august1726

DESIGNER STATEMENT FOR GAME DESIGN I (CURRIC 357)

The element in my games that resonated with me most was making the player figure things out. Not necessarily puzzle solving in the traditional sense, but more like showing the player an obstacle and having them figure out through trial and error how to get past it. This was used a lot in my platformer game Tile-Changing Mania, which ends up pushing the changeable tiles to their limit. I tried to use only a few different elements from the game in as many ways as possible. This leads into one of my other design philosophies when making games.

The types of games I want to continue making are more simple or linear games. This may seem limiting at first, and that branching paths can offer much more complexity, but I see it differently. I tried to take small ideas and flesh them out as much as possible with all three of my games. This makes the experience feel more complete, and I also think it prevents the player from getting lost. There are choices to be made in my Twine games (An Interrogation and Lab Safety.... in SPACEEEEE), but the choices usually lead to the same outcome. This choice is a thematic one for An Interrogation, and for Lab Safety.... in SPACEEEEE I do this to make the game one continuous day with only one correct outcome. In both of these games as well, I make it so the player can explore just about all of the story in one run through and don't penalize them for making "wrong" choices. 

Currently, my games have a big split between being exclusively mechanically focused and exclusively narratively focused. I am interested in both kinds of games, but with my current skillset I prefer to focus on either one or the other for each game. This allows me to present a game where that one aspect is more polished than it would be if I focused on both at the same time. This could change in the future, but I'd expect a game with great narrative and mechanical depth to take a long time for me to create.

Another major split between my games is level of seriousness, especially for a narrative game. I took a very lighthearted and comical tone for my Serious Game (Lab Safety.... in SPACEEEEE), which I think is to its benefit. This game is meant to teach about lab safety, and I figured younger students learning this wouldn't want the same drab tone that lab safety videos have. This joking tone is meant to keep the player engaged and almost trick them into being more interested in learning otherwise boring material. I also made sure to make the "wrong" answers immediately take you back to redo them, but also teach why each answer is wrong here. I had lots of fun coming up with each disaster that would be caused by not following lab safety precautions, and I hope that leads the player to click as many "wrong" answers as possible since it teaches them information either way and doesn't penalize them. I'm always tempted to pick obvious wrong answers as a player out of curiosity, and that usually is heavily suggested against by most games, so I decided to allow the player to do that here. 

An Interrogation takes a much more serious tone, which was necessary given the themes I wanted to write about. I won't dive too far into what I was hoping to accomplish with this game, but it was heavily inspired by my own opinions and events taking place in the world. It was also inspired by the book Invitation to a Beheading by Vladimir Nabokov (shout out to UW professor Sara Karpukhin and the class LITTRANS 223). Nabokov used a very dark comedic and surreal tone to deal with the political events taking place in Germany where he was living at the time. My game is much more grounded in reality, but I hope to put across similar messages to the ones Nabokov did. I hope to continue to use games as a serious storytelling medium, but maybe in the future I hope to land somewhere between the ultra-comedic and ultra-serious tones I used here

To sum up what I think players should expect from my games, I will try to use an analogy: I think my games are like a very deep puddle as opposed to a very shallow lake. What my games lack in breadth I try to make up for in depth. My games don't have many branching paths or vast open worlds, but instead are a pretty straight line that I've tried to cater to be exactly how I want them to be. I don't have a preferred genre for my games currently and am a bit of a jack-of-all-trades. Game Design I has given me the knowledge and understanding of a few tools, so I hope to move into designing even more deep and complex games in the future.