Team Composition

Team Composition

allowed-tools: Read, Glob, Grep, Write, Edit, Bash, Task, AskUserQuestion, TodoWrite

Category: design Source: Donchitos/Claude-Code-Game-Studios

Team Composition: Orchestrating Game Feature Polish

The "Team Composition" skill (team-polish) for the Happycapy Skills platform is designed to coordinate a specialized polish team, bringing together experts from multiple disciplines to optimize, refine, and harden a selected feature or area of a game for release quality. This article explores what the team-polish skill is, why it is valuable, how to use it effectively, when to apply it in your development process, and important operational notes.

What Is This Skill?

team-polish is an orchestrator skill that manages the collaborative workflow of a polish team targeting a specific game feature or area. The core team includes:

  • Performance Analyst: Profiles the target area, identifies bottlenecks, and recommends optimizations.
  • Engine Programmer: Addresses low-level engine issues, such as rendering or resource loading, when flagged by the performance analyst.
  • Technical Artist: Enhances visual quality, optimizes shaders, and polishes visual effects.
  • Sound Designer: Improves the audio experience with mixing, feedback cues, and ambient layers.
  • QA Tester: Validates the feature's stability, performance, and quality.

The skill manages the process as a structured pipeline, requiring user confirmation at each decision point. All subagent proposals are presented to the user, who selects the preferred course of action before the workflow advances. This ensures a high degree of control and transparency throughout the polish process.

Why Use the Team Composition Skill?

Game features often require coordinated effort from multiple disciplines to meet release quality standards. Using team-polish provides several key benefits:

  • Streamlined Collaboration: Automates the handoff between specialists, ensuring critical issues are addressed in the correct order.
  • Quality Assurance: Enforces a structured review and user approval at every stage, reducing oversight and errors.
  • Targeted Optimization: Ensures performance, visual, and audio aspects are all considered and iteratively improved.
  • Repeatability: Establishes a consistent, traceable polish pipeline that can be reused across features or areas.

By leveraging this skill, teams can systematically elevate the quality of their game’s most important systems and content, reducing the risk of last-minute bugs or polish gaps.

How to Use the Skill

The team-polish skill is invoked through the platform’s task interface. Its usage pattern is as follows:

Usage Guidance

If no argument is provided, the skill outputs a usage message and exits. Example:

> Usage: /team-polish [feature or area] - specify the feature or area to polish (e.g., combat, main menu, inventory system, level-1).

Invoking the Skill

To start the polish process, specify the feature or area:

/team-polish inventory system

Pipeline Orchestration

Once invoked, the skill executes a structured workflow:

  1. Performance Analysis
    • Runs profiling and presents optimization proposals.
    • If engine-level issues are found, triggers the engine programmer subagent.
  2. Technical Art Review
    • The technical artist analyzes visual quality and effect polish.
    • Presents proposals for user selection.
  3. Sound Design Pass
    • The sound designer recommends audio improvements or fixes.
    • User selects preferred changes.
  4. QA Testing
    • QA tester validates polish, performance, and stability.
    • Presents pass/fail and any additional recommendations.

At each phase transition, the full analysis and proposals are shown to the user. The user makes a selection, which is captured as a concise label, and must approve before the process continues.

Example Interaction

/team-polish combat

Performance Analyst Output:

  • "Identified memory leak in enemy AI module. Options: [Fix now], [Defer], [Escalate to Engine Programmer]"
  • User selects: Fix now

Technical Artist Output:

  • "VFX timing is inconsistent. Options: [Retime], [Replace], [No change]"
  • User selects: Retime

...and so on through sound design and QA.

When to Use This Skill

Apply the team-polish skill during the late stages of feature development, when initial implementation is complete and the focus shifts to release readiness. Common scenarios include:

  • Before major milestones such as alpha, beta, or release candidates
  • After integration of a new system or feature area
  • When user feedback or internal QA highlights polish or performance issues

This ensures that all critical aspects of the feature are thoroughly reviewed and improved before public exposure.

Important Notes

  • User Approval Required: No phase transition occurs without explicit user selection and approval, ensuring full control over the polish process.
  • Agent Scope: The engine programmer is only invoked if the performance analyst identifies root causes at the engine level.
  • Tooling: The skill has access to file system and codebase tools (Read, Glob, Grep, Write, Edit, Bash, Task, TodoWrite) to enable analysis and changes, but asks the user before taking significant steps.
  • No Interactive Prompt on Missing Argument: If no feature or area is given, the skill outputs guidance and exits without querying the user interactively.

The team-polish skill provides a disciplined, transparent, and effective way to marshal multidisciplinary expertise and deliver game features at the highest quality. By enforcing user-driven decision points and structured collaboration, it helps teams systematically achieve polish that matches their creative vision.