I think the biggest change in the way I think about game development after having taken this class relates to how I think about working with teams. Prior to this class, I had only ever done prototyping with one partner, with the exception of a three-person side project that died within a week. Having the class framework forcing me to stick with group projects for longer allowed me to gain a better understanding of what working on a team can be like in the slightly longer term. I got to find out what it was like to work on a group project that I didn’t care about, with P1, and then on a project I cared deeply about, with P2, and I think that both of those experiences have given me a deeper appreciation for what’s possible when working on a team. I used to write off developing with a team as almost more effort than it was worth, before, but now that I’ve seen how well it can work when people are covering each others’ weaknesses and everybody is competent and contributing, I’m much more positively inclined towards the idea. Certainly, I learned the value of advocating for my vision for a project in the early stages, because it can be hard to become invested in somebody else’s vision. (I seem to recall that some of the first words spoken in our initial design meeting for P1 were me saying “let’s not do an improv game.” Guess what we ended up doing.)
Beyond that, I worry that I came into this class with slightly too much experience in game development to really get much out of it. I ended up feeling like most of the class was just introducing taxonomies: types of fun, types of narrative, types of player; my favorite lectures were the ones where we learned concepts instead, difficulty curves for example, but even then I was already familiar with most of it. The sketchnoting concept seemed neat at first, but it quickly became a drag, and doesn’t seem to have helped appreciably with retention.
As far as the games in space stuff went, most of that ended up simply manifested as backseat developing for our level designer to try to make sure that mechanics were introduced simply and players weren’t hit with a wall of difficulty. There are less opportunities to apply design principles when you’re only doing the programming, but I did my best to share insights and make sure that the content I contributed was configurable for different difficulties and ways of engaging.
Honestly, I think one of the bigger takeaways for me going forward, aside from the teamwork stuff, is going to be focusing more on the concept of a target audience. It’s not something that I often consider when prototyping, but I see where my work could benefit from having a little bit more consideration for what types of people I’m designing for. Even when I’m just designing for me, making a cohesive and fun experience requires a level of intentionality that I think considering target audiences will help me attain.
