Final Class Reflection

Before this class, I simply now believe that I didn’t think deeply about it. The depths I went to for it were simply questions such as “Is it aesthetically pleasing?” “Is it fun?” “Is it cool?” I also leaned more towards game design as making decisions about what mechanisms or designs should be utilized as nudges to promote more user downloads or in-game purchases—my thoughts leaned more towards the psychology of economic profit companies utilize. In reflection, I think this is due to a lot of the readings and lessons I retained from CS 247b in my previous quarter with Christina. 

Although ethics came naturally to me in my approaches to this class’s game design, I have never consciously considered accessibility. Although there were many new principles I learned like MDA framework and Gestalt principles to name a few, the lesson that clearly stood out and stuck with with me as my team and I worked on our P1: High Rollers and  P2: Otowa Blues was considering if our game is accessible to people of different walks of life (i.e. color blindness, motor ability, gender etc.) In P1, I tried to consider color blindness together with my team by ensuring our analog board game’s tiles had color contrasts and different symbols that wouldn’t require our players to be able to tell what colors each tile or pieces were. In P2, we considered accessibility more implicitly—rather than through physical pieces, since our game was digital, we focused on the narrative’s accessibility. I implemented this together with my team by choosing a gender neutral name Rin for our player and ensuring our narrative conveys a story anyone could grow to understand. I also considered motor ability by making it a game that doesn’t require fast movements or reaction speeds throughout our meetings by ensuring our decisions remained consistent towards our slow-burn walking sim implementation. 

Throughout this class, I think I had 2 really significant challenges: weekly critical plays and unity game engine. With anxiety persisting throughout the entire quarter due to some significant matter, even thinking about the hours I would have to put into the critical plays on top of the 2 team projects was not something I was able to bring myself to do—therefore, I had to make the choice between sketchnotes and critical plays or team projects. I chose to not drag others down with me and ensured I chose team projects over my weekly personal assignments for the class. Nevertheless, this is just my personal challenge, and I think given a different quarter like the previous quarter, I think I would have enjoyed playing games and analyzing them. The other challenge of unity game engine was because although I’ve been coding and have done different CS projects, I’ve never come close to creating a digital game like this (ignoring my attempts with pygame long ago.) With my M1 laptop being old and also always struggling with memory, I already faced difficulties since the setup with my laptop crashing and my laptop always showing me system applications memory running low pop up. The challenge continued when Unity was an engine my teammates were already familiar with/ had experience with. It took a lot of time to understand how my teammates’ systems connected to the larger project, but that process also helped me become a more careful collaborator. I learned how to contribute to an existing Unity project, integrate my work without breaking other systems, and ask better questions when I was unsure. I think my teammates were patient with me, and I am very grateful for that. I also enjoyed learning how to use Unity and would continue using it in the future.

Usually in any team projects, I am used to taking charge and ensuring that everyone feels heard and included as well as the division of tasks. However, in this class, I learned to share these responsibilities better because the project required different strengths from different people. Since Unity was new to me, I had to be more intentional about learning from my teammates, understanding the existing codebase, and contributing in ways that would support the whole project rather than trying to control every part of it. This ensured that no one was a clear leader or one person carrying the team. Therefore, I believe I grew in a way where I am now able to trust my teammates who may be strangers, before a project, better.

With all that I’ve learnt from this class, with any product I design in the future, I believe I will focus most on implementation and playtesting my product to ensure accessibility and emotional clarity. Next time, I want to playtest earlier and consistently remember my intended target audience, and constantly remind myself that game design is not just about me making something fun or aesthetically pleasing, but making it an experience that people can immerse themselves in—to enter the game’s world, understand, and feel.