WEEK 1
This week signaled the official start of our sophomore year studies. It was the first time I learned about the GDD – Game Design Document, which contains a comprehensive set of files on game narrative, mechanics, or actual model plans.
During the summer vacation, I studied Frostpunk 2. From a developer’s perspective, I analyzed its game mechanics and thought about what processes are needed to take a game from 0 to 1, as well as the research involved. The GDD framework has provided me with a clear and reliable direction for designing my own project.
In the group activities, we brainstormed around the keyword “sports” and put forward many inspiring notes. Movement exists not only in physical movement visible to the naked eye, but also in the passage of time, pain, light and darkness. We have considered all aspects, from the movement of physical space to the flow of time, and even the movement at the emotional level. The way we think in this group activity provides a way for us to think about the direction of our game development.
WEEK 2
This week we studied the concept of game poetry: game poetry is not about ‘putting’ poetry into a game, but about transforming the expressive methods of poetry into a playable experience.
In this kind of game:
– The game does not pursue challenges, winning, or completing objectives
– Interactions are deliberately simplified
– Rhythm, repetition, blank space, and atmosphere become the main means of expression
Just as a poem does not need to clearly tell a story, game poetry does not need to explain gameplay or provide answers. In class, we also experienced many very representative games.
I try to create a slow and continuous sense of loneliness, rather than driving the narrative through events or conflicts. Players are placed in a closed and quiet space with no clear goals and no tasks to complete. Characters can walk freely, but the space will not change because of his behavior.
Tiny life forms are scattered in the environment – they will not guide players forward. When players approach them, only short and restrained words will appear. These words are not clues or hints, but more like whispers in the character’s heart. They can’t change the environment but can only confirm the emotional state of the character now. Loneliness is not set as a problem to be “solved” in the game. What the player experiences is a continuous, prolonged sense of emptiness: space is always silent, and the world is indifferent to the player’s presence.
Through minimalist visual effects, limited interaction and repetitive rhythm, I hope to make players realize that loneliness does not necessarily need to be broken. It is a real and universal experience.
WEEK 3
In this week’s course, I learned the MDA framework and emotional work diagram for the first time. This method intuitively helped me understand how to transform the core emotions that the game wants to convey into all aspects of game design.
This experience gave me a clear practical method to think about the direction of the game in the early stage of the game design document, and to grasp the overall emotional framework of the game, and to intuitively ensure that the emotions that the game wants to convey to the player are consistent with the structural design of the game.
WEEK 4
This week’s level design workshop made me realize that level design is not to “make the scene look beautiful”, but to use space to organize what players should do, what they need to learn and the emotional rhythm, which is different from the work of environmental artists.
The key points I wrote down from the lecture are: First, use the process to plan the overall rhythm and learning node of the player; then use operability/guidance to make the environment “prompt players what to do and where to go”, while using spatial orientation (landmarks, sight, etc.) to reduce the burden of getting lost and cognition.
The methodology is also very clear: first, create a flowchart of action bubbles and decompose the levels into key paragraphs; then use the gray box/block grid to verify the proportion, path and rhythm; and finally, iterate and optimize.
For my own project, this lecture reminded me not to just pile on textures and lighting, but to first break the level into Action Bubbles—like ‘enter corridor → discover clue → trigger an anomaly → unlock next segment,’ so that each part has clear learning points and emotional pacing.
In addition, I plan to design guidance and readability in the gray box stage: by using light, composition, landmarks and spatial hints to indicate directions and interaction points, reduce the possibility of players getting lost, and keep their attention on terrorist events and narrative information without being interrupted by navigation problems.
WEEK 5
I have clarified a very important point from this lecture. In the process of designing the project, we pull the “story” from the setting/background back to what players will actually experience: how players understand the world, how to make choices, how to choose to change the state of the world, and how the narrative is tied to the rhythm of the gameplay.
The first principle of narrative: design the world from the “player’s perspective”: the worldview should be clear, coherent and consistent, and avoid the randomness of “coming casually”; and the rules of the world should be able to guide your Art bible / Sound bible / level and narrative in turn, and it is a The “live document” of the continuous iteration should be dialogued with your game pillars all the time. What impressed me most was that you were not writing “the world you know” but designing “the world that players can understand”.
This is very helpful for me to design my own horror game project, allowing players to spell out clues through observation. “The story is driven by the environment”, and “plot information” can be stuffed into item placement, space layout, material damage location, sound source direction, instead of relying on dialogue/narration. For example, whether the player gets a key item/whether to trigger a ritual → the corridor light, the frequency of strange sound, the door that can be opened, and the position of the decal all change, but the map does not have to become a tree-like branch.
WEEK 6
This lecture splits the “system design” into four parts: Game Pillars → Game Loops → Meta Systems → Use tables/simulations to write and balance the system clearly.
For me, its greatest value is that it provides a set of methods “from vision to playable landing”, so that I can turn the experience I want to express into a structure that players can repeat, get feedback, and continue to promote.
