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Final Blog Post 8: Course Reflection

This spring semester in my junior year of university, I had the chance to take an introductory game studies class that delved into the history of making games, its theory, as well as hands-on experience with game development. I was in the Monday/Wednesday section of the class, which was split up by a lecture on the former day, followed by an activity relating to the previous lecture on the latter day. The overall structure of the class was well organized, and its lecture slides accessible since the first week so there weren’t any huge surprises if you looked ahead of the material. I had heard about the class from friends who had taken the class that the class would require you to create a game, and also looking at the class scheduler noting it as an activity class requiring 8 hours of work per week I was somewhat worried. Now at the final stretch of this class, either I really improved my work ethic and time management or the class was actually not as tough as I expected. Then again, I chose to code a visual novel game with Ren’Py which is definitely a lot easier to code than in Unity with C#. Still, I really enjoyed the class and it was really intriguing and refreshing to be in an environment that facilitated game analysis in both terms of narrative and mechanics.

The textbook that we were assigned and given for free through our school accounts was pretty informative and also fairly casual with the way the author would be talking in first person towards the reader. The overall tone, though unconventional, made the topic of games and the theory behind making them a lot more approachable.

For my final, as mentioned in the first paragraph, I coded and wrote for a visual novel game and had the art implemented in it supplied by two artists in my group. I am quite interested in storytelling, though I hadn’t really put many of my ideas onto paper for public viewing so that was a daunting experience. Still, the reception that the game received during peer reviews were quite encouraging to me and I’d like to share more of my stories in my future works. As a digital art major who is rather fond of 3D modeling and comics, coding was a bit out of my comfort zone, though I was able to make it work and my efforts sufficed for the assignments’ requirements. While I wouldn’t delve into game mechanics that involve complicated physics, I wouldn’t be opposed to coding for more visual novels through Ren’Py.

(Below is a screenshot of one of my first attempts to code a player character through C#)

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Blog Post 8: Final Project

For the past month, I continued to be the programmer in my group for the final project. This time, instead of being in Unity, I switched over to Ren’Py, the software that is often geared towards Visual Novels. Albeit starting from scratch in terms of my knowledge in the coding language it ran on (Unity used C#), Python wasn’t all that difficult for me to understand, or at least I saw the example code from the template given on the Ren’py Engine, and was able to work with the structure. As the programmer, I was in charge of inputting all the assets I receive from the artists in my team into the game, as well as the entire script that the game is hinged upon. So far I’ve uploaded everything I’ve inputted in Ren’Py to be seen through my itch.io page. I also took the liberty of downloading some free use Gui images, sound effects, and fonts so that the format isn’t totally the same as the default one.

My team consisted of me, the programmer and producer, and two other artists. One artist was in charge of background art while the other took care of character sprites. I had a certain vision already for the general plot and its aesthetics, so to save my artists the trouble of coming up with concept art I compiled a whole Google slides to refer to for possible references and inspiration. I assigned the background artist to do 3 images while the character artists would do 2 different characters albeit each would have 3 different facial expressions each.

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Blog Post 7: JackBox Games

This evening, I played a few Jackbox games hosted by my professor with my classmates. Jackbox games are essentially a collection of party games that often involve the voting and simultaneous action selection mechanisms. These games require players to go head to head with each other in order to be the player with the most votes or the last person standing. Out of the entire collection, we played a game each of Tee K.O 2, Trivia Murder Party 2, and Dodo Re Mi. The class played Tee K.O first, and in the first lobby room, the group code to join the room was “RIZZ” which was pretty hilarious so some of us took a picture of it. 2 We opened up Chomp’D Up, where players’ drawings are faced against each other and were rated based on randomized categories that either drawing applies better to, though in the first voting session the window crashed so we chose a different game. The different game was Trivia Murder Party 2, whose gameplay I was already familiar with as I’ve played TMP2 with my family before.

