Reflections

Greetings, everyone. My name is Teng Kwok Sang, I am one of the members of XP Studios and at the same time an undergraduate (2022) from Taylor’s University. I am specializing in Cyber Security meanwhile having Game Design as extension.

Throughout the module, I had experienced the face-to-face learning, face-to-face discussion, face-to-face teamworking, face-to-face honest opinions towards the existing prototype, and more. Before I started this module, I had no idea at all about how the process of creating a game with a team feels like and what knowledge is required. But at the end of the semester, after us XP Studios successfully created the game, “Oh, my Dishes!”, together, I learnt and experienced what the process of creating a game feel like. It isn’t as easy as what I initially thought, it takes a lot more assistance, effort, and knowledge than what I expected. Other than that, the interaction between me and my groupmates shows me how good it feels to have everyone cooperating for one goal.

From my perspective, our game “Oh, my Dishes!” is a successful game, which includes the element of AR, boardgame, and VR if desired. It can help the players to get to know more about Malaysia traditional food from various ethnics in gaming way of learning.

Finally, I would like to thank each and every one of my groupmates. They are very responsible and teamworking in executing the distributed tasks. The members are also follow through on their commitments towards the meeting and discussion session which occurs twice each week during lecture and tutorial classes. I hope our game can deliver the core concept of spreading the knowledge of Malaysia traditional food to each and every player. Once again, I appreciate the help from my groupmates, they are the best, without any of them we wouldn’t be able to create our game, I appreciate all the help I received throughout the journey, thank you!

Throughout this module, I was able to learn a lot about how games came about in our society and its evolution from the physical era to the digital era. It was inspiring to do research and review games that had a great impact of the live of people who played those games and to see the processes that the games went through during their lifespan. Besides that, this module gave me a lot of exposure to see other game genres and the games that other that my peers play. Everyone had different preferences when it comes to the games they play so it was very eye-opening to know what were their views on different games. The lecturer was also a big help throughout the module especially during the development of our game prototype. He helped us by giving his view and comments on our game feel and design which benefited us as we were able to get feedback from a different perspective.

It's a fun module! At first, I was very lost in this module as everyone that takes this module plays digital games, but I do not. I cannot join in their conversion and feel like I do not belong here. However, I do love playing tabletop games, and I realize that I should not limit my definition of a game to digital games only. Hence, I tried to share my experience in playing tabletop game with my group mates and also classmates. Besides, in the ideation stage, I was glad that I have experience in playing different tabletop games, and this truly inspired me to come up with some ideas for the game we created.

I was very happy with our outcome for the Oh, My Dishes! game, but the only disappointing thing was that our game was restricted to the tabletop simulator and not everyone could play it. Only those who have a tabletop simulator account can play :(. This is also one of the reasons that we could not have played tests with other groups, as we have a limited tabletop simulator account. If we did a physical prototype, this might not happen, and we could also play with our friends physically.

Last but not least, I really enjoy working with my group mates. All of them are responsible, and I believe we have demonstrated great teamwork too. I would also like to thank my group mates for their understanding and giving me mental support during these hectic weeks as I am dealing with different assignments.

I've enjoyed this module a lot throughout the whole process. First, the brainstorming and research part. It lets me to broaden my scope on board games, we got the chance to play various of them and it the way of design, game play and game mechanics has inspired me while doing our own tabletop. Then we confirmed our direction of working, which was the food theme. The ideation process of gameplay and game mechanics are burning our brain out, we test play, we dind problems and we solve it. This trial and error process takes a long time, but everything was worth it when I saw our final product.

The tabletop went well, and even perfect I would say. It's out of my expectation. The only regret was not doing a physical prototype so that everyone are able to play and we're able to show off to others about it, haha. I also hope that we will have the chance to gather the whole class together again, and play each other's games! I believe that this would really be great!

We even had a chance to experience AR games! The vortex lab was so impressive and I wish that we will still be able to use the lab in our future studies! I was glad that I have such helpful and tolerant teammates, we had get along well, and working together with them make the process cheerful! Lastly, a big thank you to our lecturer, Mr Charles who was guiding us and providing his useful inspects to us throughout the process. Words can't express much but the whole experience was very meaningful to me, and this module has definitely accelerated my interest on games in every form.