Wee Irish like a good analogy. I don't remember where this came from, but along the way, I started thinking about my design process like I was planning how to build a Sandcastle that would house some mythical faction. It's now become a tool for me to teach game design to others. This thinking game helps me to mold a design around fixed stakes (requirements) from a client/stakeholder. Taking the absolutes, while matching them with the restrictions of your platform. Let's take a look.
Center yourself as a great builder.
You're faction has need of your skills and has requested your help to build a grand structure. They're not perfectly sure what they want right now, so let's try to dive a little deeper.
First off, how big is the box we can build in and where are the edges?
Is it square, large, small, is it a triangle, what is the base?
What required components of the castle do I need to fit inside of the box?
Is there two floors, five windows, a moat…
What requirements do those things entail
The Moat now requires a drawbridge, which is an added scope that was not explicitly defined. How do we factor that into our build.
What do these components look like in their best case scenario
Art-deco arches are what the client wants after user research.
The castle floors are massive to fit everyone.
How much time am I afforded to build the castle and refine the components.
2 days to make two floors.
3 days to cut the windows out,
From the scope of each best case scenario design, we refine to fit our time and tools affordances, while not cutting too much to lose the designs vision.
We don’t have a shovel, but we have a rake. How can we make that work for us to accomplish our goals?
Art-deco windows will take too long to create and will put us over budget on time, what other styles can we use? Are we able to do a lighter version of art-deco and either incrementally build towards our best-case. Asking how important is it really, that our windows are art-deco in the first place. Maybe there is a more affordable style that works to support our goals.
Is there any scope-creep that we haven’t accounted for in our original open design?
Now planning and execution
What are the supporting structures/components which need to be built first and how can we build a roadmap plan around this.
What are the P1’s the P2’s the P3’s, Cuttables etc.
Prioritizing working on those components so that we are not trying to build the master bedroom while there’s no floor and therefore it sits outside of the box for a long time and when we actually go to put it into the castle, we may need to make major adjustments as the design may have shifted in that timeframe.
Build against that roadmap
Always making sure that iteration and refinement of the core ideals are being made as we go in order to make the best version of our original idea based on the spec’s we defined originally.
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