Having an audience in the game past the actual players participating was rather nice in that there didn't seem to be much of a limit to those who could be involved with the game. It’s also cool to see everyone’s reactions to certain prompts, especially to the T-shirts made on Tee K.O and everyone’s performance in Dodo Re Mi. In between turns however, it seemed rather slow for the audience when we had to wait for players when they were drawing or coming up with catchphrases in Tee K.O and when players were in a sudden death minigame in Trivia Murder Party 2. On the other hand, it seemed that Dodo Re Mi got to involve everyone in the main game where everyone gets to participate in the rhythm game.

Overall, I had a fun time playing a variety of Jackbox games with my classmate, and having the opportunity to experience this in a larger group also let me understand where most of the classroom's humor lies.

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Blog Post 6: Video Game Prototype

For the last month in the game dev class, my group tried our hands at producing a game prototype through Unity. I acted as the main programmer and designer for the game whereas my partner, H.X., was responsible for the art. My group partner made all the assets through Aseprite, a pixel editor application aside from the health bar, through which I pixelated a medically-accurate heart I found free to use on the internet through Piskel.com. That particular image can be found here: Human Heart.

Dead On Arrival utilizes common movement keys and shooting toggles that are seen in other games like the WASD or directional keys for moving and the space bar/left mouse click to shoot projectiles. I had a strenuous time making it so the projectiles’ angle would correspond to which direction it’d be shot in, though I had help with my significant other to figure out the math bits required for the mechanics. Now, there is still a nominal issue of the player experiencing recoil when shooting the projectile due to both the player and the syringe having collider components. Despite that, I find the map a lot easier to navigate around in contrast to the alpha build which had the player shooting projectiles in the direction of their movement.

As of right now, Dead On Arrival is a 2D top down shooter that involves a doctor trying to survive in a hospital lobby from violent creatures. I am amenable to working more on the game in terms of a clearer narrative for the game as well as adding sound effects and more animations to make the game feel more dynamic. I also really hated coding at times, however, so perhaps I might like to do more art and even experiment with some music and writing if I can find someone else to be a programmer later on in this semester.

The game can be found below if interested:

Q.L.

Dead on Arrival by SpryMint

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Blog Post 5: First Playable

I, as the current programmer and designer of the project, have decided to name the game Dead On Arrival, after the medical term. I’m also hoping that later down the line the enemies will become more zombie-like to further relate to the title.

In my programming of Dead On Arrival, I essentially followed the top down shooter tutorial shared in the class discord. It took a while to get the code right, though once I finished troubleshooting by comparing my code with the example code, I basically plugged in all the assets my game partner/artist/producer provided me and the first prototype was finished and ready to publish.

A while after publishing the game on my itch.io, my partner and I were given the opportunity in class to both test out our game to our other classmates as well as playtest their own games. When I was observing my classmates play Dead On Arrival, I noticed how they tended to gravitate towards the arrow keys to move the player while using the spacebar to shoot. This was unexpected for me as I am quite used to using the WASD keys as well as the mouse, the latter of which I made sure to provide during playtesting. One person asked me for the keys needed to interact with the game though I was under the impression that producers/designers should have little input on what players wanted so I asked that they go with what they think works.

Other details I remember classmates bringing up were both design-related and mechanical, with the suggestion that the player character’s color palette should be distinct from the background tiles for better visibility as well as additional features of interacting with enemy NPCs. The pink enemies are noted to be placeholders for the actual zombie enemies intended for the final version, though I was also given the suggestion that their damage should be visible after being hit by the player's projectile.

All in all, I would like to tweak the color contrast of the player and the background as I do value accessibility and would like for the game to be better for colorblind folks to navigate through the game. Namely, what was noted was the hospital tiles and the doctor's coat being around the same hue. Moreover, I do intend on adding more details to the enemies in terms of their overall design as well as more immersive qualities like more animations.

