Before this class, I had already had some insight into how play and game design worked from taking CS 377G with Christina earlier on. While a lot of the core concepts were the same, this class showed me how expressive and important game design can be. 377G is about designing serious games, so a lot of the design concepts are the same, but I sometimes felt constrained by the idea that the games had to teach something, or have some important underlying message. In this class, I started to realize the art in designing video games, and the need for games that might not have any meaning at all.
In creating two different games, I found that the game that we turned in was rarely close to the game that we had brainstormed at the beginning of the project. Through iteration and playtesting we would change our games so much that they were almost unrecognizable from the games we had come up with. In P2, we thought we were going to create an escape room in a box, but we ended up with a 3-level board game. Even though the prompt for the assignment was level design, we ended up with this party-style board game because of the feedback we got and brainstorming that we did. We were able to take this and still add mechanics of level design, but we still had no idea that we were going to build something like that.
There are a lot of challenges in game design, and for the most part the design process was so shortened that there weren’t too many difficult challenges. However, there were some challenges with game balancing, specifically in P2 where I still don’t think we got them completely right. It’s easy to come up with 5 different ways to balance your game, but it’s hard to choose the one that you think will balance the game the most while still keeping the gameplay fun. It’s also hard in this way sometimes to keep the game that you want, versus what the playtesters want. Sometimes its hard to determine what feedback is necessary to act on, and what feedback is helpful but would change the game too much from what you want. As a game designer, you want to create something that is yours and that can express the idea that you had in your head, but also needs to be fine tuned so that people will enjoy playing it.
Overall, I feel like I gained a lot of insight into what it means to design games, and I am really excited to start making games on my own. Building and playing games is super fun, but sometimes it can be hard to fully buy into the enjoyment of it in a class setting when you have other classes to balance and things to do. I’m really excited to see what kind of fun I can have with just doing this as a hobby and maybe one day a career, and I’m really grateful to Christina and the rest of the teaching staff! (Shoutout Amy, who was also my TA in 377G)
