Before this class, I thought about game design as a way to create something for others to play and enjoy. It wasn’t something that I thought would be interesting, and mostly just thought of it in the context of online games.
It was a lot of fun to actually design games, and with a great group for the second project, the game design process was very enjoyable. Creating puzzles was really interesting and finding the best way to weave puzzles together in order to create a full fledged game was an iterative process as well. On top of this, it was fun to play around with the narrative and story building for the game including using tools like letters and physical objects in order to create the mood of the game.
Through playtesting and iterating based off of the playtest results, I learned the importance of choosing a target audience and designing for that audience, not designing and expecting an audience to find it interesting. Thankfully, our group was the audience that we were designing for. People with a background or interest in CS and crypto were the target audience, which our group fell into the category of. This made the game creation and working on each of the puzzles a fun process instead of a tedious one, which it could have become.
We experienced challenges such as trying to come up with unique game mechanics, and making sure I was presenting an enjoyable experience for the players. Through this class, I grew in the way of understanding the game design elements, and how they all come together to create a successful game. Next time, or if I keep working on my games, I will make sure to take into consideration all of the different elements, and use the playtesting to understand the audience’s experience.
Overall, it was really amazing to see our game come together and come to life. We used a lot of physical objects, so it was rewarding to see and touch and physically interact with the game that we designed. The final playtest that we ran was with a group of my friends whom I had wanted to show the game to since the beginning. They told me that they had a lot of fun completing the game and had very little constructive feedback to give. It looked like they were having a lot of fun while playing and all really got into the game which made me very happy.