If you would like to keep up with the game's progress, you are free to refer to here: Dead on Arrival by SpryMint

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Blog Post 4: Video Game Lab

On February 26, 2025, I spent class time trying out games with a classmate. We spent today’s game lab going in between games made by students from previous semesters as well as other games made in a game jam accessed through itch.io. Some of the games that we looked at were visual novels, whereas others were 2D platformers or involved a shooting mechanic.

My lab partner and I both tried our hands at the games There is Only One Level and Puppy Hunt, both of which were 2D platformers that employed the arrow keys for movement at first glance. Both games had a challenging aesthetic through which players are encouraged to parkour between obstacles while also reaching an objective whether through collecting items or reaching a checkpoint. The main movements were left, right, or up to jump, though One Level changed up the rules to the controls sometimes in between stages. One thing my classmate and I also noted was collision properties in the games, with There is Only One Level having particles of the player bouncing off the environment following a death whereas Puppy Hunt’s collisions can be seen when the player comes in contact with a platform as they jump, creating the visual effect of double jumping.

As for a third game we looked at, my partner and I tried out Butterfly Soup, a visual novel following the lives of four sapphic characters, though we only got to witness two of them in the first few minutes of playing. The UI design indicated that the game was built on Ren'Py, a visual novel engine as seen in the menus that allow the player to save whenever they choose to. The game seems rather interactive with the mouse allowing for some movement on the screen albeit fixed onto the characters. Moreover, the player is given choices for the characters to act out, giving the impression of having a narrative aesthetic assuming that the overall story is meant to be the game's hook.

All in all, I had a lot of fun trying out different types of games as well as seeing my lab partner partake in them as well. Playing games myself is definitely a lot more interactive in that I control all my actions in the game, though watching someone else play the same game can be really enlightening as to details that I may have missed when playing on my own. For instance, in the One Level game, I struggled to figure out how a stage changed the keyboards and so I was stuck until I saw my classmate try her mouse cursor to move the character which worked. After seeing her figure out the change in the mechanic, I was able to breeze by levels fairly quickly. While I tried to finish each stage as efficiently as possible, my lab partner took their time to learn the gimmicks of each stage. This goes to exemplify the different motives between people as they play the game in regard to experience vs. completion.

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Blog Post 3: Prototyping

Recently in class I've gotten to try my hand at creating my own board game. I first started out brainstorming ideas with a partner in class, then branched off from them to make changes to the game on my own. I experimented on my game in class and at home with roommates unfamiliar to the design process to get different perspectives and this is how it changed over time.

Play Log:

Session 1: In the first iteration of the game I made with a partner in class, the main mechanic we had in mind was the acquisition of features for players’ creatures to square up against another. We considered players being able to have multiple creatures to hold even more characteristics, and the farther the creatures get from home base, the better rewards they can get, albeit with higher risks. I decided to have my version only let players have a single creature each so that they may focus on just obtaining limbs.

Session 2: At my apartment, I showed my roommates the game to which I received a lot of helpful feedback as well as additional comments as to what could be a nice touch to the game aesthetically. Since the medical symbols were drawn on the map with no other markers, I allowed my roommates to get as many limbs as they wanted so long as they got to the tile, so there was a point where the bosses at each island were a moot obstacle, plus no one could lose enough to actually be eliminated out of the game. This produced a stalemate among players. I tried to combat this by limiting the number of limbs that players can get by attaching a physical cube to each icon for players to collect once on a ‘plus’ tile.

Session 3: When I showed my revised board to a classmate, they commented on some missing rules from what I described in my notes versus the actual rules I’d vocalize during playtime.

The core mechanic for BᐧAᐧCᐧK-Off! is Ratio/Combats Result Table, of which the totals are finalized via dice roll with additional points added based on the number of limbs players collect throughout the game. In addition, Dice Rolling not only determines the results of combat, but also the number of tiles a player can move on the map.

