Before this class, I thought about game design exactly how we immediately learned that we shouldn’t think about game design, starting from the mechanics and hoping that makes for the dynamics/aesthethics I sought. Reading the MDA paper early on was really influential to my learning since the framework is very human centered— you think about your user (player) first, what you want them to feel, and consider how you can evoke the desired experience. During the first class when we were asked to make tic-tac-toe fun for Stanford students, all I did was add a layer of familiarity to the game (e.g. instead of X’s and O’s, you could play as Christina + Nina, Jerry Cain, or Chris Piech), which didn’t actually change any mechanics, and, consequently, failed to enhance the aesthetics. Also, from a creative perspective, I remember feeling very stumped, and I didn’t understand what I was meant to do. As I worked on P1 and P2; however, I grew a lot of confidence in what makes for good game design. I found the sketchnote content to be particularly helpful in terms of learnings that I could apply to P1 and P2. I had a ton of fun creating my own games. My team had great success with our P1 game. Our playtesters absolutely loved it, so much so that they asked us to send them the print-n-play and they played our game on their own time. I’m glad that P1 was very graceful and really emphasized us just learning where do we even start when creating a game. I felt that made the transition to P2 much smoother as we now had enough of a foundation to dive into creating a really great game for P2. I also really loved that I got to go digital with P2, and I had so much fun in doing so that it made me consider pursuing game development further, even if just as a hobby. I definitely want to take CS 377G, along with the other 377 classes, and CS 42SI, a new course rumored to be offered next year that teaches students all about game engines. I had so much fun working in Godot and learning how to make my team’s ideas come to life. Also, considering the concept of my team’s P2 game, it made for such a fun ideation and development process. The time and effort we were dedicating to our work was serious, but the game itself was so unserious, and it was so fun to think about how we could make our game feel further and further unserious, all the while there was a lot of cleverness, intention, and thought being put in behind the scenes to achieve this unserious dynamic. I found myself staying up late working on P2 not because I had to, but because I was genuinely having so much fun building it. I really do love to code, so I was really happy I got the opportunity to do that in this class with a focus on honing my design skills and knowledge. I also loved being able to playtest other people’s games. The people in this class are so creative and talented, and it was really cool to experience people’s creations. Finally, the CA lectures + Alan Cheng guest lectures were so awesome. I learned so much from these, I was genuinely so intrigued when they were lecturing, and I found myself integrating these learnings a ton into P2 + my critical plays.
