The outline I drafted up went like this:
o Meeting Intent
o First and foremost, everyone needs to enjoy themselves!
o This is a good way for us to experiment with a brainstorming process we haven't used before
o Forming Teams
o Everyone draws a slip of paper from the pot
o Everyone is paired up by the slip
The slip determines the group - A, B, C, etc.
The slip determines a person's number - 1 or 2
o If there is an odd number of people then one group will have three people
o Generating Concepts
o Everyone jots down two concepts on two slips of paper
o Those two concepts are put into a pot
o Each team of 2 pulls out four concepts from the pot (2 each)
o Putting the ideas on the board
o The 1's put one of their team's concepts on the board
This generates a number of columns
o The 2's put up an idea onto board
This concept cannot go into their teammate's column
o The 1's puts up another idea onto the board
This concept cannot go into the original column or the column their teammate placed their concept
o The 2's puts up an idea onto the board
If all columns have had ideas placed in them by their team, then the 2 can place his concept wherever.
If there are any remaining columns where his team had not placed a concept, he must select one of them.
o Taking Ownership
o Each column is assigned a designator
o Slips of paper with those designators are put into a pot
o Each 2 reaches into the pot and grabs a designator
o Their team is now assigned that column
o Making a Premise
o Each team has 10 minutes to answer the following questions (so short paragraphs)
What is the look and feel of the game?
Describe a defining game mechanic in the game.
What is the key selling point?
o Presentation
o Each team presents their idea
o All of the other teams provide feedback
o The teams record everyone else's feedback
Including myself there were six of us there (half of the people at our location). It was slow to get started (namely waiting on pizza and for one of the guys to show up to the meeting, which we wound up grabbing someone else to replace him), but once we got started everyone seemed to have fun. We spent about an hour on this and came up with some weird game concepts. The groups of ideas that each of the three pairs wound up working with were:
* revenge, ocean, computers, drinking
* jail, rhinos, adventure, ink
* zombies, island, crayons, open world
The guys with the last one couldn't figure out how to include crayons, so they suggested that the game ship with a pack of crayons. I pointed out that the boxart for the game could be line-art and that people could use the crayons to color it in.
In any case, hopefully this will inspire you to try something new with your brainstorming processes. We all had fun and I'm going to have another session next week to try to take our basic concepts and turn them each into a 1 page sell sheet.
