247G has been a class I knew I wanted to take since I came to Stanford. Before this class, I knew I loved making games and designing puzzles, but I think it was out of my own love of games that I had this interest. I had never designed a game before which had been playtested by anyone but me. I also didn’t really know the difference between a game and a puzzle. The games I designed were always a means to an end, designed to accomplish some intermediary goal, rather than being designed to invoke a sense of fun. Also, while I knew I liked games, I knew precisely one vocabulary term to describe what I liked about games (I love roguelike-deckbuilders :D) and that was about it.
This class changed all that.
Despite the numerous warnings, I fear I went into P1 with the mindset I had when previously approaching designing games: choose the best mechanics of the games I liked and put them together. Being a fan (most of the time at least..) of social deduction games, our team decided to throw our favorite mechanics together, creating the glorious mess of The Golden Ark. Reflecting back on it now, the Golden Ark might have been a cursed problem. We took the mechanic of hidden team social deduction game, where the goal should be social politics and added money, where the optimal strategy then became cold-hearted math. So for the 7 days we did every possible thing to try to reconcile that problem.
I learned many things from that experience (and the subsequent overly scoped P2). From a game designer perspective, I learned that starting from your favorite mechanics and putting them all together does not make your favorite game. It makes an 11 page rule-book and the title of your game meaning “you messed up one of our 300 rules.” I also learned the value of playtesting. No matter how many times you think about possible scenarios by yourself, giving your game to other players will reveal holes in your logic you never could think of.
However, from a person perspective, I also learned a lot about myself. I learned through perhaps spending the most time I’ve ever spent on a single class that I enjoy designing games, perhaps to an excessive extent. I also learned it’s an incredibly special and rewarding experience to work with people who equally want to dedicate 30+ hours a week to completing a single project. Each of my teammates are one of the most incredible people I’ve ever met and I’m so grateful to be able to have made such incredible games with them.
Looking towards the future, I hope to continues building games. This class has given me the skills to understand what makes a game fun and how to make meaningful choices to curate that experience, rather than the other way around. I’ve also learned how to work better with my teammates, how to communicate, and how to trust in a vision.
ark ark ark ark ark