Before I took CS377G, I knew nothing about game design. Like many people, I had played my share of digital and board games, such as Catan, Animal Crossing, and Minecraft. I thought that good game design required creativity, clever rules, and strategy, but the path between ideas to actual, playable games was quite murky.
I would divide my learnings in this class into theory and application. Through the class readings and lectures, I learned about basic concepts of game design, such as MDAO, information design, writing rules, game balance, and games as a medium. Additionally, I saw how these concepts played out in existing games by playing them in class. I felt like I got a ton of exposure to new games, especially interactive fiction, which is a genre I’ve never really played before. Specifically, I really enjoyed Super Dark, Ticket to Ride (Evelyn and I purchased it after class), and Papers, Please (made studying for my midterm difficult). These were useful to kickstart my imagination for my own games, where I felt like the most growing pains and learning was experienced.
Personally, I’m the type of person who learns the best through doing. Our P1 game, American Dream, had a nice concept, but we started with many components and a complex game from the start, with the goal of representing immigration super accurately. This led to us having many cards, phases, actions, and rules, which made our job difficult because we had to keep track of the many rules / pinpoint what to fix and the player’s job difficult because they had so much to learn and remember while playing (not to mention, the playtests would take forever). Additionally, we were inexperienced at conducting playtests, finding the key insights, and adapting our game accordingly.
By our P3/P4 game Not On My Block though, we had a better strategy outlined for creating a strategy systems board game (our P1 was technically a systems game too). We started with a theme in mind, which was gentrification, but we decided to start by making a very simple game (just placing tokens to “win blocks”) and slowly add rules as we conducted more playtests. Our initial playtests were very fast, allowing us to quickly gather feedback and make changes. For instance, a critical change was changing the core mechanic of gentrifying from placing tokens to win a block to literally pushing Apartments off the board. Once we knew a change was successful from a playtest, we would incorporate it, refine it, and then playtest it again. Rapid, effective playtests were especially important for achieving game balance between the two different roles (Resident vs Developer), which was a crucial but difficult process. Our approach, inspired by lecture and the game balance reading, was to use our instincts to guesstimate a good range of numbers, and then playtest/adjust accordingly. This aspect of game design really reminds me of product management and other HCI classes, where you start off with an MVP, get customer feedback, and iterate on your product.
Our approach to playtesting also changed. We made sure to not talk during our playtests, except when players started playing the game incorrectly/were confused by something not on the rulebook. During the playtests, we took videos and wrote down specific timestamps when interesting events occurred, which made doing our write-ups a lot easier.
For our P4 refinement, it was also very fun to go to the GSE Makery and work on laser cutting our board and pieces. Our resulting game had a wood board, wood pieces, 3D printed meeples/Apartments, and packaging, which was very satisfying. Overall, I’m very proud of our P3/P4 game in particular. A powerful anecdote is that we had to really convince our 2 friends during finals week to playtest mainly our rulebook and just 10 minutes of actual playtime. They did not really want to play. However, they ended up getting really into it, playing the entire game, and arguing about optimal strategies afterwards, which is a great feeling as game designers.
I also wanted to discuss P2, which was a vastly different experience than P1 and P2. I felt like I was in a creative writing class, where my storytelling was the most important part. The two main things I learned from P2 was [1] finding which points to insert choices, and making those choices feel meaningful and [2] how to make the mechanics and visuals serve the story.
Overall, when I go to create games in the future, I will definitely incorporate what I have learned in this class. Specifically, I know the key to making a good game is to show it to as many people as possible, have them play, and go back to the drawing board and continuously improve it (HCI for the win)! I think this is one of the most (if not the most) time-intensive classes I’ve taken at Stanford, but the results have been truly rewarding – thank you for a great quarter!
