Final Class Reflection — Esaw Adhana

In a nutshell, I think this class taught me that there is so much that goes into making a game beyond literally making it (if it’s a physical game) or coding it (if it’s a digital game). Before this class, I thought of game design as being a very linear start-to-finish process where you think of an idea, then implement it, then test it, then tinker a bit, and then publish. By contrast, I think the sheer amount of playtesting we did showed the importance of constantly testing throughout the process, swapping things out as you go, constantly going back to get user’s thoughts/feedback. As a more universal statement, I think I learned just how much back-and-forth tinkering/balancing game development requires and how ideally this is spread out continuously throughout. In both P1 and P2, I think I was challenged in that there were a lot of concepts that we thought were going to be well-received, but then when we tried them out, we realized we had to shift dramatically or scrap it (particularly true in P1, having to scrap some categories of our team’s category naming game, or adding a skip-turn mechanic). Focusing now on P2, I (as well as the rest of my team) had absolutely *no* digital game development experience under our belts, so we were really just throwing ourselves in the deep-end with a rather ambitious idea in my opinion (which we realized was harder to implement only in hindsight). I would have thought that our coding experience would have helped more, but it was truly a whole new world we had to adjust to. I had to grow in shifting my way of thinking to make Godot work how I wanted to, and I was encountering bugs that I never thought would even be something that I had to consider (like collisions being so finicky…). In designing the two games but also in my critical plays, my mind kept going back to the MDA framework. At face value, it’s simple, but I like the “What is it? What’s its direct effect? What’s its grander impact/vibe?” structure it has where we almost build out larger on the effect of a designer’s choice. Something as simple as including/not including a timer can completely reframe how a game makes a player play (and feel). For my team’s P2 game, the concept of having many things going on/being almost intentionally overwhelming was a mechanic, but we tried our best to make sure it wasn’t too overwhelming. Next time I work on a game or just any real project where I am making something for users, I think I will continue thinking about this idea of “playtesting,” where I create an MVP and immediately reach out to users for feedback. I think I now understand the importance on reaching out to others here because your idea might be great/understandable/easy-to-use, etc. to you, but the only way to know if it is to others is to have them try it out.