I regard myself as a veteran gamer with several thousands of hours of gameplay across a variety of games, including Cities Skylines, Kerbal Space Program, Civilization VI, Minecraft, GTA V, etc. I have also dabbled in game development in Unity before taking this class, making various tiny projects just to see how coding a game works. But taking this class made me think of game development not from a programmer’s perspective, i.e., “How do I make an idea happen in the game engine?”, but rather from a designer’s perspective, i.e., “What are the characteristics of game ideas that would be captivating to the target audience?”
I think the critical play assignments prompted me to think about gameplay experience in a more analytical fashion, especially when combined with the tools we learnt to dissect the design of games, such as MDA. I became better at identifying the good and bad designs in games I played as well as thinking about how it can be improved upon. This also helps a lot with playtesting, where we can dive deeper on mechanics or other aspects of the game that the playtesters felt unsatisfactory.
Collaborating on projects was the most challenging part of the game. Making and shipping a finished product, especially a digital one, involves so many moving parts and things to coordinate that good teamwork practices are mandatory. I’m glad that in both projects that I participated, everyone was communicative and contributed their fair share of work. It also took time for me to come to terms with the fact that the scope and narrative of a game will shift over time as more collaboration and playtest inputs are integrated into the game, but in the end we delivered designs that were so much better and richer than the initial ideas we had.
I will keep doing solo gamedev as a hobby, but this course really helped me to grow as a designer instead of a programmer or a technical artist. It also made me realize the importance of playtest, as it is important not only to gauge if the product is fun for players, but also to find the right target audience. I will do more prototyping and playtest in future projects to better integrate player feedback in earlier stages of development.
