Karn's Creative Process: Playing Left4Dead with strategies

I love playing computer games, especially first-person shooting games. Left4Dead is one of the best game I have ever played. I played it quite often when I was studying in Chulalongkorn University. It is the story of four survivors in zombie apocalypse. To accomplish missions in the game and keep all characters survive, four players must unite as a team to create the best strategies.

First, after we choose a chapter to play, we need to brainstorm about our strategies and tactics which could be work for that chapter. For example, if we choose swamp chapter, we should avoid walking through swamp, because it can slow us down and the different depths in the swamp might make our firing inaccurate.

When we come up with all ideas for this chapter, the next thing to do is organizing them. We start with choosing only some strategies that all members agree because lot of strategies may pop up from brainstorming but we cannot do them all. There are four missions in one chapter, and each mission requires different strategies. Therefore, we also need to put the right strategies on the right mission.

Drafting is when we open the game and play it for the first time. We might not do well and some tactics might not work. We might fail, but it is OK. It is a draft, so it can't be perfect. When we finish the first draft, we will review what happen in the game to see if the strategies we have selected are really useful or not.

Then we will revise our strategies by cutting some strategies off and adding some strategies. After that, we will go back to the drafting step again, followed by reviewing and revising.

We keep playing until we have all strategies we really need. These strategies lead to our success in the game. We will be able to complete all missions and survive until the end of the chapter. Now it's time to publish our success by showing our scores and the ending credit to other friends.