Before this class, I thought about (play, and game design) like having everything coming up at once and relying on whether the designer is gifted or not. Previously, my understanding was that a good game could only be designed by great and creative people, and once starting with a good idea, the game could be designed excellently. Through this class, I realized that there are formal processes to start from nothing, and even though I feel like I am not a creative person, our team still managed to build the games! Even for gifted people with tons of ideas, it would still take time to test them out and proceed carefully.
I did these things and experienced these learnings. I think although there are lots of concepts in the later part of the class, I think a lot about the formal elements as they seem to be the starting points of everything. I believed that those concepts gave me well-rounded ideas of where to start and are our games complete or not. For example, in both of our P1 and P2 games, our teams always started thinking about the player types, goals, and procedures as they provided us with great guidance for designing. I also enjoy the concepts about the balance of the puzzles. In P2, we struggled with and spent a long time and multiple playtesting just to see whether our puzzles were fair enough and whether they did give the aha moment to the players.
I think the main challenges that I faced in the class were how to be creative about what the game could be and get started with Godot. I think I am personally not a creative person and am more focused on logic and facts. It surprised me how creative other students are with their sketch notes or mindmaps and I felt behind of them just because I did not have those ideas for design. However, the part that I like about this class is about even though people do not start with creative or brilliant ideas, it is always possible to improve through testing and iterating. This made me relief a lot and helped me learn how to bring the logic and reasoning part of me into the design process. It is also a bit stressful for our P2 team to develop the game through Godot as none of us have experience with it, and at the same time, issues about collaboration, such as merge conflicts, remain similar to all other collaboration coding projects.
I grew through the two projects, especially when practicing the concepts. With Project 1, I practiced and grew a lot in the game design process. For example, I practiced more about the game design process, even including pivoting our game during project 1. I understood the importance of playtesting as we learned a lot in every playtesting on how our games were and such feedbacks usually differ from what we perceived. In Project 2, I learn more about the challenges of developing a digital game. Luckily, the coding language that Godot used does not differ a lot from other programming languages so I was able to pick them up quickly. I think I learned more about how to actually develop the game in Project 2 and matches what I want to learn from the course.
Next time (or, if I keep working on my games), I think that I will be much more confident in game design compared to where I was before this class. I think even though I am not that creative compared to the other brilliant game developers I found it does not mean that I can not be a great game developer!
