A game developer
Game Design is a project-based graduate course at Carnegie Mellon University taught brilliantly by Jesse Schell. The class focuses on the mechanics and processes of good game design, via lectures given by Schell and the design and implementation of games in several formats. Students must design and develop these games based on given constraints and iterate on them, documenting the process thoroughly.
As a programmer, I took this class in order to broaden my skills and learn about a subject that would make me a better team player in a game development group. Below are the links to the assignments that were completed for this course. All documents are in PDF format.
The course's first assignment is to redesign Hopscotch. Over the period of one week, students must come up with at least 50 possible redesign ideas, flesh out three and implement one. The idea to be implemented must be iterated upon at least three times.
A Google Spreadsheet containing every game I have ever played. There are some that I have missed, no doubt, and there are others whose names are in my native language Spanish. Some of them you may not recognize because they are from Bogotá, Colombia. I try to keep it up to date as much as I can, as well as comment on each game to some degree.
A two week-long assignment with the goal of designing a dice game that had to go through at least 12 play testing sessions and iterations. Special emphasis had to be made on interpreting playtester's feedback. I designed a cross between Jenga! and a regular dice game.
This assignment required students to design a three hour-long adventure campaign for any tabletop roleplaying system, and run it for three players. I created an adventure game based on the ever-popular Macross universe. The final report includes an analysis of Interest Curves drawn by each player.
This assignment required students to work on a freestyle game of our own choice. I teamed with a fellow student and decided to expand upon our love of LucasArts graphic adventure games (think Maniac Mansion, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, Monkey Island, Full Throttle and Grim Fandango). Our game prototype was built using Lassie Adventure Studio, a game engine for these kind of games written in Flash.