Studio: Rounding Off This Semester

Individual Tie-in Report with Games Design Studio Project on the process and development of your current Game Level Design. Discuss what you have learned as a whole, reflecting on your level of understanding of game design methods and game design theory. Obviously I want to know about your creative processes (or lack of) in creating your game as a group. Be honest about the gaps in your processes. How can you improve on them, etc. (BLOG THIS) (500 + words; more is good)

Having worked on my studio project for half a year has opened my eyes to many lessons—lessons that are best learnt through experience. The past semester has opened my eyes to many things about games design and development that have never crossed my mind before. It has also taught me valuable lessons about working as a team, which is actually harder than most people think.

One of the most valuable insights that this past semester has taught me is the importance of making a physical prototype of a digital game before the game’s actual production. The idea of physical prototypes was taught to us last year, but I didn’t believe in their usefulness initially, chiefly because of the difficulty of doing a proper translation of the digital game’s mechanics into physical form. I thought that if the physical prototype did not emulate its digital counterpart perfectly, then its playtesting results would not be of any use to the game’s development process. Our studio project’s physical prototype proved me wrong—while it was a far cry from being a perfect replication of what our digital prototype would be, it revealed several potential problems in our game’s level design. While these potential problems were relatively minor, it has shown me the potential usefulness of physical prototype playtesting. If such an inaccurate physical prototype could bring up relevant problems about our game, think of what problems we could’ve found out and solved if our physical prototype was more properly done.

The past semester has also taught me much about the game development process, which turns out to be a lot harder than I thought. Participation in the studio project has allowed us to get our feet wet with programming, texturing and modelling—processes which we had little exposure to in our past year. Due to our inexperience in these fields, our workflow usually chokes up because we plan for more work than we expect. This is especially true for modelling and texturing, which were so much more complicated than we conceived they were. I believe, however, that my team has learnt much from this past semester through getting their feet wet. Our planning for the next semester will most probably be a lot smoother than what we did this semester.

There’s nothing much for me to write about the game’s conceptualisation phase, however, as the only member who was mainly involved during this phase was our team’s lead game designer (who is also our producer). We did not have much influence over the game’s concept, so there’s not much exercising of my creative processes and methods during this project. I do realise that this was the wrong way of doing things. Our producer took it upon himself to churn out the game’s concept, but we could’ve and should’ve voiced out during that period about having more involvement in the game’s concept. Having one person conceptualise the game almost entirely led the rest of us to feel little ownership for the game, and this made us feel quite unmotivated whenever we worked on developing the game. It was also a cause for conflict on several occasions. If there was one thing that had to be done differently for our studio project during the past semester, it would be this—having everyone involved in conceptualisation would’ve helped us avert so many problems.

All in all, while this project was more of an ordeal than I think it was, there were many lessons that I have learnt too—life lessons that I could not have learnt otherwise, or in a textbook. While this project did not give me much of a chance to develop my creativity methods and skills, the lessons that I have learnt from going through are well-worth whatever ordeals and losses I might have incurred. I look forward to the next semester with both worry and anticipation—there are many more ordeals to overcome, but the things that I will learn will again be well worth the effort.