Naches (n): The glow of pleasure-plus-pride that only a child can give to its parents.
Kvell (v): To beam-with-immense-pride-and-pleasure, most commonly over the achievement of a child or grandchild; to be so proudly happy your buttons can bust.- Leo Rosten, 1968 (The Joys of Yiddish)-
I just finished marking my students’ first game projects – 20 or so board and card games in the last three days. And I’m intensely proud and happy about the quality of the stuff they made this semester. My lecturer said that she thought this semester’s games were a lot more interesting than last semester’s ones. I don’t know whether it’s because our teaching was good or whether we just happened to get a great bunch of students this semester, but the majority of the projects were great!
Seriously, I think some of the best ones are almost ready for commercial release. Gameplay and production quality were both excellent, and they’re extremely fun games of a large variety. We had everything from party games making silly poses, to abstract strategy and war games, games of logic and deduction, games involving letters and numbers, and even a physics-based marble game (mixed with spelling). These are some of the prototyping sessions we had in the early stages of development, of three games that eventually turned out very well, and the video trailer for one of the best games at the end of the project:
Railway
Scarrom
Word Warz
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