I wanted to start by saying, easily one of my favorite classes at Stanford! I’m such a huge video game enthusiast, and not only do I love playing video games but I’ve also always loved the idea of making my own. In the past, I’ve made small 2D pixel-art fighting games, or arcade style gacha games. At the time, I really enjoyed “the grind” of making a game from scratch. But my approach was definitely very rough. Whatever cool character or asset or element of the game popped into my head pretty much immediately then went into the code to then be realized in the final game. It made making my own games very personal, but the final products never really felt “final”.
That’s exactly what I decided to take this class, and I can honestly say I got exactly what I came for. I know now that the game design process, like anything, can and should have a system. Sure, acting on creativity can be chaotic, but I now know that brainstorming things can be streamlined. Things like the ideation process, sketchnoting, make game models, and much more have shown me that it’s best to channel that endless creativity into tangible steps with an intended direction. If I were to make the P1 and P2 games our groups made before I took 247G, the game narratives and dynamics would not nearly be as flushed out and smooth as they ended up being.
One concept that really stood out to me was sketchnoting. To be honest, I’ve actually always been the guy to never really take notes or have a calendar, because I’m naturally really unorganized in my workflow. Of course it’s not ideal, but I’ve never really found a productive method to organize my thoughts. But sketchnoting really opened my eyes to a new world! The process of writing down any and all thoughts, no matter how small, onto a nicely designed notebook really helped me collect all my thoughts about a reading or topic I was thinking about. I also think the past ideation/organization methods I’ve tried never really stuck with me Not only was the writing aspect super helpful, but also doing the drawings and colorings made it honestly fun to do (which I never thought I’d say before this class lol)
As for some challenges, I think one thing I found really difficult was coping with the fact that not everything in a vision can be achieved. What I mean by this is since we were with a group, we could come up with a strong theme, character design, the music we wanted, etc that we wanted in our game. Of course, none of us were professional musicians or artists or sprite makers, so naturally we just pulled a lot of things from different sites online. And this was challenging at first since because of this, our game looked a bit all over the place in theming. And even if things did look put together, it still felt “rudimentary” since instead of having a perfect NPC design for a psych ward inmate (part of our game) we instead just had to get a random character from online.
But of course, this is normal! And I grew to realize that’s part of the fun/beauty in making a game from scratch with friends.For future game design, I’m definitely going to use a more streamlined brainstorming process with sketchnotes and models, and I’ll be sure to communicate well with any groups moving forward. Thanks so much for an amazing class and quarter!
image is my partner Ian during playtesting!
