I remember vividly educational games from childhood. I particularly hated the reading ones. They were often awful Temple Run copycats that used popular cartoon characters to jump over silly obstacles and collect the correct letters to spell a word. I took this class hoping I could learn and practice how not to make a game like this. I’m very happy to say that my team’s first serious game was nothing like this!
I appreciated how the teaching team reframed serious games by emphasizing designing for fun. Thankfully, we were encouraged to not sacrifice learning along the way by being given methods of assessment for our learning objectives. This helped us design ways of making learning visible as we made our game. I was also grateful for the running dialogue between classmates and the teaching team; I felt better equipped in tracking how our learning objective was changing as we further iterated on our game.
Admittedly, as someone who primarily plays video games, I was apprehensive about designing a board game. I struggle with very complex rules; I often feel the more educational a board game is, the more complicated its rules are, which means it takes a lot more buy-in for me to even give it a try. I felt lucky that my teammates were well versed in playing board games. That meant they could use their experience to more accurately aim for that sweet spot between learning something tricky and having fun.
Our game Cook Off! encourages players to explore what it’s like buying food on a low budget, particularly with the goal to make balanced meals. We thought this was a very relatable dilemma for college students as they were firing out how to feed themselves well on little to no money for what might be the first time. Although I don’t know much about deck-building games, I found the experience of combining ingredients to satisfy certain requirements quite rewarding. I enjoyed seeing my classmates playtest our game, particularly once the game was more balanced and visually engaging. I thought it was funny hearing about how playtesters would try to convince the table that their wacky ingredients combinations were a good meal.
I am very grateful to have gotten paired together with such a strong team. We each had our own little niche that we brought to the group. But most importantly, each member had great chemistry. Brainstorming was always a joy, and each member communicated effectively about their bandwidth each day to work on the project. All of us went above and beyond in some capacity to make sure this game achieved its potential.
Moving forward, I want to gain more experience in using Figma. Prior to working with my group I had assumed Figma was only used for website prototyping. I see now that the tool is much more flexible. I hope to find the time and the right project to build this skill on my own.
