Unlike the previous speaker, who was an independent game developer, this speaker is a game designer working within a game company. She explained what a junior game designer typically does within the company; since I had already completed a summer internship at a game studio, this information served more as a supplement to what I already knew.
For me, the most compelling aspect of this lecture was the part about game balancing and numerical values.
During the demo development process, I often struggled with how to design the damage values for the monsters within the levels in order to demonstrate my ability to design and plan combat stats in this project. The instructor suggests that designers should calculate the potential damage players might take, use playtesting to evaluate whether the difficulty is reasonable, and then make adjustments to the number of enemies, their stats, or the map layout.
Her suggestion gave me some ideas. I think I’ll start by focusing on the gameplay experience: when I want players to feel a sense of tension and excitement, I’ll keep the stat gap between the player and the enemies relatively small; conversely, when I want players to enjoy the thrill of completely overpowering their foes, I’ll ensure the player’s stats are significantly higher. Of course, these are just theoretical outcomes; in practice, I’ll likely begin by designing the player’s progression curve to ensure that the intended experience is actually achieved during specific combat encounters.
Based on my current design experience, I prefer to first define the specific player experience I want to create, and then use that as a foundation to design elements such as level difficulty and the numerical values for players and enemies. This might become my design style moving forward.