Before
When I imagined game design, it was always in the context of long term live service or AAA video games: the type of games that require legions of developers, designers, writers, artists, musicians, etc. working on one project for several years at a minimum. These games are designed with revenue models in mind, like gachas, loot boxes, skins, and the like, which makes sense since they cost so many resources to create (That doesn’t change how scummy some of the tactics are though).
Class Concepts
The class concept I remember the most was the types of fun. Personally, I’m not a fan of rigid classifications, but as far as categories go I think the types of fun are good guidelines for generating ideas about how you want players to feel about games. I preferred it much more than the player classification exercise we did in class, since player classification felt more detached from system design than the types of fun.
Implementing Class Concepts
Since we had to make a puzzle-ish game, one type of fun was already set in stone. Adding the narrative gave us a second dimension and second type of fun. Realistically, much of the time we spent was on implementing the game rather than designing it, since we only had a few weeks for each project, so I don’t think I was able to more deeply connect course concepts to the game we made.
Challenges
I don’t see myself as a designer at all. I really dislike being in creative roles so having to do so much design work for creating and playtesting games was something I was dreading going into this class. It wasn’t as bad as I thought but also not as fun as I hoped, so overall an average experience. I think having teammates to bounce off of helped to improve the experience since the creative workload wasn’t entirely on one person.
Growing
Just like Ratatouille, I realized anyone can design. Do I think I would ever intentionally enter a design-focused role? No. Never. But if for some reason a designer in my company wanted help from a new grad software engineer, I would take a look at their work and I’m now confident I could give decent feedback.
Next Time
Next time for me will probably be CS 347. I think after finishing this class, my third of the 47s series, I should have enough design skills to be a valuable member of whatever team I’m assigned there. Beyond college, I’m not sure I’ll have the opportunity or desire to pursue more game design but if I were I think I would be able to draw back on what I learned in this class.
