"Game Design Workshop" Reading Journal #1

I really agree with the introduction part of the book where it says: "Part engineer, part entertainer, part mathematician, and part social director, the role of the game designer is to craft a set of rules within which there are means and motivation to play". My ultimate goal of studying game design is to become some one who is able to create a complete indie game by herself and I'm really glad that the book talks about that like this.

The part that talks about the flow of the iterative process in the first chapter is very helpful. Before reading this, I've never thought of the design process as clear and detailed, and I also realized that sometimes I missed one or two steps which made my iterative process inefficient. The idea of keeping design documentation is the one thing I realized very important during this game-making process. Since this is a group project and we did a lot of changes to the original version of the game, the documentations really helped us eliminating things we already tried and reminding us what we were planning to test the next day.

In chapter six, the author says that "...I believe that starting from the same beginning will frequently lead to the same end. Finding new ways of working often leads to innovative designs". This line can be really helpful because I feel like my way of creating games is not changing much. Changing the way of working would be like stepping out my comfort zone, I know it's going to be hard but I do think I need to try in future productions.

Chapter seven and chapter twelve talk about creating prototypes and efficient teamwork, which actually helped me when I'm creating this project. This is the first time for us to create an analog game as a group, and we really did focus more on the core mechanics instead of codes or digital assets.