I really enjoyed the class overall! I’ve been very interested in game design for a long time (since the beginning of college, honestly, if not since the end of high school as COVID got started), but have never found the momentum or impetus to learn a game engine or start designing a game by myself. I’ve definitely thought a lot about the balance of games and what makes a game “fun”, though apart from a card game I helped my friend design and balance during junior year of college (which was actually pretty successful!), I haven’t really put those thoughts into practice.
I think before this class, my main thoughts on game design were much more informal, and I think were rooted much more in trial and error than any sort of formal element analysis (e.g. types of fun); they kind of boiled down to changing numbers or mechanics until things felt “fair”. After all, in a lot of games that I play (e.g. League of Legends), where the framework for the game has already been laid out, the majority of continued game design does tend to be balancing. Honestly, to some extent, I feel like that still feels more natural to me. I have somewhat of a hard time imagining the developer of a random hit game (maybe an indie game) considering all these formal elements, when the most obvious way forward that I would assume they follow is simply to tell a good story, and worry about the game mechanics and elements later. While I tried to include more thoughts on the formal elements, especially in project 2, ultimately I still ended up doing a story-first approach and just fine-tuning the obvious mechanics to fit our needs.
One challenge I experienced was the gap between imagined design and actual design. I think, especially for project 2, my initial vision of the game was very different than how it turned out. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing – I think some of my teammates have much better artistic skills than I do – but it is definitely frustrating to have a very clear vision of what you want your game to look like, only for artistic or technical shortcomings to make your game appear very different than how it originally was meant to be; it almost feels lame or a copout, in a way. That being said, I think I definitely learned more about what it takes to go from an imagined idea to an actual game, and the amount of work that it takes to make a mechanic “feel” good and how to make in-game obstacles synergize with that – we even had to experiment with details like walking speed to change the feel of the game, for instance.
In future games, I’ll definitely put more thought into the interactions between mechanics and player fun; one thing I realized while designing my games was that what I find to be a very satisfying, elegant, or deep mechanic from a developer’s perspective might simply not be that enjoyable from a player’s perspective. This is maybe a “kill your darlings” moment, where you simply have to let go of what you personally like in a game that may not fit the game from a player standpoint, but it’s definitely something that I have learned to have a better sense of throughout the course of the class, and it’s a valuable lesson to learn.
Overall, thanks for a great quarter!
