Final Class Reflection — Amaru

I’ve always loved games. Video games, board games, card games — I’ve been hooked since birth. However, I never really thought of myself as a designer. Sure, I’ve played games critically before, reflecting as deeply as I can on their themes and messaging, but I never played them from the designer’s viewpoint. All this changed this quarter, and it reminds me of one of the first videos we watched in this class where we were told “once you start playing like a designer, there’s no going back.” Even with the games I’ve played outside of the critical plays in this class, I’ve struggled to go back to playing without that designer’s lens, picking apart distinct formal elements, kinds of fun, and thinking through the different playtesting and iterations that needed to take place for whatever game I’m playing to have reached its current state.

Throughout this course’s critical plays, I tried to pick games that I had little to no familiarity with so as to avoid letting my personal biases seep into my writing and to focus on the critical aspect of the review rather than just playing the game as I normally would. However, on rare occasion I would replay an old game, and I’ve realized that playing like a designer has given me the ability to replay my favorite games from scratch. 

One such case was my Monument Valley critical play. Monument Valley is an incredibly important game for me — as a kid from a low-income family, I wasn’t able to afford dedicated gaming consoles or a gaming PC. I was forced to whet my appetite for games during the short computer lab sessions and board game days in grade school. However, my mom was gracefully gifted an iPod touch by a wealthier friend when I was in junior high, which I would occasionally be allowed to use and always use to play games. There was a lot of mobile game slop on the App Store even then, but I vividly remember getting lucky one day and finding Monument Valley for free on the App Store and playing through its entirety in one sitting. 

I never knew I could feel the freedom and wonder I experienced going through that game again, but somehow through 247G I rekindled that magic. Every interaction with the screen, with each puzzle, with each NPC felt brand new and even more purposeful than before. Feeling that a game is good is something, but knowing why is an entirely different thing that I would’ve never experienced without this course.

Through this course I’ve also grown a lot as a designer. As mentioned earlier, I never really thought of myself as someone who could make games — how could I, without the visual or aural arts chops that popular indie devs have nowadays? However, through both projects and all the playtests in this course I’ve realized that designing, playtesting, and iterating are some of my absolute favorite things to do. I would often dread playtesting days, stressed that we hadn’t made enough progress to justify another playtest, but even the smallest of changes would have positive feedback and gave me the confidence and energy to keep pushing and improving our game for P2.

Although our P2 wasn’t exactly what I had envisioned from the start, I’m incredibly proud of the amount of work we were able to get done with such a short group in such a short time. The three of us went from not knowing Unity at all to adding all kinds of movement, platforming, and camera scripts to make the game fluid, difficult, and fun. I would like to continue working on this game to realize its full potential, and if I do I will continue playtesting and thinking critically about why each element of the game exists and how to maximize the joy and fun created by our game.

I can’t thank the teaching team enough for all of the work they’ve put in to make us feel like designers and to help us through every step of the way, supporting us wherever we needed it. Special thanks to Christina for helping with elevator pitching and scoping down, Haven for Unity debugging and getting us thinking about narrative, and Ellie for being the best section leader and the most ardent supporter of our game despite the roadblocks we experienced.