other related content. Use when meaningful differences, compatibility, repetition, eligibility, selection or presentation determine what players can encounter. Skip an isolated object with no set-level question, decorative renaming and generic text generation unrelated to game state.
license: MIT
---

# Game content design

Create usable members of a repertoire and the route by which they enter play.
Quantity and uniqueness are inputs to this work; neither determines what a
participant will encounter or what choices will differ.

## Build the encountered set

Use the established [consumer and Assay binding](../game-design/references/consumer-and-assay-contract.md).
For a direct invocation, establish it before a dependent operation. Obtain the
relevant catalog or generator, current rule/build, target states and selection
or presentation mechanism. Work with the native materials when available.

1. **Name the useful difference or repetition.** Identify the action,
   information, timing, risk, spatial relation, social dependency or consequence
   that the repertoire should support. Repeated practice, ritual, recognition
   and a deliberately small authored set are legitimate purposes.
2. **Construct playable members.** Make the actual cards, encounters, lines,
   locations or items. Compare them without cosmetic names. Add a member to
   fill a meaningful gap, revise a duplicate or preserve its intended repeat.
   Do not stop at a matrix of proposed categories.
3. **Make dependencies travel together.** For generated content, bind facts,
   dates, clues, prerequisites, actor knowledge and space through the rules
   they actually share. Choose generation from facts, constraint solving,
   reverse construction, finite pools or human curation according to the job.
4. **Follow eligibility through presentation.** Given a player state, show
   eligible members, selection, exclusions, ordering and the content actually
   presented. Inspect a meaningful type that is absent from the result and
   distinguish never generated, ineligible, never selected and not presented.
5. **Revise the responsible stage.** Change the member, representation,
   generation constraint, selection rule or display path that lost the intended
   relationship. More generated members do not repair a selector that only
   returns the first one.
6. **Deliver the materials and replay.** Provide the usable set or procedure,
   concrete outputs, selection context and an example through a relevant
   transformation. Separate model validity, implementation output and evidence
   that people noticed or valued the intended differences.

Read [repertoire construction](references/repertoire.md) before making the set
or generator. It includes playable cards, a revised five-episode selection,
jointly generated facts and clues, and a path that distinguishes missing
evidence from an inspected result.

## Keep instance rules with their subject owner

Read [actions and time](../gameplay-design/references/actions-and-time.md) or
[space and situations](../gameplay-design/references/space-and-situations.md)
when those properties define the content difference. Read
[actor knowledge](../gameplay-design/references/entities.md) before generating
what a character may say. Read [inference](../game-information-design/references/inference.md)
for an actual deductive task, and [conditional story](../game-world-narrative-design/references/conditional-story.md)
for scene conditions, canon and one-time consequences.

Use [systems](../game-systems-design/SKILL.md) for an item's resource or unlock
effect, [participation](../game-participation-design/SKILL.md) for a role or
access dependency, and the shared
[environment contracts](../game-design/references/environment-contracts.md)
for native import, generator execution and telemetry. This skill owns the
properties of the set and its path to play; it does not duplicate the rules
that make each member work.