I learned a lot from this course! I did not previously have any experience with game design, and consider myself to be a pretty inexperienced game player. I enjoyed playing a variety of games, but had no idea what made games “fun” and what a game designer considers. I enjoyed engaging with the concepts that game designers regularly work with, and certainly noticed how these principles contribute to real games. Especially through critical play assignments, I really enjoyed playing games from a new lens, including some games that I had already heard of or tried to play before. I think the concepts that stuck with me the most were relating to what makes games fun, and what kind of storytelling a game can do. I’ve always found games to be a very enjoyable and rewarding experience, so I thought it was insightful to see how designers can create a limited but curated world that creates this experience for its players. I thought it was insightful to learn that we find learning how to play games and master skills to be a rewarding experience, and also are able to interact with scoped out parts of the world/characters to create certain experiences through games.
I implemented this into the projects that I created for the course, being part of the creation of two games that utilized our course concepts. It was a challenge for me to enter the perspective of a designer as someone with very limited experience in such type of work, but I soon found myself challenging myself to be more creative and thorough with the details of my designs. I found myself frustrated at times about how to figure out small details of a game design that had a big impact on the game, such as in the first project, the task of how to balance the game so that either side had a fair experience and reasonable strategies in the game. I found it extremely difficult to reason through how our design choices contributed to gameplay for each team and how two teams could have the opportunity against each other strategically. This process required a lot of iteration rather than pure brainstorming or problem solving, which was something that I was not used to, especially in anything else CS-adjacent that I’ve done. In the second game, I often felt challenged to create a puzzle for people of different interests and backgrounds to all find enjoyable. For example, some players really enjoyed certain experiences of puzzles and found certain types of problems to be especially interesting or fun whereas others felt totally different about them. I challenged myself to understand the perspectives of the players and design a balanced game with an intentional experience.
If I choose to continue working on games, I will certainly carry over a lot of my learnings from this course. A lot of the fundamentals introduced in this course are important to understanding the games we play and the games we may be interested in designing. I have many great memories of playtesting other people’s games and hosting playtests for my games and playing half-finished games as they shaped up, so I hope that next time I try anything similar that its just as fun!
