Serious Games: A Reflection
I entered CS377G excited about the things I was going to make, both on my own and with others. After playing analog board games throughout the first couple of classes, I knew there was no chance that I would be dropping this course. (Then I witnessed a ton of other people dropped the course and was thoroughly shocked.) Although I’m extremely interested in developing games, the busy quarter systems typically prevents me from being able to embrace my creative side. CS377G was definitely a LOT more than CS247G in terms of projects, but I’m happy that it gave me the motivation to accomplish three short projects within the span of ten quick weeks.
In the course, I solidified a lot of the concepts that I’d learned in CS247G, such as the four Es of narrative architecture, narrative arcs and loops, ludology and narratology, and MDA analysis (as well as the additional O)! The core difference in this course, I felt, were that lectures were much more fine-tuned towards specific goals. I appreciated the variety of games we were tasked to create, being an educational game, interactive fiction game, and systems game. Each game posed its own unique challenges with the constraints we were given. (I will now proceed to write about my experiences with each project.)
In P1, I developed Heartland with Ngoc and Sebastian, where I created a game that educated people on the struggles that farmers face from day-to-day life through a simulated crop-planting game amidst governmental and natural events. Although it seemed easy to design an educational game that would also be fun for a general target audience, this game taught me that these two don’t easily go together hand-in-hand. Often, when we tried to make it more educational, we had to significantly tweak the game’s onboarding or switch up the mechanics to make the game more fun to play. This made me appreciate the fact that simple “gamification” can’t fix anything; game designers are much more than people that add a random layer of information on top of a pre-existing system.
In P2, I developed Wild Space, where I had to start thinking about storywriting. As a person who has developed many games in the past, most of which are focused on mechanics rather than narrative, it was difficult to come up with a convincing plot that would evoke emotion in a target audience. In the end, I eventually settled on making a furry dating simulator under the guise of a game that wasn’t a furry dating simulator. Although I don’t think I got the dating components right (I played a lot more visual novels over the break and got a lot more ideas after-the-fact), it was a rewarding experience and fun to see how playtesters reacted to my surprise. Thinking about how to make certain choices feel meaningful, even when paths eventually converge to a single (or very few, if multiple) endings was a challenge, and kind of killed my perception of various “branching path” games that I’ve played online in the past. Playing others’ games at the end of making my own also showed me a lot about the creative potential of games as a medium for storytelling. Additionally, because this was a one-person project, I learned a lot about self-pacing and completing a self-structured timeline by a rapidly-approaching deadline. I also worked a lot with external artists (who I paid for assets) to get the game looking snazzier so I could focus on learning the Yarnspinner library in Unity.
In P3, I developed Stayin’ Alive with Leyth, Krystal, and Ngoc, where you play as a Stephens’ Kangaroo Rat trying to survive in an unknown world. We had a decently large team of four, which meant that although we had a lot of hands on deck to help with assets and programming, we also had to streamline our workflows to ensure that we didn’t step on each others’ toes. Through Leyth, who is an exceptional programmer, I learned a lot about co-working in the Unity Engine and following better transparency and architectural practices to reduce frustration later on in the development process. (Spoiler: I continued to work on this for P4, and it became very unwieldy with how it was coded up initially.) Through implementing the complex mechanics of this systems game, I learned a lot about the A* pathfinding algorithm and game balancing, especially because there were many economy systems in the game that were dependent on each other. If you ate all of the grass, the rabbits would die out, leading the coyotes to hunt you down from all the way across the map (after hitting their critical hunger threshold). As someone who hasn’t really expressed much interest in representing real-world systems, it was fascinating to turn ecosystems into a video game. Similarly to P1, it felt like I had to find a compromise between an accurate representation of the system and a fun game. From how our playtesters reacted to our game, I’d say we did pretty amazingly on this front!
Then, I proceeded to work on Stayin’ Alive for my P4 refinement project with Leyth and Krystal. Refinement was a fun task, but we quickly discovered how unoptimal our game was after adding more new features such as the Knowledge menu. We spent quite a lot of time fixing bugs and figuring out how our Unity project could have memory leaks, when supposedly C# handles its own garbage collection. I’m really proud of what we were able to come out with after these challenging few days; our bond grew much stronger as a team trying to fight these issues together. (We’re even thinking of making more games together in the upcoming quarters!) Thus concludes my ten-week journey in CS377G!
When I go to make more games in the future, I will keep in mind that making video games isn’t only about making something that is fun. Coming into the class, I thought of games as a medium for sillyness. But now, I see video games more as a medium for behavior change. (I wish I could take CS247B if I didn’t have to teach a course. :C) It’s cool to see how you can make people voluntarily engage in something that ends up shaping their own behavior, and I definitely want to take this idea further. MDAO was a really effective concept for me in making me think of games as more mission-first.
I’m also looking forward to develop more games in Christina Wodtke’s independent study! Even though I’m sure everyone is saying this in their final reflection, thank you Butch and Christina for making this course so memorable. Much more memorable than the end-of-class slides.
