Week 1

Being a game designer is not as easy as I have thought originally. I have been playing different types of games such as Dead Space, Starcraft II, and some others card games so I thought it would be easier for me to extrapolate ideas. I, nevertheless, never realized how complicated the game mechanics and balancing could get while concerning players’ emotion and gameplay experience. Coming up with original ideas from scratch is especially a difficult task for a beginner like me. Designing a game requires a group of people to bounce back and forth with ideas, and a leader to guide and execute the plan. It is a collaborative work that everybody puts their efforts toward the same goal with time and patience.

Last week in class, our group came to agree to adopt a game originally designed by Joe Skupinsky, who is one of the authors of this blog. His game allowed incoming Rutgers Students to get to know Rutgers campuses better while establishing great social relationships with one another. Before we came to this conclusion, as a leader, I attentively listened to everybody's game concepts and provided feedbacks within our group. It was not an easy choice because everybody had very sophisticated game mechanics and ideas that may spark a whole new series of game concepts. One might feel left out if I his ideas were not adopted. As a result, we listed down all the pros and cons in each concept, eliminated unnecessary criteria and formalized what we were looking for. As a leader, it was really difficult to pick one among others because it will affect how we, as a group, are going to execute our plans and ideas. Eventually, we reached the conclusion that we wanted a faster-paced game with no downtime and serves an ice-breaker.

In search of inspirations and creativities, I have learned to become more observant and alacritous to my surroundings. It is a very important skill to observe attentively surroundings, for they might provide inspirations and ignited great minds of creativities. Many renowned game designers like American McGee, Sandy Petersen and Bill Roper got their ideas from other gameplay experience. If I have the chance to meet them, I would love to get to know more about their perspectives on game design.