The 100:10:1 method – the heart of my game design process
nickbentleygames.wordpress.comThis has some relation to the "Disney Method" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disney_method) where one delays self-criticism until after one has engineered out the problem, and delays engineering things out until one has dreamed up ideas. Of course the Disney Method is cyclical, and requires returning to the dreaming-up state and on from there.
This also reminds me of how 35mm street/photojournalists work (see, for example, Garry Winogrand, or Josef Koudelka, or Robert Frank). One makes tens of thousands of images, culls them down via work prints to hundreds, then choose a few dozen to print well as the final work. The final images appear inevitable, though it's unclear if there was something magical in the moment of the photography, or the culling process is the secret. See http://www.nga.gov/content/ngaweb/features/robert-frank/the-... for an example of Robert Frank's contact sheets and how he homed/honed in on an image.
EDIT/ADDITION: A fiction writer I met teaches her students to make three passes at their work. As I recall, she described the first being for ideas, the second for intentions, the third is to make it read as inevitable.
Yeah, photography has all sorts of parallels. Most people are shocked to find out that shooting ~1-2k images on an outing is normal.
95% of the time I won't know if a shot is "worthwhile" until after I cull/process but it's all about setting up environments that promote the chance of that happening.
Major respect for the people who used to do it in Film, much more discipline and technique required back then.
How does this work for video though? I remember reading somewhere there is about 3 hours of film shot for every hour of final product. That's more than some might think but not close to 100:1
There is significantly more planning behind video than most still photography. Scenes are story-boarded, shots are carefully set up, lighting is adjusted, etc.
When you look at video that was not carefully planned the ratio of hours shot to hours used goes way up. The Blair Witch Project had a ratio of about 12:1 and while the video from that film was effective it was hardly outstanding from an artistic point of view. Shot-on-location documentaries like Happy People or Welcome to Leith have similar ratios. Even though they're carefully shot, the ad-hoc nature of collecting footage for a film like that makes it necessary to amass a huge amount.
And of course, there are outliers. Stanley Kubrick did both insane amounts of planning _and_ an insane number of shots. Eyes Wide Shut, at 2 hours, 39 minutes, took 400 days of filming (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120663/trivia). I guess that gets you over the 100:1 ratio.
On the sitcom front, there is Fawlty Towers, where they six spent weeks writing and up to 25 hours of editing on each _episode_ (http://www.tv.com/shows/fawlty-towers/)
I dont know what TV editing workflow is like, but 25h doesn't seem outrageous to me. I would budget 2h of edit/mix per song when producing an album. I'm sure there are many who spend way more than that.
> A fiction writer I met teaches her students to make three passes at their work. As I recall, she described the first being for ideas, the second for intentions, the third is to make it read as inevitable.
That's really intriguing. Do you have any more info or background on this?
It was a conversation at a party, and I fear I've even forgotten the author/teacher's name. She used the three "i"'s as a mnemonic. Thinking about it, I wonder if the sequence was actually "incident", "intent", then "inevitable".
The scheme is to write down what happened in the first pass. Then the second pass is to make things follow -- fix plot holes, clarify motivation, iron out chronology, etc. The third, "inevitable", pass is, of course, key. It is to hide the seams, to make the story/book appear as if it came whole cloth.
One (counter) example would be Faulkner's first novel, "Soldiers' Pay". In it you can see the hand of the author, self-conscious characterizations and manipulation of scene. It's educational to read, as it clarifies his technique in a way that his accomplished and inevitable-seeming books obscure.
One of the major AAA companies (Bethesda, iirc), uses this on their level design. They dream up all of the levels, then design all in parallel across 4 passes.
I assumed this was about video game design, and it took me a minute to catch on that it was board games.
Phase two of this approach, developing 10 prototypes over the course of 6 to 12 months, sounds incredibly labor intensive. Perhaps prototyping board games is easier than prototyping video games. But this seems like it would be a difficult phase to get through, either as a side project, or doing it commercially full time.
Not really, or it shouldn't be. If you have a few hours to spare each day on this hobby and you sit down each day and make a video game that you want to make, in very short time you might have five or ten different games that you've come up with, especially if you're impatient or have a number of different ideas.
You have to consider that a prototype can be very, very rough. If it takes 12 months to make a prototype of a video game, then that's the wrong way to go about making a prototype. This is assuming that the core premise of the game doesn't involve inventing something impossible or solving the halting problem. Even if it involved something tough, you would just have to "fake it" until you figure out what you want to make, anyway.
You should also pick a platform that lets you do things easily, and limit the time you spend. If what motivates you about a game idea is the art and you spend most of your time designing characters or worlds, then after a while you have to treat that as your prototype or put in the minimal effort to combine them, instead of making cut-scenes and making a Final Fantasy game from everything.
The audience for the prototype isn't the final audience either. Maybe it can be friends if they're uncritical but you should really just make it for yourself if you're still in the picking an idea phase.
Most if not all game design methods are universal and not restricted to medium. His first two steps are easy to do in a notebook and the 3rd step is also not difficult to accomplish using Unity, Game Maker, or really any engine like those where pushing out a prototype becomes tedious. However in step 3 where he says "playtest+polish it till I’m sure I can’t improve it" for video games this doesn't mean graphically but mechanically which is very doable.
It seems easier, you could just have a bunch of papers with the intended action for board game prototyping. Video games needs .. more.
Catchup is a fun game, but prototyping it would not be difficult, for the kind of person that plays games like Havannah at Little Golem. Cat Herders is similar.
