PARRY!

Hello, my name is Khanh (Tom) Nguyen. I am a second-year Business Administration major. As someone from Asia, I have always considered gaming a technical skill, with player mechanics the most important factor in competitive games. This is why I created PARRY!, a game where the only objective is to achieve a high score based on your timing in parrying a sword, dodging, or blocking. I chose this not only for its replayability but also for my own amusement, as I wanted a game to serve as a practice tool for my real competitive parry games.

There are only 3 main player movements: F-tap to Parry, F-hold to Block, Q to dodge, with a posture bar to avoid holding block forever. I set the Parry and dodge frames to a 0.3-second window to match most major games, but I also added an option for players to set their own dodge and parry timings to match their games. The game was initially very black, grimy, and red, which made it really hard to replay; thus, I made it brighter and more arcadey to make it feel like a practice tool/replayable game rather than a life-or-death scenario. I chose not to really have any story behind the game nor a full thing to “beat,” as it really wasn’t what I wanted or enjoyed in what I was trying to create. It needed to be something that is very replayable, but you can also hop off in the middle of it while waiting for something else, like “queueing up” for a competitive online match.

The main mechanics of the game were indeed collaborative; the score streak, posture bar, health loss, and health gain were all collaborative. However, the design aspect of how the game looks, especially the “Master Swordsman,” was all Claude. I tweaked the sword's sound, as that is the most satisfying part of a parry-based game, and also made it so you can mute the music while keeping the sound effects. Overall, I believe there were at least 10 variations in the game, with slight adjustments. The biggest hurdle was definitely how to adjust the sound, as I could not watch YouTube videos to base it on that sound, so instead I had to describe what the sound is like and what to do.

I do believe that, in some respects, it is my game as well, but I would not take credit for being the “developer”. In many games, there is always a spokesperson or owner who can hire these developers to create the game, and I think it is a similar situation here where I came up with the idea and, through my “tokens,” hired Claude to make the game for me.

AI DISCLOSURE:

I used it mainly for the code, not for idea generation, since I knew exactly what I wanted to make. Using the prompt stated in the homework, I developed my idea, and after 13 variations, I was happy with what I created. These iterations can be categorized as 4 mechanical changes and 9 QOL, audio, and visual changes. I had a very tough time correcting the sound effects and music, but ended up in the right direction at the end.