Personal Reflection
This class has been an incredible learning experience. It’s been enlightening to work independently and develop my own game design voice. The most frustrating part was my lack of technical abilities. I have picked up many skills over the past few months, and have a clearer idea of what I want to work on next. I also am able to more critically approach the design process from a technical standpoint, including understanding how Unity works and how that will impact my design process.
Final Syllabus
Jack and I worked out the details of the final syllabus if this class were to be taught to undergraduates. We found that the circumstances of university and individual student would impact the class so much, we could not make a hyper-specific syllabus. For example, if this were being taught to a class of mostly game art students, would you really want to forbid them from making their own art? Other similar classes used this model to help artists develop their style. Personally, we approached this as a design class, not a game development or game art class, and that is our intention for the syllabus we created. It’s our hope that a class that focuses strictly on design will foster more reflective design from students, who will learn to give the why behind the how.
Next steps
This post is the formal end of this course. All of the games and the course syllabus are available in Northeastern’s Google Drive, as well as our individual itch.io pages (mine is here). There is the possibility we will publish a paper on the topic of dogmatic game design in the future.
That’s it!