
The 100:10:1 method – the heart of my game design process - momo-reina
https://nickbentleygames.wordpress.com/2014/05/12/the-100-10-1-method-for-game-design/
======
trop
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-...](http://www.nga.gov/content/ngaweb/features/robert-frank/the-
americans-1955-57.html) 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.

~~~
vvanders
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.

~~~
hammock
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

~~~
ecdavis
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.

~~~
Someone
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](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/](http://www.tv.com/shows/fawlty-
towers/))

~~~
hammock
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.

------
erik
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.

~~~
xigency
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.

------
rednab
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/)

------
kriro
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.

------
rektide
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...](http://blog.fogus.me/2015/11/04/the-100101-method-my-approach-to-
open-source/)

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
Discussion on HN:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10513015](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10513015)

------
bluedino
>> 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
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?

------
diminish
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
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
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.

------
overcast
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
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
The road to success is paved with failures!

------
sleepychu
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
[http://www.peachpit.com/store/game-mechanics-advanced-
game-d...](http://www.peachpit.com/store/game-mechanics-advanced-game-
design-9780321820273) 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
Agreed, it's an excellent book. The Machinations tool is available here:
[http://www.jorisdormans.nl/machinations/](http://www.jorisdormans.nl/machinations/)

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mmcconnell1618
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
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/)

------
tmaly
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

------
j_m_b
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.

