Joaquin Final Class Reflection

Before this class, I thought about game design primarily through the lens of balance and customization. In every game I play, when I think about improving it, I think about tweaks to the class system or the perks or the weapons so that everything is equally “viable”. Lots of my game design experience was designing house rules for Catan and thinking about how I could remix the game to enable new strategies. While that’s still something that I really enjoy in game design and hope to do, I feel like this class has opened my eyes to how much a game is defined by things besides its mechanics.

In class, I was really forced to think about art, animation, and tone in relationship to target audience and types of fun. With P1, when I was working on Meltdown, I realized that a simple game could really thrive just because of its presentation, not its fundamental mechanics. When I first saw the idea – players working together to flip switches in the correct order – I thought we needed to reimagine it into a puzzle game or a more complicated tasks. After Em renamed the switches from  “red”, “blue”, “green” to silly names like “gurgle”, “wonk”, and “wowee”, it really changed my perception of the game. I realized that the game wasn’t made or broken by its mechanics, but by the experience surrounding its mechanics. The fantasy of being on a spaceship, of having music and art that creates that silly, chaotic cooperation, is enough to make a fun game. I learned that not every player wants a deep, replayable challenge that demands different strategies. Sometimes players just a want a fun, fantastical outlet. 

Here’s where I talk about MDA and Bartle’s taxonomy of player types. I had always thought about fun through the lens of challenge and discovery. I held up Call of Duty as the pinnacle of game design – fine tuning your mechanical skill and customizing your weapons and equipment to find unique combinations that matched your strengths (which fulfills the aesthetics of challenge and discovery). I was firmly a Killer/Explorer in Bartle’s taxonomy of players, and I thought every “serious gamer” was too. I was really shocked to find that only about 5% of players are Killers.

But through P1, and through critically playing a wider variety of games, I noticed that other aesthetics were fundamental even in games like Call of Duty. For example, the sense-pleasure of really vivid visual and audio feedback in call of duty is the same kind of sense-pleasure from playing a game like I Love Hue. The narrative that makes escape rooms more than just a series of puzzles is also what makes Call of Duty’s Extinction side mode a world that matters.
I realize that I still have clear preferences. I love games that let me customize my equipment and come up with different builds and playstyles. But I’ve also learned to recognize the other aesthetics that fill the environment of really good games.

In P2, my team set out to make a really ambitious project, with a dynamic hub world that grows as you progress, an intricate combat system with real time combat and different attacks, and a beautiful narrative that the player discovers as they progress. We quickly realized that 1. Our team did not have the bandwidth to do that, and 2. So, so, so many things go into making even one of those elements succeed. The biggest lesson I took away from P2 is that making a mechanic feel good takes a whole bunch of things. It’s not just about whether the mechanic is balanced; it also has to look good, sound good, give kinetic feedback, fit in with other mechanics, be introduced at the right time, be used in the right setting, take the right amount of time. And each of those things take time. I noticed this in every part of the project, but I thought about it a lot when it came to teaching controls. Teaching controls has to be intimately tied to level design. It has to be spaced out so the player isn’t overwhelmed and has time to get their bearings. It has to appear and disappear at the right times, so the player doesn’t feel like they’re being handheld. It has to sometimes not appear at all, so the player doesn’t feel like they can’t figure things out on their own. I didn’t have the time to do this in our project, but if we really want to be ambitious, it needs to look good too, to fit into the world visually rather than just being a plain text UI element onscreen. If it’s in the world, it needs to fit into the world narratively. For a player to feel like they really grasp a mechanic, it needs to be responsive. They need to have audio and visual feedback to know when they succeeded. 

So many little things go into making each part work. This course has really inspired me to view game development more holistically. Going forward, this course has made me want to spend time creating a very thin and very tall vertical slice this summer. I want to create a single mechanic: a really good, really satisfying punch. I won’t worry about backstory, or plot, or what happens after the enemy dies – I just want the punch to feel incredibly responsive, like the satisfying swing of the Nail in Hollow Knight, or firing a weapon in Call of Duty MW19. I want the visuals, sounds, and controls to all feel seamlessly connected. To do that, I’m going to have to really play critically, and look at all the elements that make combat click in other games at the nitty gritty level. But being in this course has given me the tools and confidence to do that 🙂