6 ms·

The 100:10:1 method – the heart of my game design process

246 points by momo-reina 10y ago

kriro 10y ago
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.
sleepychu 10y ago
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.
- hellbanner 10y ago
  http://www.peachpit.com/store/game-mechanics-advanced-game-design-9780321820273 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
  - kneeko 10y ago
    Agreed, it's an excellent book. The Machinations tool is available here: http://www.jorisdormans.nl/machinations/ http://www.jorisdormans.nl/machinations/
- stonemetal 10y ago
  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.
diminish 10y ago
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.
- sleepychu 10y ago
  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.
  - vkazanov 10y ago
    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.
  - hellbanner 10y ago
    See the history of https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgamefamily/13434/shibumi https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgamefamily/13434/shibumi - rules designed in collaboration with AI & human designers.
- reklawnos 10y ago
  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.
  - eru 10y ago
erik 10y ago
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.
- imarg 10y ago
  I think the www.onegameamonth.com folks have a different opinion on developing 10 prototypes in 12 months.
- BoysenberryPi 10y ago
  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.
- wingerlang 10y ago
  It seems easier, you could just have a bunch of papers with the intended action for board game prototyping. Video games needs .. more.
- panglott 10y ago
  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.
- 10y ago
trop 10y ago
This has some relation to the "Disney Method" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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-americans-1955-57.html 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.
- hellbanner 10y ago
  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.
- caseysoftware 10y ago
  > 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?
  - trop 10y ago
    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.
rednab 10y ago
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. ¹) http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~sgc/papers/browne_cig11.pdf http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~sgc/papers/browne_cig11.pdf ²) http://cameronius.com/games/yavalath/ http://cameronius.com/games/yavalath/
mmcconnell1618 10y ago
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.
- maroonblazer 10y ago
  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. [0]http://writersblocpodcast.com/ http://writersblocpodcast.com/
overcast 10y ago
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.
- gagege 10y ago
  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.
  - overcast 10y ago
    The road to success is paved with failures!
bluedino 10y ago
>> 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.
- dexterdog 10y ago
  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?
j_m_b 10y ago
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.
rektide 10y ago
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-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.
- nbaksalyar 10y ago
  Discussion on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10513015 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10513015
tmaly 10y ago
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

246 points by momo-reina 10y ago

kriro 10y ago

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.

sleepychu 10y ago

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.

hellbanner 10y ago
http://www.peachpit.com/store/game-mechanics-advanced-game-design-9780321820273 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
- kneeko 10y ago
  Agreed, it's an excellent book. The Machinations tool is available here: http://www.jorisdormans.nl/machinations/ http://www.jorisdormans.nl/machinations/
stonemetal 10y ago
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.

diminish 10y ago

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.

sleepychu 10y ago
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.
- vkazanov 10y ago
  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.
- hellbanner 10y ago
  See the history of https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgamefamily/13434/shibumi https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgamefamily/13434/shibumi - rules designed in collaboration with AI & human designers.
reklawnos 10y ago
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.
- eru 10y ago

erik 10y ago

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.

imarg 10y ago
I think the www.onegameamonth.com folks have a different opinion on developing 10 prototypes in 12 months.
BoysenberryPi 10y ago
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.
wingerlang 10y ago
It seems easier, you could just have a bunch of papers with the intended action for board game prototyping. Video games needs .. more.
panglott 10y ago
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.
10y ago

trop 10y ago

This has some relation to the "Disney Method" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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-americans-1955-57.html 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.

hellbanner 10y ago
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.
caseysoftware 10y ago
> 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?
- trop 10y ago
  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.

rednab 10y ago

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. ¹) http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~sgc/papers/browne_cig11.pdf http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~sgc/papers/browne_cig11.pdf ²) http://cameronius.com/games/yavalath/ http://cameronius.com/games/yavalath/

mmcconnell1618 10y ago

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.

maroonblazer 10y ago
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. [0]http://writersblocpodcast.com/ http://writersblocpodcast.com/

overcast 10y ago

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.

gagege 10y ago
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.
- overcast 10y ago
  The road to success is paved with failures!

bluedino 10y ago

>> 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.

dexterdog 10y ago
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?

j_m_b 10y ago

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.

rektide 10y ago

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-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.

nbaksalyar 10y ago
Discussion on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10513015 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10513015

tmaly 10y ago

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