Reading Response #6 Leyth Toubassy November 6th, 2022 Music 256a / CS476a, Stanford University Reading Response: Video Game Design In this chapter of Artful Design I really got to see some of the elements that make my favorite games so enjoyable feel so fun to play. I know that sometimes people say that one of the best ways to become a better game designer is to play tons of games, but honestly, I kind of disagree. Long term I really want to make video games, and over the years I've tried to come up with some cool game ideas but I really think playing as many games as I have has almost limited me in a way. I often find myself feeling like any idea I come up with is just the combination of some set of games I've already played. Often times I'll become really passionate about some original idea and start researching and find that someone already made it. Until recently anyways, finally this summer me and some friends came up with an idea that simply doesn't exist right now (I'm not going to say what it is because my friends are paranoid about someone making it before us haha). After starting to actualy develop this game I've realized how foolish it was of me to try to come up with a great design before opening Unity all these years. Already in the few months that we've been working (suuuuuper on and off I don't think I've written a line of since the quarter started :| ) it's already amazing to see how far the (pretty jank) husk of a prototype we have now has come from our original designs. For some context our game is a rythm game and when we started we envisioned a classic four button DDR type game, and while I was coding it up I just kind of messed around with some of the attributes and ended up with this conceptually similar experience that plays entirely differently. Even though we aren't very far yet I'm really excited to implement some of the stuff Ge talked about in artful design, especially the stuff regarding progression, since that's my favorite part of any game. Overall I'm really happy to have learned the lesson that even two games that sound similar when described, usually become totally different when actually implemented.