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Blog Post 2: Game Lab 1

On 2/5/2025, I played the board game Secret Hitler with a few classmates. I was first exposed to the game when I heard tidbits of people playing a session from across the room at a house party last year, though I hadn’t actually played the game until directed to during class. At its core, the game is a social deduction game where it’s liberals vs. fascists, the game taking on a political theme. On the liberal side, the goal is to either enact 5 liberal policies or expose and execute Hitler, whereas the fascists are trying to enact 5 fascist policies or elect Hitler as chancellor.

In our first session, I was given the liberal role along with a majority of the 10 people in the game, though I was not aware of who else was on my side or against me. Fascists in the beginning generally seem to have the advantage of knowing who everyone on their team is, with the exception of the Secret Hitler themself not knowing. Before the first election starts, all the players are instructed to close their eyes while knocking on the table as the fascists learn who everyone is. The knocking part of the beginning seems small and unimportant, though I think it adds to the mystery of the game. The sound from everyone knocking on the table potentially covers any shuffling that may occur when fascists reveal each other so that they don’t accidentally reveal themselves to any liberals beside them at the table. In the end, there were a total of four fascists in the game including Secret Hitler who managed to get Hitler instated as chancellor and won the game.

Detailed below is the session report for the first Secret Hitler game played among us:

Players: Emilie Garcia, Justin Kim, Vivian Lam, Jared Langner, Beckett Van Leer, Quynh Luong, Sejeong Park, Karan Raval, Jonathan Sim and Lea Wilhelmer

Mechanisms of Secret Hitler: Hidden Roles, Player Elimination, Team-Based Game, Traitor Game, Voting

Round 1: Lea is President and Beckett voted as Chancellor

A president is chosen and chooses a chancellor

3 policies are drawn.

President throws 1 away and hands 2 to the chancellor

The chancellor then throws 1 away and the last remaining policy is kept

(Fascist policy was passed)

Round 2: Karan is elected president and Justin is chancellor

3 policies are drawn

Karan throws 1 away and passes 2 to the chancellor

The chancellor (Justin) can see both policies and throws 1 away

(Fascist Policy was passed)

Round 3: Quynh is elected president and Emilie is denied chancellor due to failing the vote

The election fails and passes to 1

No policies are drawn

Round 4: Vivian is elected President and Sejeong is not elected Chancellor

No policies are drawn

The election fail is moved to level 2

Round 5: Jared is elected president and Vivian is up for a vote for Chancellor

Vivian is elected Chancellor

Jared draws 3 policies.

President throws 1 away and hands 2 to the chancellor

The chancellor then throws 1 away and the last remaining policy is kept

3rd Fascist Policy is passed

Round 6: Beckett is elected president and Justin is elected chancellor

Justin is revealed to be Hitler

Here's the official website for the game:

A social deduction game for 5-10 people about finding and stopping the Secret Hitler.

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Blog Post 1: Internet Arcade

Through the Internet Arcade, I was able to play an emulated version of Centipede, an arcade game originally produced in 1980 by Atari Inc. The game is rather straightforward with its objective: stay alive by shooting the creatures coming after you from the top of the screen top-down style like how Donkey Kong is formatted. The control keys for movement were rather intuitive as well, with arrow keys where its direction would correspond to where the player head would go on the bottom of the screen. The longer I played, the faster the enemies seemed to move toward me, leading to myself losing all the three lives I was given and facing the game over screen.

I’m pretty glad that I’m able to play Centipede on an emulator as I’d have to spend quite some money to be able to play it how it was originally intended with the tokens required for each session in conjunction with access to the arcade machine housing the game itself. One thing I would prefer in regard to the arcade machine however, is the physicality of playing the game versus playing the game digitally through browser emulation. The tactile experience of moving the joystick, spamming the shoot button, and having to start another game through physical coins is just not something one can easily achieve through a screen and a keyboard.

Even so, I’m glad that the Internet Archive has a record of this game as it’s part of the foundation that gave way to many more games down the line.

-- Q.L

You can find the game here: