Final Class Reflection – Justin Hall

Before this class, I didn’t really think about games as a fundamental part of our lives, but I learned so much from the class about how games can impact us. The biggest thing that I learned about in this class is narrative and how to craft an effective one (most of the games I played before this class were multiplayer competitive achievement styled games that lacked a strong narrative, so this was valuable for me).

This class (and especially Butch) have really drilled in mechanics, dynamics, and aesthetics into my mind and the class overall has made me think about these concepts in every game I play, whether I play for fun or whether I am playing just for fun. There were several other concepts that really stuck with me were the psychogenic domains of game theory (power, affiliation, achievement, materialistic, information, sensual), the 12 rules of puzzles, and four types of narrative– not only were those the things I constantly wrote about during my critical plays, but I think about them whenever I play games myself now.

My first game I built was Séance with Team Meerkat. I am generally a massive fan of social deduction games like Secret Hitler, Among Us, and Mafia, so I really enjoyed building this game. Though this was before the balance lecture, most of my time was spent balancing the mechanics of the game rather than focusing on visual design, so I worked a lot with Akary, playtesting constantly, especially in the several game nights I went to (sometimes until midnight on certain days lol). Building this game was a ton of work and required a lot of attention to detail in ensuring that the game was balanced and fun for everyone. We implemented several ideas from class, such as an emergent narrative (through a murder mystery), a Séance marker map to indicate round progression, and getting ideas from other teams after playing other games (for instance, Brooke, Jeffery, and Sabrina’s team who made Golden Ark collaborated with our team a lot and we gained a lot of ideas from them too). I was really proud of our final playtest and I felt like we made a well balanced and extremely engaging game!

All of our iterations and materials for Séance

The second game I built was Otowa Blues with Team Binturong. This was a more narrative heavy game and was based on interactive fiction, which is a game genre I’ve never built and honestly haven’t really played either, so I had to do a lot of learning during this project. I implemented a lot of concepts from class on this project as a result: an interactive map, accessible controls, UI design for Unity, etc.  Despite having very limited digital game design and Unity experience, I think the game turned out quite well! I was really impressed with our final product and think the sound design complemented the gameplay and visual design quite well, and we had a very detailed enacting narrative.

I also just wanted to give special shoutouts to some people:

Thanks Butch for giving great feedback throughout the class (on both my P1 and P2)!

Thanks Sabrina, Jeffery, Brooke, and Jinhyo for always being willing to playtest our games and giving me great feedback always! (Also for both P1 and P2, especially for P1).

Thanks Tianze and Akary for putting in exceptional work into P2 and P1 respectfully, I feel like you guys did a lot of the heavy lifting for our projects and I hope I was able to contribute my part as well in you guys’ eyes, but I really wanted to shoutout you guys.

Thanks everyone for an amazing class!