Before taking this course, I thought game design was primarily a technical and aesthetic challenge: make the screen look great, make the protagonist powerful, and players will have fun. I had little sense of how much deliberate thought goes into balance, playability, and the kind of experience a game actually produces in someone playing it for the first time.
That assumption unraveled quickly. One of the earliest things I internalized was how hard it is to balance a game, both in the single-player and multiplayer sense. For our P2 puzzle game, we assumed the experience would feel natural and intuitive. It didn’t. Players with puzzle game backgrounds flew through it; players without got stuck in places we hadn’t anticipated. For our P1 multiplayer game, playtesters pointed out that certain characters were outperforming others in ways that made the experience feel less fair and less fun. We responded by adding a hint system and randomness, both of which helped, but getting there required accepting that our first instincts were incomplete.
The MDA framework initially confused me. I couldn’t see how eight abstract aesthetics categories could meaningfully guide actual design decisions. But once I started building projects and thinking backwards from the player experience I wanted to create, the framework clicked. It pushed me to ask: what do I want someone to feel when they play this? That question changed how I approached everything.
The part of the course that stuck with me most was the unit on narrative, particularly the Jenkins reading on game design as narrative architecture. I came in thinking narrative meant cutscenes and dialogue. Jenkins reframed it: game designers are not storytellers but spatial architects, shaping environments where stories emerge. That distinction mattered enormously for P2. Rather than front-loading exposition, we tried to use enacting stories and spatial stories, letting players gradually discover the truth through the space itself, uncovering what happened by moving through and interacting with the environment. The puzzle design became less about directing players and more about creating the conditions for discovery.
The biggest personal challenge was learning to accept criticism. Early on, I tended to assume our designs were self-explanatory and that players would naturally follow our intent. Playtesting dismantled that assumption repeatedly. What surprised me, though, was learning to filter feedback rather than simply absorb it all. When one playtester found a puzzle too hard, we didn’t immediately add more hints because that might have ruined the experience for everyone else. Instead, we built a time-based hint system that surfaced more direct guidance only when a player had been genuinely stuck for a while. That felt like the right balance between listening to feedback and trusting our design.
If I keep working on games, I want to carry forward that orientation: start from the player experience, playtest early and often, and stay humble about the gap between what a designer intends and what a player actually feels. This course didn’t just teach me how to make games. It changed how I think about playing them.
This refection fills my heart with joy: you got what I was throwing down. 😉 It’s hard to feedback, but it is so powerful! Keep making games, if only for yourself.