Lecture 17 - Game Feel.key

CS 325
Intro to Game Design
Spring 2014
George Mason University
Yotam Gingold
Announcements
• Filming? Friday?
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• Final project groups (Thursday vs. Tuesday)
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• Game Mechanic Explorer
Where are we?
Date
Topic
Tues April 22
Game feel
Thurs April 24
Playtesting each others games
Tues April 29
Something fun?
Thurs May 1
Final presentations
Tues May 6
Final presentations
Groups
Team
Bearly Games
Capcom Squadron
Colorize
Dungeon Crawler
Game
Bear is Driving
Capcom Squadron
Colorize
I Bought a Dungeon
Embrasure
Embrasure
Grey Arena
Grey Arena
Hourse Dojo Development studios
Snag
TR Studios
Visitors
Weather Vanes
Hourse Racing 2014: Solar Warfare
Snag
Space Maze 2014 Deluxe
Visitors
Escape Flyer
Game Feel
Steve Swink
Game Feel
• The tactile sensation of manipulating a digital agent.
• The thing that makes your mom lean in her chair as she
plays Rad Racer.
• Proxied embodiment.
• The sensation of controlling a digital object is one of
the most powerful phenomena ever to emerge from
the intersection of people and computers
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Overlooked?
• Mostly subconscious
• Combination of sights, sounds, and instant response to
action
• “Know it when you feel it”
• If it’s off by a bit, game doesn’t feel right.
• It it’s “responsive”, “tight”, and “deep”, it can be
magical.
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Mario 64
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Mario 64
• Especially where there’s very little pressure or structure,
it’s fun just to run and bounce and spin and experience
the sheer kinetic joy of controlling Mario.
• Control, intent, and instructions flow from player into
the game as quickly as player can think.
• Feedback returns just as quickly, letting the player
adjust and fine-tune their instructions.
• What’s behind the magic? The feel.
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Mario 64
• 20-something hours: completing the game, defeating
Bowser, getting all 120 stars
• Every hour or two: completing a ‘boss’ battle
• Every half an hour: getting access to a new area or
painting
• Every 5 minutes or so: completing an objective,
getting a star
• Moment to Moment: steering around, running,
jumping, performing acrobatic maneuvers
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Mario 64
• Before any real levels were made, Mario ran around a
“garden.”
• A lot of the animation was done before any of the
game.
• They spent a lot of time on swimming.
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Steps to recreate
1. Create a gameplay garden for experimenting with
mechanics, objects, and game feel.
2. ?
3. Profit
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I’ll just polish at the end
• The feel of a game is given a backseat in the
production of the game.
• If your player is going to spend most of her time
steering and controlling the avatar, experiencing a
sense physicality and control, shouldn’t the amount of
time you spend on that feeling be commensurate?
• Your game design should include game feel.
• Prototype the game feel with a test that approximates
the final, polished feel of interacting with the game.
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Game feel
• Input: How the player can express their intent to the system.
• Response: How the system processes, modifies, and responds
to player input in real time.
• Context: How constraints give spatial meaning to motion.
• Polish: The interactive impression of physicality created by the
harmony of animation, sounds, and effects with input-driven
motion.
• Metaphor: The ingredient that lends emotional meaning to
motion and provides familiarity to mitigate learning frustration.
• Rules: Application and tweaking of arbitrary variables that give
additional challenge and higher-level meaning to motion and
control.
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Input
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Input
• The only way a player can “speak” to the game
• The tactile feel of the input device
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• Your game will automatically feel better if you hook it up to an
Xbox 360 controller compared to a keyboard.
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Natural mapping
• A clear, intuitive relationship between possible actions
and their effect on the system.
• Stove burners and dials:
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Natural mapping
• Geometry wars:
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Sensitivity
• A rough measure of the amount of expressiveness
inherent in a particular input device.
• Button has very little sensitivity
(on or off)
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• Computer mouse has a lot more
(two axes of sensitivity)
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Sensitivity
• Consider the sensitivity of your input device relative to
how fluid and expressive you want your game to be.
• Additional sensitivity generally means additional
complexity (for the player).
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Response
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Zuma
• The frog rotates in place and faces the mouse.
• This reduces mouse’s inherent sensitivity.
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Strange Attractors
• Single button turns on gravity wells.
• Player still has fluid & subtle control over their ship.
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Reaction sensitivity
• Reaction sensitivity: sensitivity created by mapping
user input to game reaction to produce more (or less)
sensitivity in the overall system.
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• This mapping is where the core of game feel is
defined.
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NES Controller
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Sensitivities
• Mario has sensitivity across time, across combinations
of buttons, and across states.
