Week 1

The first week of COMOS was an exciting experience. We started off COSMOS with an opening orientation where we learned about how COSMOS is run, functions, and works. The orientation set us up for the first official day of COSMOS academics. In my first cluster session, we went over how the class would work and a simple explanation of what each week would be focused on. For our first activity, we split into groups of five and each received two random cards. The activity was to create the best poker hand with the available cards. This simple activity allowed me to get to know the other people in my group. After this, we went over the definition of a game and various player archetypes. We needed to define the different types of audiences in order to understand what games will appeal to them. This would be helpful later on when it came to making our own projects because it is important to know our games' intended audience in order to make games that would be entertaining for them. In our second session, we started with the five ways to begin our lesson on design frameworks. The five ways is a simple process where we start with a statement and need to make our way to the root cause in five ways. This then led to Zubek's design framework which has two different pipelines, one from the perspective of the player and one from the perspective of the designer on how they go through different things to get something. For the player, they go through the mechanics and gameplay in order to get a certain feeling which is the player experience. The process is the opposite for the designer because they should first start with something they want the player to experience and then go back from that. In order to better understand mechanics and gameplay, we learned about different design elements and filled out a document that showed the examples of them in action in a pre-existing game. This allowed us to apply our newly learned knowledge and see it in action in a real game. For our next session of the day, we used the constraint-o-matic in order to attempt to design a game based on six different things. It was a way to learn about design and how to use our ideas and apply them to make an actual game. For the third session, we used the processing application in order to do programming. We went over programming process fundamentals such as pseudocoding and flowcharts. We did some simple exercises as a class and ended the class with everyone attempting to code pong on processing using their modified java. This session was primarily for our instructors to get a feel for everyone's programming ability and to provide some good programming habits like checking documentation and commenting on code. The fourth session of our cluster was focused on prototyping and iteration. We went over the process of game development which is primarily made up of polishing, and playtesting. We looked through different ways to create prototypes and focused on physical prototypes. The class was assigned to make a paper prototype of a pre-existing game in groups. The main lesson from this session was to be okay with prototypes that weren't completely polished. This can be seen in the strict time limit for creating the paper prototype which prevented the prototype from being as complete as they could have been. The last session of the week was based on playtesting. We focused primarily on narrative and how we want the players to feel from playing our game. Playtesting was pointed out as a way to see if the player can feel what we want them to feel and how it is important to take notes from what worked when playtesting and what didn't. The lesson taught us that it was important to playtest as much as possible in order to best allow our games to follow our ideas. We applied the principles learned in class by adding in a twist to a role-playing game and recording notes on player feedback and reactions to our twists. In only one week of COSMOS, I feel that I have learned a lot about game design. These lessons were a great way for me to get exposure to the design of games, which is something I didn't have a lot of experience with. I learned a lot about the technical aspects of coding, but COSMOS allowed me to learn about the more abstract design process of creating games. I can't wait for another next week of COSMOS!