final class reflection! by aribarb

I was a bit scared when I first took CS247G because I have never been much of a gamer. I enjoy board games, but I have never been good at video games, and a lot of other games, especially those involving social deduction, always scared me a lot. And before this class, I thought of play and game design mainly in terms of what was fun or aesthetically pleasing. I appreciated well-designed games but didn’t have a vocabulary or framework for why something felt good, fair, or immersive. I didn’t really approach any games with a designer’s mindset. That changed drastically over the course of this class.

This quarter, I immersed myself in the full lifecycle of designing for play, from analyzing games critically, to brainstorming mechanics, to iterating on feedback, to actually building interactive experiences using Godot. I played and analyzed games like Secret Hitler, A Short Hike, Factory Balls, Yahtzee, The Scandal, and Pokémon Emerald, among others, trying to understand what created tension, choice, satisfaction, and surprise. And I had fun! These critical plays were transformative for me. They made me realize how intentional good design is and taught me to enjoy new games. My gameplay of Secret Hitler, for example, changed my entire perspective of social deduction games, and how the dynamics of teams competing against each other create fun. For example, having to pass more policies to win as a liberal was a design decision rooted in the fact that there are more liberals, so this evens out the playing field and gives both teams a more fair chance at winning! I fell in love with it and am no longer anxious about the stakes of social deduction games as a result of it. 

Whether it was the illusion of control in Yahtzee or the personalized immersion of naming Pokémon, I started to see how every choice affects the player and what things do or don’t work. I became deeply interested in how games balancerandomness and skill, how mechanics reinforce narrative, and how aesthetics influence tone and accessibility. The MDA framework (Mechanics, Dynamics, Aesthetics) helped me talk about design in a structured way. I also loved our class’s emphasis on iteration. I knew from CS147 that it’s okay, even necessary, to get things wrong, as long as you observe, revise, and keep testing. But while making these games, I got to feel out this process with projects that I was so much more emotionally invested in. It made me realize how much I love design and want to continue doing it!

I got to use these skills while working on P1, a social deception storytelling game called The Truth Consortium that we designed outside of the digital space. It combined elements of hidden roles, emergent narrative, and collaborative play. Players took on the roles of “truthers” and “traitors” within a cult-like organization, with the goal of uncovering (or obscuring) secret agendas. This game helped me explore the power of ambiguity, social tension, and group dynamics in play. I learned how important it is to balance structure with freedom, giving players just enough constraints to spark creativity, but not so many that they feel railroaded. Designing Secret Society also taught me a lot about facilitating player behavior without explicitly scripting it, a skill that translates beautifully to both analog and digital games.

Then, I got to implement what I learned into a digital space in P2. My team made a surreal, psychedelic hockey platformer called Microdoze, set in a freezer. I had never used Godot before, but with the help of YouTube tutorials, my CAs and my teammates helped, I grew so much technically and coded indispensable parts of my team’s game. I learned how to create animated UI, detect and react to collisions, trigger scene transitions, manage game state across levels, and implement damage feedback through visual effects. I spent many, many hours with my team brainstorming what we wanted things to look like and what our mechanics should accomplish and then figuring out how to make it all happen in Godot. Those hours taught me so much. Now that the class is over, I can say with confidence that I can program a game from scratch using Godot. Besides the technical stuff, I experienced real design challenges. I had to make tough calls about what features to scope down. I realized that just because something is funny or clever in my head doesn’t mean it translates well to players. Playtesting was humbling but invaluable. Some people didn’t know how to pick up the puck, or they missed the humor I thought was obvious. That taught me that design is communication and that miscommunication is the designer’s responsibility to fix, not the player’s fault.

I grew a lot in confidence this quarter, both in my coding skills, but in trusting my instincts as a designer! I became more comfortable with ambiguity, more curious about player psychology, and more excited by the idea that games can tell stories and evoke feelings in nontraditional ways. I also learned how to give and receive feedback that made my work not just more polished, but more playable. Next time I work on a game, I want to push myself further into systems thinking. I want to prototype faster, test more often, and pay more attention to how players actually move and feel in my games rather than just what I intended. I also want to keep using Godot, especially now that I’m no longer scared of it! This class demystified a lot for me and made me feel like someone who’s interested in games and actually capable of building them.