#game feel

[openworldadventurer]

How Gamey is Your Game?

One of the silliest arguments that serious designers often get into.

The silliest argument that game designers get into, and why it’s a serious consideration: when is your game “too gamey”?

[alkaliii]

Jul 13, 2021

posting videos on tumblr seems to be a billion times more enjoyable than trying to post them on twitter. oh and yea now the characters move a bit when they do stuff.

[breadknight-likes-things]

Halo 3: ODST Makes Being Weak Fun!

“Powerless” is not the word I would use to describe how the lead character feels to play in the 2009 Halo Spin-off “ODST”, but I also wouldn’t use “Powerful”.  Landing somewhere in the middle of hapless civilian and the series regular, an 8 foot tall super cyborg named “Master Chief”, “The Rookie” and his ODST squad mates are not all powerful killing machines, but damn are they fun to play.   Somewhere along the line making this game, Bungie made the excellent decision to make you the player, vulnerable as hell.  Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t a tactical shooter by any means.  You can still jump inexplicably high, blast dozens of enemies by yourself and even somehow carry large turret weapons around like they were a few bags of groceries, but you can’t do it all.  You can be sniped if you’re not staying aware.  Your health can go from 100-0 in seconds if you get overwhelmed.  Even enemies you may be used to taking out left and right in other Halo games pose much more significant threats to you even just on their own, let alone in the large groups they still travel in.   

There’s an excellent line drawn in this game where you’re clearly noticeably weaker than the series usual protagonist, but it’s that same division that gives ODST it’s unique flavor.  ODST is fun in it’s own unique way even among the other Halo games (Which it largely feels identical to game feel wise) because of the limitations of your characters relative weakness imposes upon you.  It even helps that it’s set in a place fans of the franchise already fondly remember, specifically because they spent their time there tearing bad guys up with little effort.  Suddenly that same setting and those same enemies get new life breathed into them.  ODST isn’t a perfect game (too much backtracking!)  but it’s one hell of a unique experience for the kind of small scale spin-off it really is.

[blubberquark]

Fix Your Isometric Controls!

This is a pet peeve of mine: I push the right arrow key, and my player character goes in any direction other than right!

It applies equally to games with isometric pixel graphics, games with isometric 3D graphics (orthographic projection), and grid-based games with 3D graphics (perspective projection), where the 2D grid is angled 45° against the camera.

I have mostly encountered it on the Ouya, because I played so many isometric games on there, and I had to play them all with a game controller. I rarely see isometric puzzle games that get the gamepad-based character controls right, instead many puzzle games I play use an axis-aligned view and avoid this problem altogether, or they use mouse controls.

Arrow Keys

When your isometric game is played with the D-pad, arrow keys, or WASD, there is no choice but to pick an “up“ direction. In any case, your controls may be misaligned by 45° compared to the keyboard or controller, or by 30° and 60° depending on the direction (45° on average).

Either up is North-East (the more common choice), or up is North-West. If up means NE, then right means SE, down means SW, and left means NW.

This mock-up shows a stick-figure character in an isometric world where up means North-East: When up is pressed on the D-pad, the character moves one square into the North-East direction. The way this is represented in the code doesn’t matter to the player, whether the NE-SW axis is x, y, or z does not impact the feel of the controls.

When right is pressed, the character moves into the South-East direction.

If the movement is not constricted to the grid, directional controls could be aligned with the screen, so that up corresponds to North on the screen, but in this case your character would either constantly run into walls at a 45° angle (in world-space), or the player would have to push two buttons to walk at most times.

If player movement is constrained to discrete grid steps, pushing two buttons might trigger two consecutive steps where the player only intended to make one.

One solution to this could be to only move the player character when the second directional button is pressed and one is already held down, but while this removes ambiguity, it is cumbersome and may be physically impossible to do on some gamepads.

The best way to go is to let the player choose between NE, NW, and eight-way-D-pad configurations, and to allow key rebinding and numpad arrows on the desktop.

Unfortunately, my Ouya controller only had a four-way D-pad. It had two analog sticks though. I could play isometric puzzle games with the analog stick, and I could move the stick diagonally, corresponding to the axes on the screen.

Except often enough, the games converted the analog sticks into cardinal directions, so I couldn’t point diagonally to go where I wanted.

And if I tried to anyway, I would end up right on the 45° border between up and right, so 50% of the time, this happened:

Because I was one degree off the diagonal, I was 90° off in world space!

Pushing the analog stick in the direction I saw on the screen felt natural and intuitive, so this happened a lot.

Please, game developers, don’t let this happen to your players! Support 8-way D-pads when possible, and don’t let Unity just convert the X and Y axes of the left gamepad analog stick into arrow keys.

Please read the analog stick one the gamepad, and interpret it like this:

NE corresponds to x=+1.0, y=-1.0. You can do a simple change of basis transformation by computing the dot product between the x,y vector of your analog stick and the NE and SE vectors.

Don’t just use the default Unity3D InputManager! Let players move on the screen without rotating the map in their heads!

[abnormoinfo]

[syzygyzip]

Basic Premises of Game-Entrainment

Game-entrainment is psychosimulation therapy. It describes any act of participation in a game whose effects extend into the unconscious mind of the player.  To an extent, all gaming is entrainment. Whether the player is dropping blocks, zapping aliens, or kicking balls, they are, in different measure, inhabiting these games. When the player partitions part of their mind into the game world, and actions are performed upon that projected part, those actions affect the whole of the psyche. This is the basic premise of alchemy, and much has been written about the participation mystique in theater, dance, visual art, fishing, archery, tea ceremony, and almost every other human endeavor under the sun. But gaming offers a unique capacity in this task, and it deserves much more attention.