• Sensitivity across time:
• Mario speeds up gradually from rest to his maximum speed,
and slows gradually back down again.
• Mario’s motion is dampened to simulate friction and inertia (in
a crude way).
• Holding down the jump button
longer means a higher jump.
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Sensitivities
• Mario has sensitivity across time, across combinations
of buttons, and across states.
• Sensitivity across combinations of buttons:
• Holding down the jump and left directional pad buttons
simultaneously resulted in a jump that flowed to the left. The
combination of buttons has a different meaning from pressing
them individually.
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Sensitivities
• Mario has sensitivity across time, across
combinations of buttons, and across states.
• Sensitivity across states:
• Pressing left while “on the ground” has a different meaning
than pressing left while “in the air.”
• This is a contrived distinction which is designed into the game
and lends greater
sensitivity to the system so long
as the player can correctly interpret
when the state switch has occurred
and respond accordingly.
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Donkey Kong
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Context
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Context
! Reaction sensitivity: sensitivity created by mapping
user input to game reaction to produce more (or less)
sensitivity in the overall system.
!
! This mapping is where the core of game feel is
defined.
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Context
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Context
• Constraints define sensation.
• The placement of objects in the world is a set of
variables against which to balance movement speed,
jump height, and all the other parameters that define
motion.
• If objects are packed in, spaced tightly relative to the
avatar’s motion, the game will feel clumsy and
oppressive, causing anxiety and frustration.
• As objects get spaced further apart, the feel becomes
increasingly trivialized, making tuning unimportant and
numbing thoughtless joy into thoughtless boredom.
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Context
• Build some kind of test environment as you create the system
of variables you’ll eventually tune into good game feel.
• This is your “Magic Garden” of game feel: if you can make it
exceedingly pleasurable to interact with the game at this most
basic level, you’ve got a superb foundation for enjoyable
gameplay.
• Put things into the garden; build a playground of interesting
things. Take note of your interactions.
• Think about a “standard unit” (width of jump, width of road
and angle of turns).
• Steve Swink likes to start by throwing in a wide variety of
primitives without worrying about spacing.
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Polish
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Polish
• Sprays or dustings of particles when things hit or
interact.
• Screen shake.
• View angle shifts.
• Squash and stretch.
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Mark Kennedy, sevencamels.blogspot.com
Polish
• Do this at the same time as you build context (your
garden).
• Convey the physical properties of objects through their
motion and interaction.
• Take inspiration from film, animation, and the world
around you.
• When prototyping, list cues and sort them according to
the physical impression you want to convey.
• Polish is a notorious time sink, so limit yourself.
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Example: Squishy
• If something is squishy, it will deform in a certain way, like
a water balloon or silly putty.
• Sounds: squelching and schlucking noises, like walking
through deep mud, or kneading wet dough with your hands.
• Motion: The thing must deform and bend when it comes into
contact with other objects, especially relative to speed.
• Tactile: You can easily deform, mold, or stretch the thing.
• Visual: To aid the impression of squishiness, the thing could look
moist like a slug, translucent with tiny bubbles like Jello, or
amorphous like putty or clay.
• Sound: Any movement or deformation of the object should be
accompanied by squelching noises.
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Metaphor
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Metaphor
• Think of a racing game:
• Now substitute for the car a giant, bald fat guy running
as fast as he possibly can spraying sweat like a sprinkler
in August.
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Metaphor
• We have preconceived notions about the way a car
should handle.
• We have preconceived notions about the way a horse
should handle.
• Don’t limit yourself to everyday objects; look at how
you can use preloaded conceptions to set up, and
execute on, expectations for how a thing should feel &
behave when controlled.
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Rules
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Rules
• Longer period objectives to give additional meaning to
the sensation of control and mastery.
• If you’ve been “noodling around” with a mechanic for a
couple hours, you’ve probably already made up little
goals for yourself:
• Race from point A to point B
• Scale this tall mountain (get to the top of the hill)
• Rescue five wayward puppies
• Collect X coins
• Sort things into colored bins
• Perform a trick
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Rules
• High order goals define game feel at a different level:
sustainability.
• Add longer period goals to find out if your motion has
depth.
• Find challenges that could become a sustainable
game.
• This becomes game design proper.
• Start throwing a bunch of these goals into your garden.
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Conclusion
• The first, last, and most common thing a player will
experience when playing your game is its feel.
• If you have good game feel, your game is going to feel
good at its most basic level.
• The spacing of objects is in harmony with the tuning of
your controls.
• In testing, you will feel yourself building skills that
might give rise to longer period interactions.
• Add goals for the rules to test if they’re sustainable.
• You’re on your way to a great-feeling game!
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Next Time
• Playtesting each others’ games