Before 247G, I thought games were just about fun. You make something clever, people play it, laugh, maybe compete a little. I didn’t think there was much beneath the fun. I definitely didn’t think game design was emotional—or that it could be a way of sharing something cultural, personal, and real.
We didn’t just play games—we analyzed them. We felt the awkwardness of bluffing, the tension of miscommunication, the joy of collective discovery. And for the first time, I realized: play is not surface-level. It’s where people take risks, reveal parts of themselves, and build shared meaning. Games can do what stories, books, and even conversation sometimes can’t. They can create moments that feel true.
Then we started working on Yu Gong: Prologue.
I had grown up with this myth of Yu Gong, the old man who tried to move a mountain with his bare hands, passing the task down to his children and grandchildren. It was absurd. It was inspiring. And it felt so familiar, in ways I hadn’t fully unpacked until I tried to turn it into a game.
The idea was simple: a group of mythological characters—Nezha, Tie Shan Gongzhu, Erlang Shen—join forces to climb the mountain and storm the heavens. But the mechanics weren’t simple. Translating myth into movement, tension, collaboration? Hard. Making players feel that intergenerational weight without dumping a wall of text? Even harder. And then came playtesting.
I genuinely didn’t expect playtesting to feel so vulnerable. Watching people struggle to understand the rules you thought were “clear” is brutal. Hearing feedback on a mechanic you were proud of—and realizing they’re right, it’s clunky—hurts. Sometimes I wanted to skip testing altogether and just tweak things in isolation. But 247G pushed me to test early, test ugly, and actually watch how people played.
It paid off. Every time someone misread a character’s abilities or asked, “Wait, who’s Yu Gong?” I had to think harder: What am I assuming players know? What do I want them to feel? The design started evolving from “how do we make this playable?” to “how do we make this feel like legacy, like persistence, like myth?”
The class taught me frameworks—MDA, kinds of fun, narrative structures—but what stayed with me most was the idea that games are language. They can communicate without saying everything out loud. They can hold tension and history in a single mechanic. They can carry cultural stories without flattening them for outsiders. Yu Gong wasn’t just a game. It was an act of translation—between generations, between cultures, between players.
I didn’t grow up thinking I’d make games. But through this process, I’ve started seeing games as a medium I want to keep using—to reimagine myths, reinterpret folklore, and invite others in, not as tourists, but as participants.
I’ve also learned I don’t have to explain everything. Sometimes, I just need to make a system and let players live in it.
Next time, I’ll prototype sooner, trust confusion more, and design even more unapologetically from the stories I know. Because those stories? They’re already playable. I just have to dig them out.
