It wasn’t easy, but, it was worth it.
After several classes on how to develop an educational game, I learned that a game consists of 3 major building blocks (game mechanics, dynamics, and aesthetics), that highlight the rules that define the game, how everything behaves, how the player interacts with the game-world, and what the game offers that is found interesting and entertaining.
At first, I thought that designing a game was an effortless process, but the fact that it took me and my group nearly 10 days just to come up with the basic idea of the game was quite enough, for us, to admit the difficulty of developing an educational game. So, we started organizing several group meetings, to layout all our ideas. In these meetings I realized that, as a group we maintained deferred judgment, we let all the suggestions flow taking them all into consideration, so that we could build on each other’s work and come up with great ideas. As a group, we all wanted to step outside of the box and develop a game that was not the mainstream; so, we developed a game containing 7 stages of diverse difficulty levels (questions and activities) making it similar to escape games. We were inspired by our class, thus the learning outcomes of the game were time management (players are only given 10-15 minutes) and creativity.
During the game developing process, I learned that teamwork is the key to success, my group and I worked collectively to bear all the pressure and the tasks. I also learned time management, since we only got two weeks to choose the game idea, come up with the questions and activities, and play-test. Moreover, I learned that people believe that they are a lot less creative than they actually are, when they played our game they were very surprised.
Fortunately, after play-testing we got plenty of positive feedback; although most of the contestants were unable to reach stage 7 in the given period of time, they were still eager to continue the game after the time collapsed, which made me, and my group, extremely proud. Something that also raised our morale, was when Dr Maha told us that our game was the most visited game, since this course started. The only thing that I would improve not change, if I had more time, would be trying to come up with different questions or topics for each stage so that the game could be adjusted to various age groups.
Not Made to be Subtle 
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