playbooks/ — per-genre design

Use AFTER game/fantasy-test.md confirms a clear fantasy, BEFORE game/workflow.md Step 1. The playbook fills in the genre-specific knowledge (death traps, required screens, the 5 decisions, reference games + their canonical mechanism) so your design doc isn't generic.

When to use this layer

Two entry conditions, either is sufficient:

1. You know the genre. User says "tower defense" / "vampire-survivors-like" / "platformer". Read the matching designing-*.md directly.
2. You DON'T know the genre. Read genre-router.md first — it asks "what does the player DO every 5–30 seconds?" and routes to one of the 13.

Where this slots into the workflow

Step 0 — Fantasy test     (skills/game/fantasy-test.md)
  │  pass 5/5
  ▼
Step 0.5 — Genre lock     (this layer)
  │  produces: genre name + the 5 decisions answered + death-trap awareness
  ▼
Step 1-6 — Forcing-function workflow   (skills/game/workflow.md)
  │  produces: design doc, MVP
  ▼
Implementation            (worlds/<name>/ + docs/principles.md)

The genre playbook is input to the design doc — its "5 decisions" become your design doc's "core decision", "trade-off matrix", and "what this game does NOT include" sections.

The 13 playbooks

The four that fit this repo best: survivors / tower-defense / platformers / endless-runners (plus puzzle for cozy stuff). No world in worlds/ is one of these yet — the games that exist predate this layer, so there is no local example to copy. Read the playbook, not a sibling world.

How playbooks compose with the rest of game/

The playbook says WHAT the genre's conventions are. The rest of game/ says WHY they work and HOW to engineer them.

Cross-reference both directions. A playbook saying "needs telegraphing" is your cue to open game/feel/telegraphing.md for HOW; an axiom you're about to apply is worth checking against the playbook for whether this genre wants it.

How to use a playbook in practice

1. Read it top-to-bottom once. ~200 lines, three minutes.
2. Answer the "5 decisions" in your design doc's section 1. They map onto game/design-doc.md: map structure → First 30s; death traps → "what this game does NOT include"; reference games → the 5-word pitch.
3. Use the MVP scaffold at the bottom of each playbook as a starting point.
4. Cross-link the death traps to concrete runtime/ helpers — and extract a new helper only at rule-of-three.

What NOT to do

• Don't pick a genre to fit a playbook. Fantasy first, genre after.
• Don't blend genres for v0.1. "Survivors-like deckbuilder rogue-TD" is not a brief. Pick ONE primary loop.
• Don't skip the playbook because you "know how TD works". The death-traps section catches what you forget under time pressure.
• Don't translate them to Chinese. The English vocabulary is the standard design vocabulary; design docs communicate better in it.

Attribution

These playbooks originated from a separate game-design bundle, licensed CC-BY 4.0, and were copied here for tight integration with the Makone workflow. The only modification so far is structural: each was a designing-<genre>/SKILL.md directory and is now a single designing-<genre>.md, with its frontmatter description folded into the routing table above. The prose is unchanged.

If you modify a playbook's content, flag it (e.g. a ## Modifications for Makone section at the bottom) so the divergence from upstream stays visible.