Game design
The Game design tab is the brief. Everything that flows downstream — which screens get registered in Flow, what colours land in each generated symbol, how the GDD reads at the end — is shaped here.
It used to be called "Project". The data shape is the same; the label changed in the brand sweep because what you're doing here is game design, not data entry.
Why this tab matters
Spinative's prompt builder reads the Game design fields directly. A sparse brief produces generic AI output; a precise brief produces output that's recognisably yours. Two minutes spent filling in the mood, palette and narrative is the highest-ROI two minutes you'll spend in the tool.
You can still ship a complete project from sparse inputs — the generator has sensible fallbacks for almost everything — but you'll re-roll a lot more tiles than you'd like.
The fields, top to bottom
Game name
Free text. Appears on the splash, on the logo wordmark, on the GDD cover, and in the prompt that builds the logo asset. Backgrounds deliberately *don't* see the game name (otherwise gpt-image starts painting "Aztec Treasures" on every storefront in the scene).
Theme
Pick one card. The catalogue has 21 themed cards: Western, Ancient Egypt, Ancient Rome, Ancient Greece, Aztec / Mayan, Chinese, Irish / Celtic, Viking / Norse, Pirate, Fantasy / Magic, Fairy Tale, Space / Sci-Fi, Jungle / Safari, Underwater, Halloween, Christmas, Classic Fruits, Diamonds, Sports, Music / Rock, and Other / Custom.
The theme key is injected verbatim into every prompt. "Other / Custom" is the escape hatch when none of the presets fit; pair it with a detailed Setting and Story so the prompt has something concrete to work with.
Reelset
The shape of the playable grid. Accepted values:
5x3— the default. 5 reels, 3 rows.5x4— extended-height classic.6x4— wider, common for cluster pays.3x3— compact / arcade-style.megaways— variable-height reels (2–7 symbols per reel). Pair this with the Megaways feature for the correct screens.243— 5×3 with 243 fixed ways-to-win paying.1024— 5×4 with 1,024 fixed ways-to-win.
The reelset value drives the reel-frame aspect ratio in the prompt builder. A 6×4 reelset asks the generator for a wider frame than a 5×3 — without this, every reel frame came out square and didn't fit the actual reel area. (See buildReelFrameAspect in lib/ai/promptBuilder.ts for the math.)
Palette (3 hexes)
Three colours: primary, background, accent. Each one has an "active" toggle — turning a colour off omits it from the prompt entirely (useful when you want to lock the AI to a strict two-tone palette).
The hex values are converted to *named* tones (warm gold, deep indigo, cream, forest moss — 32-entry palette) before they reach the prompt. Names are softer than hex codes, so the model treats them as *mood cues* rather than a strict colour quota. The result is a generation that respects your palette without violently colour-correcting every pixel into 3 tones.
Per-category roles: each asset class (high symbol, low symbol, wild, scatter, character, logo, background) draws from the same three colours in different proportions, so symbols don't all come back the exact same shade. See "Per-category palette roles" in prompt-architecture.md §3.3.
Mood
A short enum: gritty, opulent, mystical, playful, dark, cinematic, romantic, retro, festive. Joined as "<mood> atmosphere" and applied to every asset.
Setting
Free text, up to 240 characters. Used for backgrounds only — gets injected as "world: <your text>". Best results: name a real or mythic place, time of day, weather.
> *"dusty saloon town at dawn, low sun through the haze"*
Story / Narrative
Free text, up to 240 characters. Used for backgrounds only. Gets injected as "narrative atmosphere: <your text>".
> *"a lone gunslinger hunts the last of the lost gold across the > mesa"*
Bonus Round Narrative
Free text, up to 240 characters. Used only when generating the background_bonus asset. Gives the bonus scene its own narrative beat distinct from the base game.
Graphic style
Pick a card. 14 styles ship today: Cartoon 3D, Realistic 3D, Fantasy Illustrated, Art Deco, Dark Gothic, Pixel Art, Anime / Manga, Watercolor, Cartoon 2D Stylised, Low Poly, Ukiyo-e / Edo Woodblock, Minimalist UI, Claymation, Neo-Noir.
Each style ships with three things: a positive prompt modifier (what the model should aim for), a negative modifier (what to suppress), and — for the styles where it matters — a tailored quality clause (pixel art doesn't want "polished, high detail"; watercolor doesn't want "glossy CGI"). All of that is invisible from the brief; you just pick the card.
