CS247G was one of the most fun classes I’ve taken at Stanford. The teaching staff is very passionate and helpful, the professor is knowledgeable and a great lecturer. The learning is smooth and entertaining.
I have always been interested in video games and played them a lot growing up but I have never delved into anything game development related. After making my own digital game with friends, I feel as if I understand what is happening behind the scenes in the games I like to play. Critical play taught me to approach games with a better learning mindset and working on the final project gave me an idea of what it would be like to work as a game developer.
In my memories, the concept that is always at the top of my head is the Kinds of Fun. Especially through critical play, I learned to look for the type of fun it invokes within its players. This experience gave me different insights when approaching design and code for the game.
Furthermore, the chapter about balancing was also very eye-opening. Watching out for potential imbalances in the game is a big time saver. This lead me to be more careful about my game’s puzzles and balance. My favorite types of games were definitely the narrative-based story games that did not have too much gameplay. However, for my final project, my team decided to do a puzzle and narrative based game. As someone who rarely plays puzzle games, I faced the challenge of making puzzle games. This is deceptively hard, as testing and balancing puzzles is extremely important. Furthermore, I had never worked on a game on the technical side s0 learning the game engine and language was quite a challenge too. I think I grew to be a better game designer after taking this class.
Next time, I want to try making an indie game from scratch and having it become the next big game. As a CS student, one of the areas I could improve upon is design and art. I want to be able to one day make an indie game myself.
