I do something nearly constantly every day that I think is just normal. But, it occurred to me that maybe everyone else does not do this, or maybe they do, I don’t know. I take stuff to an extreme to help put the reality into perspective. What does that mean? Do I go get a dirt bike and launch myself off ramps to understand game balance? Nope.
What I do is this, if I have a simple thing like health of an enemy, what should it be? Say it is 50 now, and he feels too weak. If I just add 10 would that help? how about 20 would that help? this could go on for a long time, but I am searching for a cap where he is just right. Instead of doing that, my first step is always to do something like this, what if it was 50,000,000 would that help?
What did I just do? You say 50,000,000 is probably always too high. Probably always too high isn’t good enough for me. How about 50,000,000,000 would that help? Now we are talking, the odds of that not being too high are very slim. So what does this do to our thinking? Now we have a range. somewhere between 50 and 50,000,000,000 is the correct answer. Now you can binary search for it at a faster pace than just trying to get it right by guessing.
I do this in every problem I am trying to solve, from business, to game development. Try it out, take a situation to an extreme, then usually the correct answer is simple to find.
EXTREME!!!! I had to yell it once. 🙂
