Final Class Reflection – Luca

Games have always been around for me. They’re the shared activity that gets my family in one room, and they’re the ongoing reason I still talk to friends I’ve known for decades. The flip side of that, actually making them, struck me as something else entirely; a slow, technical grind that lived in a different universe from anything I cared to attempt. My day job as a MateSci PhD student keeps me knee-deep in lab work, which makes game design just about the least obvious elective I could have picked up for my minor. I signed up anyway, for one simple reason: I was interested. That was the whole pitch. By the end of the quarter, my mental model of games had been rewritten from the inside.

The scale of building a full game still gives me pause, but it stopped feeling like an impossible mountain somewhere along the way. The bigger surprise is that I enjoyed it. An engineering education tends to drill in carefulness and rigor, so being asked to throw together rough, intentionally “shitty” prototypes felt almost wrong at first. What I came to understand is that an ugly, half-broken build is the fastest possible way to figure out whether a mechanic works, and the payoff of nursing a scrappy idea into something people genuinely had fun with turned out to be enormous. Equally important was learning that the creative wildness and the productive constraints of design aren’t opposed; the constraints are what let the wild ideas actually become a playable thing. That click was when game design stopped being a class and started being a creative outlet I want to keep coming back to.

The readings gave me a useful vocabulary, but the lessons that actually stuck came from putting hands on real games. The critical plays were, without a doubt, the most fun part of the whole syllabus. There’s something addictive about pulling apart a game you’ve never played before and noticing exactly what its designer was trying to do, and noticing just as clearly the choices that didn’t land for me (I still think back to Monument Valley and the way certain transitions felt opaque enough that I had to slow down and parse them more than I wanted to). Those dissections seeped directly into my own work. I came away with real respect for everything designers handle out of sight: onboarding that teaches without condescending, narrative scaffolding that quietly hides repetitive loops, the careful sorting of primary versus secondary architecture. These days, when I sit down with a game purely to unplug from research, my brain refuses to stop noticing the choices being made under the surface, which is honestly half the fun now.

None of that growth happened cleanly. Godot was the wall I kept running into for the second half of the quarter, and getting past it took a lot of stubborn late nights with the engine open, scripts that wouldn’t compile, and documentation tabs piling up faster than I could close them. At some point the gears caught. Opening a fresh Godot project no longer feels like the start of a battle; it feels like a workspace I actually understand. The shift that matters more, though, is in how I see myself. I used to be a person who played games. I’m now a person who knows, in concrete terms, that I could build one. My eye for design choices has gotten sharper, and the Sketchnotes assignments have nudged me a small but measurable step toward being able to draw, though I would not push that claim very far.

I doubt I’ll keep developing the specific game my groups put together this quarter, but messing around with engines over the summer is absolutely on the docket. With a window longer than the six-week sprint we were working under, I’m genuinely confident I can put together an experience that other people enjoy as much as I have enjoyed playing my favorites. I walked into this class on curiosity alone. I’m walking out as a game designer (sort of ahaha).