Firstly, I would like to say I heavily appreciate the teaching team for all the hard work they do. Shoutout Annabelle for guiding my teams for both P1 and P2!
CS247G has been a rollercoaster of an experience. I came into this class fully expecting to learn and develop video games, but to my surprise, I found the physical board games and the new games introduced to me to be a ton of fun. I came in with very minimal game design experience having developed a handful of Roblox experiences, Minecraft mods, and experimenting with AR in Unity. I was expecting to fully gain all the hard skills of working with a game engine in this class.
I have been playing video games since I was four, finding a Nintendo DS with Pokémon Diamond and Pearl and the New Super Mario Bros (at the time) in a CVS. The store clerk told me to keep it! Games have been an experience for me to connect with family and friends, and this was the experience I was trying to emulate with the games I developed in this class. I knew game design was a strenuous, stressful process, especially in industry, but I was hoping the satisfaction of seeing my games being played would help ease that struggle. Unfortunately, the timeline of this class drastically limits the learning of hard skills, especially when P2 does not begin until about mid-way through the class. However, I believe this class is extremely valuable.
My biggest lesson from this class: learning how to critically analyze games. My critical plays, especially those of Firewatch and Monument Valley, really enabled my learning. I learned how to tell stories through games without relying upon intense and deep mechanics, and I think this really influenced the direction that my team took in P2. I also find myself using this lens to analyze other forms of entertainment like music and film. How did they do X? Why did the director/producer/artist decide to do X this way instead of this way? How did user input affect X? These are all questions I now ask myself when analyzing media. I do wish the class discussed gaming-related topics (gaming media outlets, commercialization, GamerGate, competitive gaming) more, but I understand that was not in the scope of this class.
Working with teams on a project that required creative direction that we generate together was probably my biggest challenge. It was unlike anything I’ve done before. Sure, I’ve written stories, produced theater, and made music with other people but designing and developing video games have so many layers with no “correct” answers that it was often times frustrating to move a project along because we were not sure what direction we wanted to go. Eventually, the decisions were made based on our timeframe, capacity, and skills, and although I really wanted to use a more complex engine than Twine, our time just did not allow for it.
CS247G reinforced my hunger and drive to learn more about gaming, both in terms of design and gaming-related topics as a whole. The class also encourages me to explore more games outside of video games. The nature of physical games encourages people to connect in a way that is still difficult for video games to do.
In the future, I’m hoping to develop more games experimentally as a solo game designer and on a team. Next step: picking up (and sticking with) a game engine!