I suspect that people who play lots of different abstract games have a lot of prototype components on hand—stuff like different size square and hex boards, generic abstract pieces. Hex is a classic of the genre, and yet has gone long periods without affordable commercial sets being widely available—it's easy to build. Slither is a game you play with a Go set. Catchup you would just need a printed Hex board and some glass gems.
I think the www.onegameamonth.com folks have a different opinion on developing 10 prototypes in 12 months.
For the people talking about automated or evolutionary design of board games, this has indeed been tried. The most successful one I know about is Ludi¹) which produced the game Yavalath²), which I think is a pretty darn good game.
Could be interesting to adapt this slightly for a small scale one person startup-generator and give it a shot. I usually try to work on one idea but... 1) Identify 100 problems worth solving 2) Narrow down to 10 and build MVPs for all of them in parallel 3) Go deeper on the most promising one(s)
I think the key is how to go from 2 to 3. I feel like an idea worth trying is to not focus on growth and instead monetize all 10 MVPs from the start and focus on the one(s) that can get to cash flow positive the quickest.
I love Fogus's take on 100:10:1. As opposed to this highly linear ever-winnowing flow, Fogus uses 100:10:1 as a way to keep a list of spitballed ideas, a list of things he might want to work on that all have sincere promise, and one thing picked to focus on. Instead of being process driven, focusing on getting one thing done well, Fogus lets himself switch among his 10 picked items. The 10 is a way to swap out when interest wanes. 100:10:1, my approach to open source- http://blog.fogus.me/2015/11/04/the-100101-method-my-approac...
This process speaks to me a ton (a whole lot more than Nick's rigorous phased development process). When my attention and care for an interesting, creative project wanes, I can either dig in my heels and try to make myself code, or preferably I can switch to some other promising piece of development. Having a deck of other ideas decreases the context switch time- when a project is in a lul, there's already other great gems prepped, and one of them can re-inspire me.
Quite the contrast. I wonder how much of it is due to Fogus's focus on developing open source software, versus Nick' focus working on physical board games.
Discussion on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10513015
>> Based on some selection criteria (which depend on my design goals and which I discuss below), I pick 10 of the 100 concepts
I used to try this as a teenager with QBASIC. I'd start writing down game ideas, but I'd always pick the 5 or so that I already knew I wanted to make. So why write down 2 pages of them?
I would probably have been better off drawing them out of a hat, working on them for a day and then just seeing where each one went.
The idea is to consider anything in the first round. You can be more creative that way. Writing it down makes you do more than just think about it and dismiss it. Then you have to come back and review the list which gives it a second chance. How many great ideas just come and go because we don't dig deeply enough on them?
At first I was thinking that the methodology described appears to be waterfall approach to innovation with bing bang brainstorming and selection.
All 3 games I have seen are quite innovative pieces which took the author years to implement and perfect. The games are quite impressive, and are equivalent to innovating "chess".
On the other side one can argue, an incremental evolutionary approach to innovative games, or an agile approach would fit the current times, better, due to the rapid rate platforms maturing and disappearing. For example, I could take "chess", or mahjong and create variations to it in quick iterations with a focus on process.
Just because a particular approach can be characterized as waterfall-esque doesn't mean it's necessarily bad, just as a agile approach isn't necessarily good. Part of what makes chess great is the fact that it has remained the same for ages, and evolution has come through the way the game is played and not through the game itself.
Actually, chess rules have changed quite a lot through the ages..
> At first I was thinking that the methodology described appears to be waterfall approach
In waterfall, he will do big upfront design for every game. Nothing will be implemented until the design documents were very detailed.
Man, if only we could come up with a good "fun to play" metric for board games, I'd love to play a board game that were produced by a genetic algorithm.
You should probably check out the "Evolutionary Game Design" book, which does exactly that. The resulting game, Yavalath, was actually published and is indeed quite nice.
See the history of https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgamefamily/13434/shibumi - rules designed in collaboration with AI & human designers.
Basically just spitballing ideas. Pretty classic process for anyone creating things. Throw out a ton of ideas, and see if any stick. I try to get a new web project developed every month, if it gains some traction, continue development, if not, moved on to the next idea.
It's good to be reminded of this process though. I tend to try to take on an epic project that I think is a good idea and then am crushed when it turns out it doesn't work.
The road to success is paved with failures!
Interesting read and approach, though you'd have to be pretty committed to pursue it in the 10 stage.
It's interesting that he talks about software, I've thought a couple of times if it's possible to produce generic board game design software but I'm still not sure.
http://www.peachpit.com/store/game-mechanics-advanced-game-d... has an online editor for storing values in containers, then with rules for moving those values eg.
every turn, +1 food every turn, 50% chance of .. etc
it's pretty detailed, worth looking into
Agreed, it's an excellent book. The Machinations tool is available here: http://www.jorisdormans.nl/machinations/
It seems like it should be possible for most board games. All you really need are: a graph to represent the board locations and connections between them, user tokens on the board, user inventory off the board, and a rules engine to evaluate the rules of the game. That seems like it ought to be enough to get everything from risk to candy land.
Motown used a similar method where songwriting teams had to deliver x number of ideas per week and then the best ideas were pulled out for demos. The best demos were produced.
Late night comedy shows also. Many of the comedy writers interviewed on JR Havlan's excellent podcast "Writers' Bloc" [0] recount how writers or teams of writers will be given assignments - e.g. "Write 10 jokes about Trump's last speech" - then they'll pick a few, refine them and go with the best one.
This had me thinking how could I apply this to features of my side project.
I am not sure if I can. The first thing that came to mind was a set of micro services that provide some feature. These micro services would be composed into a UI using some type of bandit algorithm
Very similar to how I design a game for Ludum Dare. Of course, I do this in the first hour after they announce the theme.