Growing up, I rarely played video games but played some card and board games here and there. In fact, I was scared to start playing video games in case I got addicted and end up “wasting” a lot of hours. So, I wasn’t sure if I should take a 247 class focused on game development if I didn’t feel as passionate about playing them. But I’m so happy and grateful of how much I’ve learned in this class, especially the skills related to digital game development which was very new and exciting to me. Also, the class times where we played a lot of board games were one my favorites! I’ve never tried building a game, besides some Scratch block coding in middle school, so learning how to use Pixen to draw pixelated objects and Godot to build a fully-functioning game from scratch was very fulfilling. Also, through the critical plays, I was exposed to a lot of diverse games most of which I’ve never heard of before, so that made me a lot more curious and excited to play more games in the future, especially the ones focused on narrative world-building and social interactions.
At first, I was a little intimidated by the idea of building a whole digital game from scratch when I had no experience with game development and previous lectures weren’t focused on technical aspects of setting up a game on Godot or other game platforms. But luckily, we had some experienced game developers in our group who introduced the technical aspects at the beginning and I asked a lot of questions in order to learn the technical part of it and still have a lot to learn in terms of the complex coding parts of game development. I learned a lot about creating maps, characters and adding physics and coding interactions components to the objects which ended up being pretty relaxing to create.
Also, our team decided to create a game filled with puzzles, fighting monsters and uncovering story plots. Initially, I couldn’t wrap my head around how to build a story plot around a combat-heavy, interactive game that also involves intellectual puzzles. I was used to games that were single-dimensional such as candy crush with no story plots and only levels or games that were solely based on uncovering riddles and clues without much interactions with different characters to progress the story forward. So, seeing how our group progressed our game to incorporate three different aspects of interaction in our game was very eye-opening and fulfilling to reflect back on. I also found sketch noting to be really fun as I got the hang of it. It felt very time-consuming at the beginning since I wasn’t used to drawing figures portraying different emotions, but I definitely want to incorporate sketch notes into my notes in the future to add more interactions and color to my learning.
I know in the future, the technical skills such as GitHub, Godot and design thinking process would be very useful throughout my career in tech. I also want to incorporate the soft skills I learned such as communicating and designating tasks within a team and ideation skills into my future work. Going forward, I hope to play a lot more games, especially social games that bring people together, and maybe even introduce my friends to the 247 games I created during our hangout sessions.
