Before entering this class, I already considered myself to be a pretty knowledgable gamer. I have been playing video games since as far back as I can remember, starting with Nintendo’s GameCube. Growing into adulthood, my love for gaming has only increased as I’ve taken an interest in playing most major game releases every year. To be fair, I’m not really a computer gamer though, and I feel like that’s a whole another world. But either way, I didn’t think too much about a game’s design as I played it and focused more on whether I enjoyed it or not.
I found a lot of the material from class to be really interesting, but I think what stuck with me the most was implementing a narrative into a game and the many ways that developers can go about it. I started thinking about my own favorite games and I’ve come to realize that my favorite type are single-player and narratively driven. For instance, The Last of Us Part 2 is basically just a really long (and interesting) movie that has snippets of gameplay in between scenes. On the other hand, Hollow Knight doesn’t really contain cutscenes but contains many artifacts and characters that let the player know about the history of the world (and it’s up to the player to interact with them). Thus, I wanted my own game to have an engaging story that would engross players.
However, the main challenge I faced was making puzzles that fit with my team’s project. See, we were making an Escape Room in a Box and therefore wanted to make puzzles that were difficult enough so that players would spend a decent amount of time on them. And although we really liked our puzzle ideas, we would sometimes struggle to come up with reasons why our players were doing the puzzles or how the puzzle connected with the story as a whole. Thus, it took us many trials and lots of brainstorming to come up with compelling premises that supported our puzzle designs as well as their objectives.
Overall though, I mainly grew in the way that I perceive what “play” is. I feel bad because I don’t remember who mentioned this, but someone during lecture brought up the idea of how play doesn’t actually have to mean playing games. We play games by simply bantering with our friends or performing reoccurring bits with the individuals in our lives. And through this form of play, we connect with each other, which I guess seems pretty obvious now. Still, it was cool to think about how play evolves when we grow older.
Next time, I would love the opportunity to improve the narrative elements of my game. Again, I’m really into escapism and just totally throwing myself into a world that’s different from our reality. Therefore, I would want my next game to build upon what I already learned in this class to create an experience that immerses my audience into a super interesting story.
