I enjoyed my time in CS377G: Serious Games and particularly appreciated the project-driven course design! Through building three separate games (and meticulously refining one), I learned to craft a variety of educational game experiences. In this class, I contributed to the following games:
- Fish Reproduction (a systems board game about ecosystem resilience)
- AI Judgment Day (an interactive narrative web game where a player convinces a chatbot they are worthy of living)
- Catopia (a Unity game where players attempt to expand their empire of cats through training, hunting, and befriending all the cats in the land!)
For P4, I contributed material finishes to AI Judgment Day, including a custom wooden box and a two-color 3D-printed gameboard.
Before I took the class, I had three areas of weakness: digital game-building skills, understanding of game systems, and knowledge of mechanics to improve learning outcomes through games. By learning sketchnoting, Unity, 3D modeling and printing, laser cutting, and numerous conceptual frameworks (most notably MDAO) for the first time, the experience of CS377G helped turn these weaknesses into strengths that I will carry into any games I design in the future.
A large area of growth was understanding the mechanics, systems, and thought process behind designing a “serious” game. Although the frameworks seemed tough to apply in practice at first, through the process of building a game, I quickly noticed how useful they are. For instance, it greatly helps to stratify a game into its MDAO subcomponents. Understanding how certain mechanics may create dynamic advantages for certain players can fine-tune the balance of a game. Thinking about the aesthetics in tandem with the outcomes is also meaningful. For Fish Reproduction, I constructed the graphic design to be simultaneously visually pleasing and inviting but also information-dense and authoritative so that players can have fun while playing the game while also understanding and retaining the facts conveyed through their playing cards.
I also enjoyed the reading about narrative architectures. I recall that the author presents a conflict between ludologists and narratologists regarding how to design the architecture of a game and concludes that the average designer should take ideas from both sides — considering environmental storytelling, evocative stories, agency, and melodrama to create emergent narratives. I internalized the idea about agency, which is why my P2 was a somewhat unconventional narrative game. In AI Judgment Day, rather than the player being told who they are and their backstory by an exposition, I chose to immediately plunge the player into a conversation with the AI and have the AI ask them what their backstory is. Through this mechanic, many emergent narratives came up, which were interesting to see: some players would introduce their true background, while others would entirely fabricate a background they thought was most likely to placate the AI. Overall, the conceptual frameworks I learned in this class helped motivate and inform my design decisions on each of the assignments — so thank you for the fantastic readings!
Another area of growth was becoming a more capable game builder in the engineering sense — getting my hands dirty in Unity, Blender, Twine, and more. I came to this class with the misconception that programming games would be relatively easy. This quickly changed, especially as soon as I touched Unity. During this course, I learned Unity for the first time, built a couple of games (not submitted to this class, but a Flappy Bird-like experience and a shooting game), and ended up building the splash screen and initial versions of the fight screen for the Catopia game. To go from zero to somewhat proficient in a week was a whirlwind experience!
I also learned Blender and Fusion 360 for the first time to model the 3D gameboard for P4: Fish Reproduction. 3D modeling similarly turned out to be quite difficult, and Blender is an especially confusing piece of software (so many keybindings and buttons)! For learning all of these programs, I realized the best approach for me is to watch a 10-hour YouTube tutorial while following step-by-step and then make my own project. I soon learned that Blender is not the best for modeling exact measurements (as my gameboard required), and that Fusion 360 is better, so I learned it too. The most difficult aspect was taking a huge topographical map file of the Great Barrier Reef (130MB!) and slicing the objects in Fusion 360 so that the surface of the gameboard would match the surface of the reef. For this, I got stuck and ended up needing to phone a friend — my roommate, who is a mechanical engineer and fluent in Fusion. Watching him complete this step and add the piece dividers into our gameboard showed me how far I still have to go. All these pieces of software have so many keybinds and tricks; the ceiling is quite high.
Finally, printing the piece was fun — using a two-color massive printer at Lab64 for the first time, then heading over to the Makery to help the team with designing the final box and assembly. Overall, I feel like a much more proficient designer in a technical sense now, with fluency in both digital and physical game engineering.
When I design games in the future, I will be more confident in both my technical ability to execute on creating the game and my design ability to craft a thoughtful game that is not only satisfying to play but also meaningful in the outcomes it promotes. Thank you for an excellent quarter!
