How to Delegate

How to Delegate

What Is This

"How to Delegate" is a team-level skill for orchestrating collaborative design tasks within a game development pipeline, specifically tailored for level creation teams. This skill leverages subagents representing critical roles-level-designer, narrative-director, world-builder, art-director, systems-designer, and QA-tester-to distribute complex tasks involved in area or level design. The delegation process is interactive and methodical, requiring user guidance and approval at key decision points. By automating communication and coordination among specialists, this skill ensures efficient, traceable, and high-quality outcomes in game level production.

Why Use It

Delegation is essential when managing multidisciplinary teams responsible for delivering complex deliverables such as game levels or areas. Manually tracking each contributor’s input can lead to miscommunication, overlooked requirements, or bottlenecks. Using this skill provides several advantages:

• Parallelization: Tasks are assigned to specialized subagents, enabling simultaneous progress on interconnected aspects of level design.
• Accountability: Each subagent's contributions are explicit and traceable, making it easier to identify the source of decisions and outputs.
• User Oversight: At each transition point, the user reviews and approves proposals, maintaining control and ensuring alignment with the overall vision.
• Context Awareness: The skill gathers and synthesizes relevant documentation, including game concept, pillars, existing levels, narrative, and world-building resources, so each agent operates with full context.
• Consistency: The skill enforces structured collaboration using standardized tools and processes, reducing the risk of errors and rework.

How to Use It

1. Invocation:
   The user invokes the skill, providing the name or description of the level or area to be designed (e.g., tutorial, forest dungeon, hub town, final boss arena).
   Example:

   plaintext

   team-level "forest dungeon"

2. Context Gathering:
   The skill automatically reads the following files to assemble context:

   • design/gdd/game-concept.md for the core game concept
   • design/gdd/game-pillars.md for foundational design principles
   • All existing level documentation in design/levels/
   • Narrative documents in design/narrative/
   • World-building files relevant to the area

   Example Bash command used internally:

   bash

   cat design/gdd/game-concept.md
   cat design/gdd/game-pillars.md
   ls design/levels/
   grep "forest" design/narrative/*

3. Subagent Task Delegation:
   The skill spawns the following subagents, each with a focused responsibility:

   • narrative-director: Defines narrative purpose, characters, and emotional arcs
   • world-builder: Provides lore context, environmental storytelling, and world logic
   • level-designer: Designs spatial layout, pacing, encounters, and navigation
   • systems-designer: Details enemy compositions, mechanics, and systemic challenges
   • art-director and qa-tester (if needed): For visual direction and quality assurance

   Example (pseudo-code for spawning subagents):

   python

   Task.spawn(subagent_type="narrative-director", area="forest dungeon")
   Task.spawn(subagent_type="world-builder", area="forest dungeon")
   Task.spawn(subagent_type="level-designer", area="forest dungeon")
   Task.spawn(subagent_type="systems-designer", area="forest dungeon")

4. Decision Points and User Approval:
   At each major step, proposals from subagents are presented as selectable options using the AskUserQuestion tool. The agent writes a full analysis of the options directly in the conversation. The user must select and approve one of the options before proceeding.

   Example (decision prompt):

   plaintext

   Narrative-director proposes: "Include a lost druid as the main quest giver."
   World-builder proposes: "Ancient ruins overrun by corrupted flora."
   Please select which narrative direction to pursue:
   [1] Lost druid
   [2] Rival adventurer

5. Task Coordination and Documentation:
   As each team member completes their part, outputs are written to appropriate documentation using the Write, Edit, and TodoWrite tools. The process is tracked and updated in real time.

   Example (writing narrative summary):

   bash

   echo "The forest dungeon features a druid protagonist seeking to cleanse corruption." > design/levels/forest-dungeon/narrative.md

When to Use It

Use this delegation skill at the outset of any game level or area design project where multiple, specialized roles are required. It is particularly effective when:

• Creating new levels or redesigning existing areas
• Integrating narrative, environmental, and gameplay elements
• Coordinating large interdisciplinary teams
• Ensuring that every aspect of the level design process is documented and reviewed

Important Notes

• Approval is Required: No step advances without explicit user approval of subagent proposals.
• Strict Role Segregation: Each subagent is limited to their area of expertise, ensuring clarity in responsibility.
• Documentation-Driven: The skill relies on the current state of design documents. Incomplete or outdated documents may lead to suboptimal results.
• Traceable Workflow: All actions and decisions are logged, supporting robust version control and review.
• Allowed Tools: Only designated tools (Read, Glob, Grep, Write, Edit, Bash, Task, AskUserQuestion, TodoWrite) are used, ensuring safety and reproducibility.

By following this structured delegation process, you can optimize your team’s productivity, maintain high quality, and foster a transparent and collaborative development environment.