Games have been an important part of my family life since I was a kid. Over the pandemic, my dad and I even tried to make one, but we didn’t really know where to start and it never happened. I knew that a lot of people were making games and publishing them, but how they were doing that was such a black box that I was intimidated going into this class. I wanted to know how to do it, but I wasn’t sure that I would be able to create a game as well as others who have more experience than me. I could discuss mechanics and interactions as well as any other gamer, but I wasn’t sure how that knowledge would translate into the design side of it.
This class has really helped me look at the game knowledge I have and figure out how to reverse it to form a designer’s perspective of a game. The critical plays were definitely hard for me, but they really challenged me to not take things in a game at face value. I had to look under the hood and think about why the pieces fit together to form the final game as a whole. I think I learned a lot from that process and I hope to be able to continue to play games from that perspective in the future. I think the concepts that will stick with me the most are the ones we most worked on with the games we made, such as: how to make a quick and usable prototype, what game architecture is and why it’s important, creating and testing puzzles, and level design and distinction. Each of these concepts challenged me and required me to articulate my ideas and critiques in understandable and clear terms that the whole team would understand.
I was particularly challenged to reframe my experiences and understanding of games in order to figure out how they were made, as well as use that knowledge to create interesting and engaging gameplay. It was also often hard to work with others to combine our visions of the game into something we all liked and thought worked well. Games are often very personal and can be wildly different experiences for different people, so trying to reconcile that with the intended goal of a game and the feeling we want to evoke was a difficult (and exciting!) experience. The short timeframe of both projects also made this class rather challenging, as it can be very hard to test enough to get a good feeling of your game and the problems and opportunities it might have. I think I grew as a teammate, learning more about how to express my vision for something, and discuss it with others while working to make something all of us were proud of. That’s a broad skill set I think I still have room to work on, but it’s especially important for creative projects such as these, which really forced me to step it up.
In the future, I think I will really try to slow down the process (not possible in this class unfortunately), and try to make decisions with sound thought processes and clear reasons behind them. I feel like the short timeframe often made it difficult to really be certain of the right direction for a game, and could make decisions hard to rationalize clearly. I definitely also would like to learn more about game platforms and coding for games, as we had to specialize a bit to get the game done on time.
