Before this class, I thought about video games as something I never had the time to play! As a busy college student and someone who didn’t grow up playing video games, this class was a great introduction to the intricacies of video game design.
I come from a background in comics and animation, but I’ve never properly tackled implementing video games before! Learning about game development concepts like level design, MDA, and tutorial design were the core class concepts that stuck with me. Iterating on my sketchnote abilities every week helped solidify these concepts while exercising a type of play in drawing comics and storyboards! Moving forward from this class, I’ll bring sketchnoting into my daily lecture and reading review routine. After learning about tutorial onboarding through the Plants vs. Zombies Lecture, I became fascinated with how I can best introduce the player to a new gaming experience while striking a balance between challenge and guidance. I implemented what I learned through the onboarding of my group’s P2 project, where I helped spearheaded the introduction of core game mechanics and controls in playtests.
Another thing I learned through this class was the different creative experiences in the game development pipeline. In P1, my group created a physical card game “Duck Duck Goose: Reducks”, which I helped draw the assets and graphic design for. The project was a crashcourse on Figma and rapid prototyping. In P2, I transitioned to a more technical role as an RPGMaker Game Developer. While RPGMaker substantially helps with the game development process, I found ways to grow as a programmer by incorporating my own scripts to customize our game’s user interface.
Some challenges I experienced where part of the narrative and game economy side of game design. While storytelling structures can be similar across mediums, I found that embedding stories into games to be a challenging hurdle. Through collaborating with my team and section (shoutout Annie), I learned how to incorporate core game loops and arcs in between story scenes to connect the story with the gameplay.
Overall, I grew in substantially creative ways through this class! I was able to meet a variety of talented people across all parts of the game development pipeline and got to learn about my own strengths as a game designer. Next time I develop a game, I want to experiment with incorporating my computer graphics coursework to learn how to develop 3D games in Unity!
You had a wonderful team, and your art was terrific! It’s funny as something like illustration can be so crucial to the game experience. I agree that getting narrative to really work in the context of a game is challenging, yet it’s so satisfying when it does. And I hope some of the ideas from the class get into yoru comic practice!