Before this class, I have made an escape room and **kind of** designed one board game and one mobile game. I knew that I really enjoyed thinking of those and making them, but I never really iterated on them all that much. I had some idea in my head and I put it out there, and then just kind of left it alone. I never thought too critically about how to take my projects to the next level. I also assumed that I didn’t have the talent/skillset to make something really good, so I didn’t feel much motivation to iterate and expand on these projects.
This class has me thinking about game design in a completely different way. The biggest theme of the class that I hadn’t really considered is how games are human-computer interaction. It’s been fascinating and gratifying to explore the similarities between CS147 and this class. One of my favorite parts of CS147 was showing strangers paper prototypes, observing how they interacted with it, and using those responses to iterate our Figma. I am so grateful that this class allowed for so many playtests. It really showed me the value of getting constant and consistent feedback on a project, and I’m excited to take these lessons with me outside of just game development.
Despite my enjoyment of playtesting, while I was happy to change small things as a result of the playtests I found it hard to let go of certain ideas that I had. Specifically, for my board game, I wanted to create a dense and complicated scoring system to keep the scoring consistent across different groups of people. It took me far too long to accept my teammate’s suggestion of getting rid of that mechanic. It wasn’t until a high fidelity prototype where the players read what I thought was the best possible wording of an explanation that I finally came to believe that it really was too complicated of a scoring system. But that same playtest showed me that the scores were far from the most important part of the game, as they loved actually playing the rounds, interacting and connecting with each other. It took me a long time to realize how sacrificing complexity in service for easier play and social mediation was the best possible move forward, but when I finally saw it, I was happy to sacrifice the idea I held on to for so long.
I also didn’t see the value of games and play as clearly as I do now. I thought it was primarily something used to entertain and pass time, but this class has helped me understand how truly deep and profound playing is. The concept of a magic circle, a setting where you can be fully emotionally invested in something that has no real world consequences, will stick with me forever. Play allows people to dig deeper into relationships and maybe even themselves. It’s so corny and dramatic to say, but I genuinely believe that play helps us be more in touch with the human experience.
I also found that I really really enjoy level designing. At the start of our P2 project, I mentioned to my team that I was interested in level design, and they graciously allowed me to be the level designer. When I started, I had so much fun coming up with clever puzzles just by sketching stuff out on my iPad. I learned a couple of things pretty quickly–you need to know what mechanics you have to work with before seriously designing levels. For all of the subsequent levels, I created them by first playing around with the controls and mechanics that my other team had previously created. As I saw these come together, ideas popped out from the mechanics themselves. I also learned from the first few levels that my instinct is to make hard challenges. The first level I ever came up with involved many intricate steps which would take a while to complete. The second level required some innovative thinking and some real dexterity for the player. My teammates who had more experience playing games were very clear with me that these levels were too hard, and if the whole game was like this, it would not be fun. I am deeply appreciative of this piece of advice, and it completely changed how I approached the rest of the levels going forward. I focused more on having one key “aha” moment in each of the challenges, keeping them short enough so that you never lose too much progress, and ultimately ordering them so the players are eased into the mechanics and the dynamics they eventually combine to create.
I would absolutely love to continue level design in the future. Creating these levels was pure fun. Seeing so many different people play through the levels was extremely entertaining and gratifying. Being able to question my assumptions and see where they went wrong, and being able to do something about it so quickly and effectively, was so truly rewarding. I don’t know how my future might involve game development. Before this class, I wouldn’t have thought that I would be trying to find a new outlet for game design at the end of the quarter. But my experience in this class, developing two games that I’m genuinely proud of, has realized that I have this itch that I want to continue to scratch.
