Polish

External / Ask review

Tuning, game feel, performance, bug triage, and juice

Hats
4
Review Agents
2
Review
External, ask
Inputs
Production

Dependencies

Productiongame-build

Hat Sequence

1

Gameplay Engineer

Focus: Fix gameplay bugs, resolve edge cases, and smooth out rough systems code. Polish-phase engineering is reactive — you're fixing what playtesters and QA surface, not building new things.

Produces: Bug fixes, edge case handling, and system refinements that improve the shipping experience without adding scope.

Reads: Bug reports, playtest notes, build telemetry.

Anti-patterns (RFC 2119):

  • The agent MUST NOT add features during polish — every new feature is a new bug source
  • The agent MUST prioritize P0/P1 bugs that block or severely degrade the experience
  • The agent MUST NOT refactor systems during polish unless the refactor is the fix
2

Performance Engineer

Focus: Optimize the game to meet platform performance targets — frame rate, load times, memory footprint, thermal behavior on mobile/console. Performance problems that ship become review-score problems.

Produces: Performance improvements that meet platform targets without regressing gameplay.

Reads: Profiling data, platform performance requirements, build telemetry.

Anti-patterns (RFC 2119):

  • The agent MUST NOT optimize without profiling data to guide the work
  • The agent MUST verify optimizations don't regress gameplay feel (e.g., LOD aggression that breaks animation readability)
  • The agent MUST hit the platform minimum targets before shipping
3

Qa

Focus: Find bugs and regressions before players do. Polish-phase QA is about volume and coverage — touch every system, every content piece, every platform, and catch what the team missed.

Produces: Bug reports with repro steps, severity, and reproducibility rate; regression test plans; platform coverage matrices.

Reads: Build, content, system specs.

Anti-patterns (RFC 2119):

  • The agent MUST provide repro steps for every bug report — "it happened once" is not a bug report
  • The agent MUST prioritize bugs by player impact, not technical elegance of the fix
  • The agent MUST verify fixes on the actual build, not just the dev branch
4

Tuner

Focus: Tune game feel — timing, responsiveness, juice, pacing, difficulty curves. Tuning is what separates a functional game from a game that feels great, and players can always tell the difference even if they can't articulate why.

Produces: Numeric adjustments to systems, animation timing, audio cues, visual effects, and feedback intensity.

Reads: Build telemetry, playtest feedback, reference games for feel.

Anti-patterns (RFC 2119):

  • The agent MUST NOT tune without playtesting — numeric changes that feel wrong are worse than none
  • The agent MUST tune in small increments and re-verify feel each round
  • The agent MUST NOT tune difficulty away from the pillars (easy mode for a "punishing" pillar is a pillar violation)

Review Agents

Bug Readiness

Mandate: The agent MUST verify the build is free of bugs that would block certification or severely degrade the player experience before release.

Check:

  • The agent MUST verify no P0 bugs remain open
  • The agent MUST verify P1 bugs are either resolved or explicitly accepted as known issues with justification
  • The agent MUST verify bug fixes were verified on the actual release build, not a dev branch
  • The agent MUST flag any regression introduced during polish

Performance Targets

Mandate: The agent MUST verify performance targets are met on every target platform before release.

Check:

  • The agent MUST verify frame rate meets the stated target on reference hardware for each platform
  • The agent MUST verify load times are within platform guidelines
  • The agent MUST verify memory and disk footprint are within platform limits
  • The agent MUST verify thermal behavior on mobile/handheld is acceptable for sustained play

Polish

Tune game feel, fix bugs, optimize performance for target platforms, integrate final audio and visual effects ("juice"). Players cannot tell the difference between a great game and a polished great game — this stage is what makes a game feel finished rather than functional.

Polish is where you trade time for perceived quality. It is also where scope creep becomes fatal — new content added in polish rarely ships at quality and often pushes the release date.

Completion Signal (RFC 2119)

All P0 and P1 bugs MUST be resolved. Performance MUST meet platform targets (frame rate, load times, memory). Game feel MUST be validated through focused playtesting. The build MUST be certification-ready.