Day-One Patch

Every shipped game has a day-one patch. Planning it before launch day prevents chaos. This skill scopes the patch to only what is safe and necessary, gates it through a lightweight QA pass, and ensures a rollback plan exists before anything ships. It is a mini-sprint, not a hotfix, not a full sprint.

When to run:

• After the gold master build is locked (cert approved or launch candidate tagged)
• When known bugs exist that are too risky to address in the gold master
• When cert feedback requires minor fixes post-submission
• When a pre-launch playtest surfaces must-fix issues after the release gate passed

Day-one patch scope rules:

• Only P1/P2 bugs that are SAFE to fix quickly
• No new features, this is fix-only
• No refactoring, minimum viable change
• Any fix that requires more than 4 hours of dev time belongs in patch 1.1, not day-one

Output: production/releases/day-one-patch-[version].md

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Phase 1: Load Release Context

Read:

• project.stage in project.yaml (fallback production/stage.txt), confirm project is in Release stage
• The most recent file in production/gate-checks/, read the release gate verdict
• production/qa/bugs/*.md, load all bugs with Status: Open or Fixed, Pending Verification
• production/sprints/ most recent, understand what shipped
• production/security/security-audit-*.md most recent, check for any open security items

If the resolved stage (project.yaml → stage.txt) is not Release or Polish:

"Day-one patch prep is for Release-stage projects. Current stage: [stage]. This skill is not appropriate until you are approaching launch."

Check the premise, do not assume it. This whole skill rests on there being a gold master that already passed a release gate, that premise is what justifies its lightweight QA pass instead of a full one. So verify it rather than inferring it from the stage value: