Before this class, I mainly thought about visual style being the most important for game design; I often tended to focus more on things like character design or world-building, and the overall aesthetic and feel of a game. I still find these things important, but I feel like now I appreciate a lot more of the complexities that go into game design, like thinking about game mechanics, narrative, and even things that seem small but are actually really important, like how to make a good tutorial for your game. It was also interesting to think about how to think about analog games too, because I usually associate “gaming” with digital games but there’s a lot to unpack with analog games as well. Something I learned a lot about, especially through the final project, was how to think about level design. Since our final project was centered around 3 puzzles that were meant to increase in difficulty, we had to think about how we could make our puzzles challenging without being too frustrating and how we could ease the player into our puzzle mechanics throughout the game. Through our playtesting, I learned the importance of introducing game mechanics early on and easing the player into it throughout the game, so that they’re not thrown for a loop when they get to the puzzles. Something else that was challenging but rewarding during our final project was learning a new software, since we used Godot 4 to develop our game. I had never used any game engine software before so it was definitely a new experience and I had to do a lot of personal research to figure out how to put our ideas into practice. I felt proud of our team for putting in the effort to learn a new software and I think the end product managed to capture our vision quite well, even though none of us were super familiar with game development beforehand. In addition, something that was fun to experience was thinking about how the narrative of our game could inform the actual gameplay and mechanics. The reason we decided to go with a boulder-pushing puzzle was because our game takes place in a cave, so we were trying to think of ways to incorporate the environment and narrative into the puzzles. I feel like when I play games now, I’m more appreciative of how the game-makers mesh together both puzzles and gameplay so that they make sense together, rather than just having puzzles for the sake of having puzzles. One last takeaway from working on the final project is that I had a lot of fun working on the audio and sound effects for our game. I appreciated Amy’s lecture on how sound design can have a huge impact on a player’s experience, and worked hard to find audio that would fit with the mysterious yet whimsical vibe of our game. Overall, this class taught me not only how to work together with others to design fun games, but also how to have a deeper appreciation for games that I experience as a player too. I feel more inspired to try different kinds of games now and think about how the different mechanics and decisions contribute to my experience as a player.
