We eventually got into the habit of placing a number of unrelated requirements into each area then doing our best to come up with a rational way to fit them tog

We eventually got into the habit of placing a number of unrelated requirements into each area then doing our best to come up with a rational way to fit them together. Often, by the end of the session we would find that the initial idea wasn’t nearly as interesting as all the pieces we built around it, and the structure we had designed to explain it actually worked better without that initial idea. This is so very true! As weird as it sounds, creativity thrives on constraints. Think about all the wildly imaginative classic games. How many design decisions were made because of the NES' dedicated tile-engine hardware? How many clever enemy variants were derived from methodical planning around limited ROM memory? Your brain simply can't processes the entire spectrum of all possible thoughts. Pick some arbitrary constraints and you're suddenly much more productive of great ideas.