Before this class, I didn’t know there could be theories for game design. I didn’t think about the architectures, types of fun, or any other aspects of game. I imagined creating a game would be thinking about a plot, then implementing.
The concepts of this game are not difficult to understand at first glance, but really absorbing everything into games we created could be challenging.
For the second project, in the level design, we changed the puzzle design several times, each time we realized another thing mentioned in class sometimes. For example, at the beginning, we had multiple mechanics for our spiritwood. Later, we realized the learning curve thing, and creating too many mechanics at the beginning could be confusing, then we converged to a single mechanic.
One thing I really stuck is the sketchnote. I don’t like drawing at all, and I enjoy the simple design. For example, for website design, I’m a huge simple HTML webpage fan, rather than a fancy website created by modern tools and UI like VUE. Similarly, in terms of learning, I’m a huge fan of writing important points down, rather than drawing. So this part of the class really drives me crazy. I had to spend more than 6 hours per week on those drawings, but normally still got 85-95 out of 100.
I experienced a lot of challenges in project 2, mainly the technical points. I’ve never used Unity before, but in p2 my team decided to use Unity. Even though I was willing to learn, I still felt nervous about it. There were so many small tabs in Unity Editor, and many terminologies that I could not understand, so at the beginning, I felt desperate. Especially when the other members of my team are all very great artists, and they’ve created very nice pixel arts, but I was not able to produce anything, I felt bad about it. But then I spent a lot more time on the project, and finally figured out something about Unity, and managed to finish some aspects of the game.
Another thing making me feel my growth is that, I’ve tried creating the BGM using Garageband. Before this class, I only composed pure piano pieces with slow and melodic lines, but the tune for our game is lively, and it would be boring to do a completely piano BGM. So I downloaded Garageband, and watched several tutorials for it. Even though there’s still an obvious music contour, I’ve tried adding different instruments to mix with it, which I think is not bad.
I hope to continue working on the game. I will learn more Unity skills and create more pieces for the game. Currently we’re using online music for the beginning and ending, and I hope to replace those two pieces.