You can change the style at any point. The prompt builder reads it fresh each time you generate or re-roll, so an art-style change applied mid-project will be honoured for the next batch.
Visual reference / Art Reference
Free text *and* up to 3 reference image uploads.
- Free text — name films, games, artists, schools. Up to 120 characters. Gets injected as
"visual reference: <your text>". - Uploaded images — each upload runs a vision-describe pass and stores the description alongside the URL. The prompt only ever sees the description, because the image generator is text-to-image; the image bytes are for *your* reference, not the model's.
Art bible
The art bible is a project's locked-in visual signature — palette, material treatment, lighting language, ornament density, line work — captured as a ~120-word description that gets injected into *every* prompt at high priority.
It solves the cross-asset cohesion problem: even with the same theme, style and palette, separate generation calls drift because the model doesn't know what your previous approved assets look like. The art bible tells it.
How to set one:
- Generate one asset you're happy with (typically the logo, the character, or a background base).
- Right-click → "Generate art bible from this asset."
- The vision-describe pass produces a description. Edit it before locking — you can sharpen anything that's wrong.
Once locked, every subsequent generation rides the art bible. Regenerating the anchor asset doesn't auto-update the bible — that's deliberate, you stay in control of when the visual signature shifts.
Art Direction Notes
Free text, up to 160 characters. The catch-all for short direction that doesn't fit anywhere else: *"matte materials only", "no photographic detail", "rim light from upper left always"*. Applied to every asset.
Symbol counts
Three sliders:
- High symbols — 1–8. The premium-value icons.
- Low symbols — 1–8. The lower-value icons. (Used to be playing card ranks; now tier-neutral so non-card themes don't get a card aesthetic forced on them.)
- Special symbols — Wild + Scatter always; up to 6 additional named specials (Bonus, Mystery, Multiplier, etc.) as your features require.
Per-symbol names
Optional. Each symbol can carry a name ("Revolver", "Saloon girl", "Whiskey bottle"). When set, the name is injected into the prompt as "depicted as: <name>", anchoring the symbol's subject. Leave a slot's name empty and the generator picks something theme-appropriate.
Jackpots
Four tiers — Mini, Minor, Major, Grand — each with a configured amount (e.g. €100, €500, €2,500, €10,000) and an on/off toggle. The jackpot bar row honours which tiers are on; turning a tier off hides its plaque on every screen.
Character toggle
Switch on if your game has a hero / mascot / icon character. The character asset gets generated and added to the canvas; turn it off and the slot ships character-less. Includes a scale preset (Full height / Half height / Quarter) for portrait viewports.
Ante bet
Toggle and label. When on, the Ante Bet banner appears on the canvas and the Ante Bet feature is implicitly available in Math/Logic. Most games leave this off.
Required vs optional
Anything marked with a gold asterisk is required for a complete brief. Everything else can be left blank — the generator falls back to generic-for-the-theme behaviour, the GDD marks it as TBD, and the Project Health pill in the topbar shows the section as incomplete.
A complete brief minimum:
- Game name
- Theme
- Reelset
- At least one palette colour
- Graphic style
- Symbol counts (high / low)
- At least one feature toggled in the Features tab
Everything else is leverage. Use it.
Validation and Project Health
The topbar shows a Project Health pill. It counts open items across the whole project: missing fields here, missing assets in Art, open comments in Flow, unresolved Supervisor findings. Click the pill to open the full panel with deep-link buttons that jump you straight to the offending workspace.
The pill turns green when there's nothing left to address. That's your signal that handoff is going to be clean.
Saving and snapshots
Spinative autosaves the project every few seconds while you edit. The save badge in the topbar shows the state (Saving…, Saved 12:34, Unsaved). You shouldn't need to think about it.
If you do want a named checkpoint — before a risky restyle, before a client presentation — use File → Snapshot in the menu. Snapshots are listed in File → Versions and any one of them can be restored in a click.
What this tab does NOT cover
- The math under the hood. Pay tables, RTP targets, hit frequency — those live in Math & GDD. The Game design tab carries the *narrative* and the *visual brief*; the math layers on top.
- Screen composition. What goes where on the canvas is the Flow workspace.
- Feature mechanics. Free Spins / Bonus Pick / Cascade / Megaways and the rest live in Features.
Get the brief right here and the rest of the workspace works for you. Get it wrong and you'll fight the AI every step of the way.