A huge part of becoming a better game designer, is to make more games. In keeping with this philosophy, as part of Jesse Schell's Game Design class at the CMU ETC in this Spring 2018 semester, we were assigned to design and develop a game in five weeks.
Creating an educational game for middle school students as a first time designer is hard. I dive into some of the decisions I have taken on the CryptoKnight project.
Over the last week, I had the opportunity to attend the Game Developers Conference at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. It was a great learning experience and I highly recommend everyone that if given the opportunity to attend GDC, you must.
I have been playing a lot of Overwatch recently and I absolutely love that game, but there are some maps and game modes that require players to walk forever to reach where the action is taking place and this got me thinking about how asymmetric the game is and why is that a good thing?
When I played LIMBO, the 2D side scrolling puzzle platformer developed and published by Playdead Studios in 2010, last year, I was completely blown away by how good of a game it was even comparing it to some similar games that had released in 2017. The game won a lot of critical acclaim for its minimalist aesthetic and heavy focus on gameplay. Even though the gameplay is only a few hours long at most, it holds its own against some longer games.
As I get comfortable in my seat and sift through my game library to decide what to play, I chuckle at myself as I know I will always end up choosing the same games over and over again. As I start another session of FIFA 18 on my PC, I look back at the start of the previous semester. Since I have started studying at the Carnegie Mellon University's Entertainment Technology Center, I have been asked multiple times "What games do you play?", and every time someone asks me that question it gets me thinking about what do I actually like playing.
This was a question posed to us as part of Jesse Schell's Game Design class at the ETC. Hopscotch is a very old game that has endured through the ages and knows no boundaries. The rules are very simple and the game is ubiquitous among children on playgrounds. Hence, Jesse gave us this challenge to help build our game design skills.
After a disappointing round four, I was excited for round five as we had been allowed to pick our own team unlike previous rounds and I knew that we were going to create something fun and interesting come what may. This was also the final round of BVW, so a somewhat bittersweet ending to the roller coaster of a semester that was.
After a shaky round three, I was ready to reset and give it my all in this round. I had received some great feedback from the faculty and my peers on how I could improve as a teammate and I was ready to put that into to good use. Like the previous round, we had no idea what the theme was going to be or what our platform was.
So after the moderate success of Round 2, I was somewhat excited for the madness that was about to hit us in the third round. We had no idea what the theme or our platform was going to be and the apprehension was killing us.