Postmortem
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The end result of the product is way beyond of what I initially thought it would be. I’ve studied game-related courses before on a more beginning type of level. And the products we produced there were only sometimes playable. There was no motivation, no drive to complete the games. However, here at this university, every soul I meet has a passion for creating games in their own way. I have learnt a lot of what is needed of me as a designer. When I first started I didn’t really understand my own position and what use there was of me. During the first 1-2 weeks, this was still true. But the further we came into development, the more I learnt about my role and the more my team could depend on me. I understood that I was supposed to be the person who had to know the limits of both my artists and programmers. And within their limits, I was supposed to design something they were able to construct. During those first weeks, as I mentioned before, I did not know this. This made our progress slow and a lot of miscommunications happened. It was thanks to an experienced programmer in my group that I understood how important my role was. He explained to me why it is important to for me to design and present mechanics etc in a detailed way. Because if I did not, how was the programmer supposed to know why the mechanic acts in a certain way or what even the purpose was. Something that was really useful in my learning experience as a designer was this tool my programmer made for me (As shown below). This allowed me to adjust the different attributes of the enemies we had in our game.
With this tool I learnt a lot about level design. Combining this with the playtest I could get a hunch on how many enemies are needed in certain areas and how fast they should move and shoot. It was only a beginning on my design learning process but something I will remember throughout my entire university education. At the end of the course, I felt I was capable enough to design mechanics for my programmers and be able to explain the feeling the art should convey to my graphical artists. That was something I did not feel at the beginning of the course.  |