Game Pillars: The core concept that the game wants to explore should be set in the early stage of the project, and the design and production should be continuously guided during the development process to help the team always align “what the game is about, and the writing style of Pillars also gives a clear standard: keep 3-6, each Title + 1–2 sentences of explanation, the more specific the better, and with the test and learning can be “consciously adjusted”, this step makes me no longer just say “I want to make a horror atmosphere”, but turn it into a testable design guideline.
Loops is a repeatable action chain, which constitutes the process that players experience; players use these mechanisms to advance progress and achieve goals. Loop is divided into two categories:
Core Game Loop: The action that the player repeats in the core gameplay (short-term target, high repetition frequency).
Meta Game Loop: Long-term promotion around the core gameplay (unlock, long-term goal, motivation system, permanent growth, etc.)
We also carry out simple design and experiments on the core pillars of the game and the game cycle in the group task, which can scrutinize whether our ideas can be implemented in the game and test whether they can support each other.
WEEK 7
This week is feedback week. I summarized the parts I have completed and the parts that need to be improved:
1. Completed part: game overview, one page of gdd and 1-6-week blog
2. What needs to be improved: My initial idea of the game is to interact with players through the traditional horror game method (monster’s face) to achieve the effect of making players afraid, but my current new idea is how to innovate this method, not to rely on the monster’s face, but to shape the atmosphere of horror through the environmental atmosphere.
WEEK 8
Conceptual art is not only “drawing beautifully”, but also an ability to translate ideas into visual language. We have discussed a lot about conceptual art and specific art styles – simply put, designers can “read” the emotions and rules of the world before hearing a dialogue through the colors, shapes, materials, light and shadows and compositions that the audience will associate with.
My understanding of this lesson is that it is teaching me to establish a more conscious set of “visual expression”. In particular, the part of semiotics touched me very much: the same visual symbols (such as red, broken walls, narrow corridors, and overexposed lights) will automatically point to a certain meaning in the eyes of players, so I can’t just rely on intuition to build the atmosphere, but also know more clearly what I want players to associate with and what they are afraid of, What to suspect – that is, to turn the “emotions I want to express” into a signal that players can receive stably.
In my own project (“Residual Fear”), the most direct help of this lesson is to give a clearer route in the “early design stage”: first clarify my visual pillars and style boundaries, and then use a more specific refer Ence board to lock every element (such as corridor material, blood stain decal shape, light source type, fog density, lens language), instead of just a general moodboard. The advantage of this is that I can maintain overall consistency according to the same set of rules in the future, whether I adjust the light, paste the material, or do the sound and picture in UE5, instead of doing it more.
I also began to realize that conceptual art is more like a “judgement”. Instead of finishing it first and then explaining it later, designers should propose a world through visual choices very early, and then constantly verify whether these choices have achieved the effect I wanted. Next, I’m going to implement this week’s content into something executable: complete the reference boards of several key components, and clearly write “why I chose it, what emotions or narrative information does it support” on each reference diagram, and update these to the blog as my the basis for subsequent production.
WEEK 9
In this week’s lecture, we focused on learning how sound shapes the player’s experience in the game. I was impressed by a clip of Bruce Lee’s martial arts played at the beginning of the lecture. The originally hot-blooded and exciting martial arts bridge became so ambiguous and strange after watching the background music, which made me realize the importance of music in the game.
Sound in the game is not “adding to better” but directly helping players understand the world and make decisions – just like, we judge the environment by ears and find invisible dangers, game audio and music subconsciously connect players and the world, providing information and context.
Nonlinear audio part: It divides audio triggers into interactive / reactive / adaptive / dynamic – some are directly triggered by the player, some are indirectly triggered by the player, and some are triggered by the game state (such as low blood volume, time, Day and night) drive, and some of them are real-time mixing (such as ducking, spatial positioning, priority cropping), which makes me realize that “horror” can actually be shaped by systematic sound logic, instead of just piling up a tense BGM.
When I do level events in the future, I should also use the same set of logic to plan: what information the sound needs to convey, how it changes with the state, and the function it plays in the player experience.
WEEK 10
This week’s core task is to understand what a good GDD is. The meaning of GDD is not to “write very long and professionally”, but to let everyone have the same picture of the same game in their minds, and developers can immediately know “what tasks I have to do, how long it will take, and what to do first”. It also clearly distinguishes between Pitch Deck and GDD: Pitch is more like a high-level overview used to “attract people/take resources”, while GDD is a “landing instructions”. It relies on many diagrams and references to explain the details, and the focus is to write on the points that others are willing to read.
It taught me how to disassemble the “play”: instead of writing “make a platform jump system”, but list the small systems such as movement, animation, collision, attack, attack, failure status, resurrection point, enemy, environmental damage, upgrade, victory conditions one by one, and then use a gameplay loop. The diagram clearly draws “what players are doing every minute, what challenges they encounter, what will happen if they do well/bad, and how the next experience will change” – even a simple example of Tetris requires asking about the number of shapes and how it is generated.
Finally, back to project management, it forced me to ask: What exactly is MVP/vertical slice? Which ones can be cut? Where is the real time black hole? – This is very helpful for me to write my own GDD, because it allows me to forcefully align “ideas” and “work lists that can be made” instead of just writing a good-looking setting.
TO
BE
CONTINUED…
