Before this class, I thought about game design as something that was complicated, technical, and hard to access. I came in with no experience building for play and was a bit intimidated, especially after the first few weeks when I got to meet a lot of my peers and learn about how accomplished everyone was in this field. Quite frankly, I understood games mostly as finished experiences and didn’t fully understand how intentionally every mechanic had to be designed in order to create a specific feeling for the player. I also thought of games as forms of entertainment, but this class helped me further understand that games can be arguments, systems, and ways of making people think differently.
Over the quarter, I experienced this by helping create a tabletop game and a digital game. Through these two projects I learned that game design is about translating a great idea into rules, player choices, and feedback systems that is accessible to a large audience in a manner that’s easy to understand and enjoy. I also learned that doing this was a bit harder than it seemed. Concepts like the magic circle, mechanics/dynamics/aesthetics, and player empathy gave me the vocabulary for understanding why certain design choices succeed or fail, especially when play testers interacted with our game in ways I didn’t expect. For example, in the puzzle I designed for P2’s digital game, I thought the sequence was clear because I understood the intended logic (notice the bottle, reveal the hidden sign marking, connect them to museum fragments, return to spring). However, play testers didn’t always see those connections, which taught me that player empathy means designing enough feedback/guidance for the puzzle to make sense from the player’s perspective, not just my own. I implemented these concepts as well as other concepts we learned into my work by designing puzzles, defining the kinds of fun I wanted players to have, and art. For both my games, I tried to make sure the mechanics supported the larger experiences my teams wanted players to have rather than feeling separate from the theme.
One of my biggest challenges was working with backend code during P2 and implementation for a larger-scale digital game. It was a bit of a learning curve to manage branching logic, visual assets, bugs, and puzzle states, especially when one small change could break another part of the game (this happened a few times). I also learned how much polish matters, things like unclear buttons and narrations can distract players from the experience you actually want them to have.
By the end of the class, I grew from seeing games as intimidating finished products to understanding them as iterative systems that can be tested, revised, and improved. Next time, I would like to think even more intentionally about accessibility and player guidance. This class made me realize that accessibility in both digital and analog games can be difficult, especially when designing puzzles, because making something accessible doesn’t just mean making it easier. If I had more time, I would’ve liked to explore more avenues for accessibility, specifically within solving puzzles. Accessibility is a core value of mine, and this class has helped me see that it has to be built into the design process from the very beginning.
