I really like games. Making tons of weird games on scratch as a kid is what got me into programming and my whole life path so long ago. So its always been something that I knew I enjoyed but it had sort of faded out of my life, became something that I loved but didn’t really engage in. I would do a Ludum Dare every few years but never felt like I ever had anything good enough in my head to actually put enough effort into.This class gave me the space to make something that i was proud of again. I always feel like I never really know how to properly put myself into the things I make, or how to come up with something that might be meaningful to me, so I think it was good for me to be just forced to brainstorm something in 10 minutes and then make it, and I was surprised how well it worked.
I also hadn’t ever done much of any formal game design stuff before, I definitely thought about it more as something where I’d randomly get ideas for stuff every once in a while but not apply any formal processes for coming up with stuff that would actually be good. While the readings felt dry at times I’m definitely glad I was exposed to almost everything in them. The content about what makes puzzles fun and specific things that ruin them was super cool to see, and even just being able to articulate better why something is fun is probably important to be able to do. Seeing lostgarden.com gave me strangely visceral flashbacks to being like 13 and obsessed with making games using the free texture packs that the site had (while ignoring all the game design articles on it), and I’m glad I ended up back there eventually.
This was definitely one of the most challenging classes I’ve had in terms of group work, just because there are so many different skills required and so many different parts of the project to balance. I definitely feel like I got better at all the normal little things in working on a team, but also at new more complicated ones, like ‘we have limited time and can teach this person either blender or unity but not both, how can we figure out which will be most complementary to the teams existing skillsets’. This class really made me feel like I could have fun making games again. I’m currently procrastinating writing this reflection by both rendering a final cutscene and editing the dialogue for the game i submitted, so I’ll definitely be continuing to work on it (and will hopefully get some of my teammates to do so too).
