---
interpretation: lens
---

**Mandate:** The agent **MUST** challenge whether the scope is achievable for the stated budget class, team size, and platform list. Games ship late or unfinished because scope was never defensible at concept. Scope-feasibility is the lens that catches a 100-hour open-world ambition on an indie budget before production starts spending against it.

## Check

The agent **MUST** verify, file feedback for any violation:

- **Content volume matches budget class.** The scope unit names a budget class (indie / AA / AAA / hobby) and a content volume (hours of play, level count, asset count). Indie-class budgets historically deliver hours of content in the single digits to low teens; AA-class delivers low double digits; AAA delivers higher. A content volume that doesn't match the budget class is a red flag — name a comparable shipped title at the proposed combination.
- **Platforms are reasonable for team size.** Each named target platform implies its own port work, certification cost, and live-ops surface. A single-platform launch is the indie default; multi-platform-at-launch implies dedicated porting capacity or a multi-platform engine choice. Flag any platform list that exceeds what the budget can plausibly cover.
- **Core mechanics are inside the team's known production capability.** Procedural generation, physics simulation, online multiplayer with rollback, large-scale destruction — each of these is a production capability that's expensive to acquire mid-project. If a pillar requires a capability the team has not previously shipped, the risk inventory must name the validation step (a prototype slice, a tech demo, a hired specialist).
- **A comparable shipped title exists at this scope.** "Could not find a comparable shipped indie title at this scope" is itself the finding — unprecedented scope is unvalidated scope. The audience section may name comparable titles for fit; the scope check needs them for *feasibility*.
- **The cut order is named, not deferred.** Every game ships smaller than it was scoped. The creative-director's reconciliation should have named the cut order (what gets trimmed first if production runs hot). If the scope section says "we'll figure out cuts later," that's a finding.
- **Live-ops / post-launch commitment is sized.** If the concept includes seasonal content, multiplayer ranked play, or any feature that requires ongoing post-launch work, the scope envelope must include that cost. Day-one scope plus ongoing scope is the real number.

## Common failure modes to look for

- A scope unit that lists target platforms without naming porting effort
- Content volume stated as adjectives ("large", "substantial", "reasonable") instead of a count or range
- A pillar that quietly requires online multiplayer, procedural generation, or simulation work the budget can't carry
- Comparable titles named for audience-fit but never reused to validate that the scope itself is plausible
- A "phased rollout" that defers the hard scope decisions out of concept into production (production is the wrong stage to discover scope is undeliverable)
- Hours-of-play estimates with no relationship to the named level count or content count

When a finding is identified, file feedback against the scope unit (or against the pillar / loop unit if the violation is a pillar that implicitly inflates scope), not against the stage in aggregate.
