Before this class, I thought game design was going to be really complicated and hard. I am relatively new to computer science/programming, and I thought making graphics was going to be tedious and technical. There was this cloud around video games for me- I love them so much and have been playing my whole life, but I have always been under the impression that putting one together is this abstract technical thing that I would never have the skills to do.
When I was younger one of my parents used to joke that I should just quit school and go play video games for a living. I thought that this was the best I could do- always just a player, not smart enough or sciencey enough to make one of my own. I never tried because people told me it was not for me, that it was too hard.
This class slapped me in the face. #wakeupcall! I could not be happier about my experience. Not only was this weird illusion of what I thought it meant to be a gamer shattered, but a new door into a creative world of life and games that I love was opened. I have always been a creative person, but up until this class I hadn’t practiced any art because of all of the other more “important” things on my plate. This class gave me the opportunity to fill a blank page again, and reminded me that that is my favorite thing in the whole world to do. I learned that creating games is not a crazy technical gorgon- you just have to play and test and play some more, which is something I definitely can do.
The concept of play testing honestly was the most important class concept to me. I would have never expected to learn so much about how to have fun and that there are actually methods for creating fun. Critical plays and analyzing the mechanics dynamics and aesthetics of games and how they created fun were assignments I actually looked forward to. In my work I was constantly asking my friends to come over and play and I just watched them. I think an issue I had in user testing in previous design classes was that I was just too involved because I couldn’t really recognize feedback. In this class, the feedback we were looking for was having fun, which to me is pretty easy to see on a person. I think I vastly grew as a testing moderator, creator, and designer.
The most challenging thing for me in this class was turning on the creative juices all. the. time. I have never spent longer staring at a blank page just to jot three things down and then scrap them all an hour later. Creating puzzles with very limited mechanics in my final project was HARD. Crazy respect for the designers who make hundreds of puzzle levels in singular games with limited mechanics- I am impressed. Learning the coding side was actually the easiest part of this class. Coming up with a design for the space of our game was also a major task. How I ended up finally getting it right: I tried in vain over the course of three days to plan out what it would look like without actually drawing many of the pieces- I tried to get the layout before anything else. That was a huge mistake. I ended up creating the best draft when I only had three hours left before I had to turn it in to a checkpoint. I just started drawing items that I knew were going to characterize the world, and once a good chunk of them were drawn I just flung them around on a page until it looked right, and THEN I created the structure when the vibe was right. I am curious as to if this was just the best method to create my particular game, or if there will come a time when I actually will need to learn how to plan things.
I want to continue game design, or at least give it another try. This class has opened my eyes to a world I always thought was out of reach. I want to continue to refine these skills that I have learned and expand my gaming umbrella. I will continue to play test new games- I learned there are so many out there that I never would have thought to play that I NEED to play. Thank you Christina and teaching team, this has been my favorite class at Stanford so far.
