Final Reflection

When I first joined this class, I thought that making games was pretty easy, to be honest. I am a self-professed lover of games, but I really only understood them from a simplistic perspective – I couldn’t really see why people geeked out over games as much as they did.  The games that I have played are ones that I’ve always seen as basic, whether it was board games like Coup and Secret Hitler, or video games that seemed  pretty basic plot-wise (Mario Kart, Pokemon), if they even had a plot (many sports games I loved didn’t), and so thinking about gaming from a narrative / analytical perspective, I couldn’t really see anything that made it particularly special.

What was really cool, then, was that immediately within the first couple of weeks we went into games and concepts that ran the gamut, from mechanics, dynamics, and aesthetics, to bluffing games, to walking simulators and beyond. The act of critically analyzing games, especially in comparison to the sketchnotes and readings we were doing, was just so awesome because it allowed me to interact with such a wide variety of game concepts, ideas, and stories told through the perspective of gaming. I don’t think I would’ve ever played a walking simulator if it weren’t for this class, and yet coming out of it I’m hooked on Journey, one of the best games I’ve ever played so far.

Moreover, what I think is really cool about this work is that we were immediately able to push it into the games that we were working on. Whether it was using the principles of social games to finetune our Ladybug game, or creating a Unity game (without any prior Unity experience!) using things that the creator of Plants vs. Zombies talked about when designing levels, I felt as if I could literally see the work that I was doing in sketchnotes and critical plays come to life in our projects. 

By far the hardest part of this class for me was coding in Unity. C# is not an incredibly difficult language, and my familiarity with other languages helped, but it was really difficult to understand how movements occurred, how to write and attach scripts, how to load in assets, etc. I am so proud of how I was able to learn Unity, and I’m pretty confident that I could make another game if I ever needed to, which is really awesome!

I think if there is a next time for making games, I would love to have more time to think through design decisions regarding my games. Even for a slice like our team did in the second game, there were a lot of choices made that we would’ve loved more time to test out, especially in terms of narrative-building. A part of me wishes that our group started out with that first, versus the mechanics first, but time constraints meant that mechanics had to be prioritzed. Still, I am so incredibly proud of the games that my teammates and I made and the knowledge I’ve gained, and I’m happy to join the game-loving world – I’m hoping to geek out alongside all of them over the next cool game to come out.