Journal 2

After reading Chapters one and two, I've begun to realize that there's much more to making a game than I thought. I remember when I was in Middle School (ugh), I once had to come up with a card game in a group, and that was not easy. Considering I don't play a lot of strategy games, mostly because I'm terrible at them, or tabletop games, I now realize that designing a tabletop game that's relatively original is going to be a challenge.

I played Minecraft for five minutes (and later on longer), and the most I got done in that amount of time was locate where I was going to build my base, gather supplies, and begin building it. I'm playing a modded version of Minecraft that features more activities to do. My main goal is actually to reach the moon, but I've only just started so that will be a while.

Watching me play Minecraft would be pretty boring. All I do is press the wasd keys and click my mouse every so often. It's a very simplistic game. As for the decisions I had to make, all I had to decide on is where I was going to build my base, and what I built it out of.

A game in my opinion is like a book, however, unlike a book, the story isn't always straight forward. Most of the time, you have to progress the story yourself to continue "reading" and that's not always easy.

Fun... Fun is fun you know? There's not really a good way to describe it is aside from it's just doing what you enjoy. Making a game fun is difficult, there's so much you need to think about: how does it play, who is it targeted at, what is the theme etc. You can't just throw something together and say that it's fun. In order for something to be fun, you need feedback and criticism.

Aside from needing to improve my drawing skills, I suppose I should go back and learn about making charts...

First Journal

I don't really have much of a favorite game, but I'd say I play Team Fortress 2 more than any other game. I first started playing Team Fortress 2 back in 2012, and since then it's gone through many changes, some of which I'm not too happy about but I have to live with. I'd say the best part about Team Fortress 2 is just the overall chaos that the matches can dissolve into. Like most multiplayer first person shooters, it has different gamemodes with different objectives, but the similarities stop there. Team Fortress also throws nine different classes, a multitude of unique weapons, the chance for random critical hits, and most importantly, the allure of collecting digital hats, into the mix. This combination creates a game in which just about anything can happen. One minute you could be playing a relatively normal match, and the next you'll have ceased mindless violence in favor of dancing in a giant group. In the nine years that this game has existed, it has gone from being a relatively unique online multiplayer shooter, to something that can only be described as barely organized chaos. As for improving it, I'd probably involve the community more in how the game gets updated. The last few updates have just been balancing patches with bonus weapon skins to keep the community occupied for a while.

A game designer can differ from a someone who plays video games greatly due to the fact that a designer doesn't always have to play or even like video games. Some designers are just people who wanted to try their hand at making games and found that they just happened to be good at it. I guess the similarities lie in the fact that game designers can also love video games just as much as the players themselves.

I think my greatest strength will be that I can come up with interesting stories and characters to go with them with relative ease.