Stone Librande’s 2013 GDC talk “Simulating a City, One Page at a Time” chronicles an experiment: run the entire SimCity (2013) design — pre-production to ship — using only one-page documents. He expected it to fail; he wanted to find out why. It mostly worked.
The one-page paradigm:
- Replace “design bible” docs with a single page of diagrams, printed and displayed physically to build team buy-in
- Forces clarity early — messy multiplayer trading mechanics were cut before resources were wasted on them
- Even spreadsheets got the treatment: consolidated, color-coded charts posted around the office
- The “design fairy” habit: “don’t rely on people to come to you… if you really have something important to say to your team, you need to get it to them”
- Failures counted too: bespoke printed magnets were delightful but time-intensive; a card game was “too cute” to work
The payoff was longevity. In postmortems years later, diagrams from 3.5 years earlier were still valid and in active use.
The takeaway is that documentation is communication, not storage: a design doc pinned to the wall beats a wiki nobody opens.
Still relevant today — the writer teaches the method to game design students at Berklee, and indie devs sketch the same one-pagers on Miro.