Before this class, I had really never played games in my life. Other than playing the occasional Fire Boy and Water Girl sneakily during class in middle and high school or trying out the trendy games like Among Us and Secret Hitler, I hated games because of what they have done to the world. I saw my cousins in Indonesia play games all day and waste their lives away, and my friends spending late nights on Fortnite and League and decided there were enough people in the world playing more than their “share” of games, and I decided I was not going to get involved. I just hated games honestly and there was a mental block preventing me from enjoying them.
But this year I got really interested in crypto, and a lot of the people in this space are interested in games. Through them, I began to see a different perspective. During the third week of this quarter, Spring 2025, I was the moderator for a panel about gaming in crypto, featuring Don Johnson (Virtuals Protocol), Greg Gunadi (now leading games at Monad), and Scott Sunarto (building decentralized game engine at Argus Labs). From them, I learned that there was a lot of art, beauty, and display of mastery involved in making a game. That the frontier of gaming is ever expanding due to all the new things you can implement with AI, that games in the future will be infinitely more dynamic, real-life, and personalized. That if AGI makes resources abundant, what will people be doing with their lives? : playing games (not me tho). And I decided that I wanted to know more about what it takes to make a game, and what this industry is like. That’s why I showed up to CS 247G on the last day of the add-drop period. It was honestly dreadful that day, when I realized I had like a dozen sketchnotes to draw and critical plays to write (cry) but it was a great decision.
In CS 247G, I learned how to build a game in the Godot engine. I learned how to integrate code, design, and sprites, how to work in a team of students on the same repository. It was a blast. More specifically, I learned how to prototype, design, implement, playtest, feedback, and repeat, which is the iteration cycle of improving a game. I learned to think about the game in terms of the MDA framework. Our team liked to think of each category separately when making improvements, but we always come together to re-build the holistic view after making the improvements. For example, we would whiteboard the whole mechanic of the game, and then once we decided on it, we think about how the dynamics would work (how much time per level, how to punish actions) and how the aesthetics would change (what new assets we need now).
Throughout the process, learning how to use Godot was one of the biggest challenges. A lot of times, I had writer’s block because I had absolutely no idea how I was going to implement something in Godot. But working as a team helped that. We filled each others’ gaps and because each time we individually left the project, we came back to one that has grown ever since, and the momentum fed itself.
Working on Someone Call Securi-tree with this amazing team taught me to be a better team member, to communicate more, and I learned how to drive fast progress in critical time. Our start was rough. Maybe you reading this, were one of the TA’s we needed to beg to allow us to not have to playtest that day, because we couldn’t get anything to work. But once we started rolling the snowball and it started to take form, it was just a exciting time.
Here is a picture of us getting hotpot as a team!!!
