kociden/sakurai-skill

Overview

sakurai-skill packages game design principles drawn from the subtitles of all 257 main episodes of Masahiro Sakurai's Japanese YouTube series on making games. The result is a single SKILL.md that AI coding agents such as Claude Code can load, aimed at people who plan, review, or debug game feel, level flow, UI, sound, and team/production questions.

This is an unofficial fan project, not affiliated with Sakurai or Sora Ltd. The content is AI-generated summaries of the videos, not Sakurai's own words; the author notes that automatic subtitle transcription errors may survive into the summaries.

Structure

The skill keeps SKILL.md (roughly 27,000 characters, 14 chapters plus review/planning/game-feel procedures) small and pushes concrete numbers, steps, and examples into 14 reference files such as gameplay.md, planning.md, motion.md, effects.md, ui.md, and sound.md, loaded only when needed. Each principle carries the video's running number (001–259) and title, so you can trace it back to the source. Two scripts, to_text.py and build_refs.py, strip timestamps from subtitles and reorder notes into categories.

Quick Start

Requirements: a Claude Code-style agent that supports SKILL.md skills, and Git.

1. Clone the repository: git clone https://github.com/kociden/sakurai-skill.git
2. Copy the skill into your Claude skills directory: cp -r sakurai-skill/skills/sakurai ~/.claude/skills/
3. In Claude Code, ask in Japanese something like 「桜井さんならどうする？」 or 「このゲームの手応えをレビューして」, and the skill is loaded.

A short (~100 second) usage video is linked from the X introduction post. A worked example, the Godot 4.6 one-screen action game Hajiki, can be played on unityroom, and its README records which skill sections were consulted.

Constraints

• Japanese only; the agent will read Japanese principles.
• The principles lean toward Sakurai's large, action-oriented titles. The author advises re-interpreting them through the goal of entertaining players rather than applying them directly to other genres and scales.
• No license is declared in the repository metadata.
• Summaries are unverified by a full human pass, and transcription errors are possible; consult the original channel for exact wording.
• An existing alternative, Sakurai-Skills, offers a larger English-centric system of 24 task skills for bigger projects, whereas this repository is a single lightweight skill for everyday conversation.

HotRepo's Take

On the all-language new-project list for 2026-11-13, the repository recorded 103 stars and 8 forks within its first growth window (about 16 hours from 2026-11-12). There is no daily-rank record and only one star sample, too little to judge a trend. What the data does support is quick early pickup of an AI skill distilled from a well-known Japanese game design channel; whether the summaries hold up is something the source videos, not the star count, will settle.