CS247G enabled me to explore my love of games in a more complex and enriching manner than I had before as merely a game-player. Certain games may indeed give the player a shot at fulfillment merely by playing them – which is truly my favorite thing about the medium – but the art of game-making itself provides a full-bodied and uncompromising opportunity to achieve the same; game-making is a deeply personal and fulfilling endeavor to a degree that game-playing cannot match.
Approaching games as a game-maker has encouraged me to place more value on games of all types, regardless of my opinion on any given game. They’re not easy to make! I know that’s a simple, and perhaps obvious realization, but it’s quite easy to take even bad games for granted when you don’t understand the magnitude/scale of effort behind their creation, and find them boring or tedious to begin with. I’m convinced that there hasn’t been a more capable and enabling medium for self-expression in history, and even the half-baked attempts at participating in such an unwieldy form of art are worthy of some merit. This was one of the most impactful lessons I learned through taking this class, as it encouraged me to be kinder to myself in the act of judging my own art. Everybody’s got to start somewhere!
This class was also an invaluable opportunity to practice collaboration in creation, which I’ve learned can certainly have its merits if your teammates are willing to provide space for you to share your ideas. I was lucky enough to have great teammates who afforded me this respect, resulting in games that combined myriad, differing perspectives into a unique project. Furthermore, collaboration enabled us to make things in far quicker time than one could do on their own, which was only possible because my teams were willing to grant leeway to its members in pursuing a problem their way. We avoided stepping on each other’s toes to prevent merge conflicts, but more importantly to get each team member excited in what they were making in that everyone was able to put a bit of themselves into the project. The in-class ideation sessions were especially fun in this regard as well as valuable to do as a team – everybody’s empowered to share their eccentric ideas, providing an opportunity for great ideas to emerge and interact quickly.
I want to hone in on P2 specifically as it proved to be a monumental learning experience, in both a technical as well as interpersonal sense. I am thoroughly grateful to have been given an excuse to learn Godot, but what really made the P2 experience shine was the opportunity to create with people passionate about game-making and software design. I’ll give a specific example from Outer Plates’ development – my colleague and I were at one point camping out in Ricker, with me building systems to facilitate customer behavior and him working on a new system to facilitate order generation. There’s a special kind of satisfaction watching your work intersect with another’s and accomplish something neither work could do alone, and this fact is exactly what’s driving me away from game-making as a solo experience and towards collaborating on passion projects with my friends. Even if the idea we settle on isn’t exactly what I had initially envisioned, the opportunity to create art in a social context more than makes up for the loss in creative freedom. I’m set on pursuing the making of games for the rest of my life, and the lighting of that fire I owe all to this wonderful class.