How is gaming different from other art forms? Well, let’s not get bogged down in that. But we can say briefly: in a game you perform actions (as in dance), within an artistically constructed fixed field (as in film). No other medium can offer that experience. Though you perform in theater and dance, those actions occur within the boundless and unpredictable domain of physical reality. And while a film presents a defined field of observation, it is not subject to alteration by its witness. Only gaming offers movement and performance within the confines of the fixed field.

Under any circumstance, focusing on a fixed field becomes a potential vessel for conditioning the psyche. It’s not uncommon for people to come away with their personalities transformed from looking at a painting or closely studying an anthill. The special efficacy of gaming in this endeavor is due to the immediacy of acting within the vessel and the clear delineation of permitted actions. To expedite the process further, games often give the player a clear entry point for the “I”: an avatar into which a player can more consciously self-associate. So while the entire game is microcosmically representative of the player’s psyche, the player-character provides a handy vehicle for mediation (akin to the ego). This projection of the ego into the player-character is relatively obvious (we say “I made the jump!” even though it is Mario who has jumped).

The player-character may or may not act as a reliable representative of the game as a whole, because they will have some semblance of their own identity. That is to say, no avatar can be a totally neutral instrument of mediation; even a single pixel will inspire some affective response in the player. There can be no accounting for the idiosyncrasies of each player’s relationship to their player-character.  How much of ourselves do we consciously recognize in this avatar? Which aspects of our personality does this avatar encourage us to access? This representative of our conscious will is not a clear cast into which we pour ourselves, and our relationship to this intermediary figure will evolve as we play. All this is to say that game-entrainment derives from identification with the gestalt game experience, of which the player-character is only a part.

Of course there is no set way to initiate this style of gaming. Entrainment is just something that happens when we play any game. We throw ourselves – to varying degree – into the game, and what transpires there is suggestive to the unconscious psyche. It is then helpful to bring conscious reflection to the events of the game through interpretation. But again, there is no rulebook, for the same reason that there are no true dream dictionaries.* No generic codification can be assigned to these processes because the disposition of the player, the game itself, and the relationship between the player and the game each hold countless idiosyncrasies. In order to understand how a particular play experience has conditioned the mind, it is most helpful to remain open and honest in your own impressions, and freely associate from there. What events from the game stood out? What did they remind you of? And so on.

While it is helpful to have an attitude of openness to interpretation during gameplay, it is even more helpful to play naturally. Entrainment occurs most efficiently during experiences of immersion. Gamers have pointed out that there are two primary types of immersion: mechanical and narrative, and that a flow state emerges when the two immersions are in harmony. For this reason, I would argue that games which elicit elevated concentration from the player are more effective in this practice. Concentration can be coaxed by the demands of precision movements, as in all manner of action games: shooters, bullet hells, platformers, MOBAs, fighting games. This is representative of mechanical immersion. Concentration can also be seduced into elevation by rich diegetic elements, common in sandbox games, RPGs, visual novels, detective games. This is representative of the so-called narrative immersion. It seems that an increased focus on either count leads to a denser self-projection, and all the more so when the two immersions are acting in concert.

There is one more premise of game-entrainment that is most elusive. When the mind is partitioned into these projections within games, it typically requires very selective attention. On one level, the visual vocabulary of the game is inculcated until recognition is immediate. Think of cherries, coins, blue and green potions: color-and-form compositions that indicate some beneficial effect. Then there are objects that are detriments. There are also objects that are neutral, objects that produce a random effect, and objects whose effect changes depending on other conditions. There are objects with intelligence and objects that are totally passive. The player quickly learns to codify these objects based on the expected result of interaction with them. In a modern game, there are tons of these signifiers that require different anticipations. It is no longer a dichotomy of “touching this is good, touching that is bad,” but a complex tapestry of visual elements that require individual discernment in how they are treated by the player.

So beyond acclimating to the concrete signifiers, the player also develops a fluency for the game’s patterns. Objects and events often come in specific formations. Routines and gestures are repeated. Enemies have intended or unintended tells. Certain events have rules about what precedes or follows. The player becomes intimately familiar with certain situations. In that familiarity, the player both develops conscious responses to game conditions (like learning a combo), and unconsciously accrues a lexicon of habits and shorthands (throwing a bomb at a certain enemy because that’s what you did last time).

When we distribute our focus into similar formations repeatedly, we develop postures of attention. Anyone who has played enough Tetris to see the blocks fall as they fall asleep can testify to this. This suggests that the mental hotkeys that we develop from observing patterns and responding in postures extend beyond the game and into the inner world. We find our dreams inflected with game scenarios, or that these same scenarios are overlaid upon our perception of the world in small eruptions of fantasy. When a posture of attention bleeds into other orders of phenomenal experience, that indicates to me that something new is being accessed in the recesses of the psyche – some formerly unconscious content is coming into view. I would suppose that the particular nature of the content would have some isomorphic relationship to the posture of attention, but is not wholly represented by it.

So, in allowing ourselves to be conditioned by games, we should consider not just the aesthetics and the gameplay, but also how the mind is situated in its task. Each of these elements contributes to gamefeel, the feeling of participating in games. The more aspects of a game that can be consciously understood by the player, the more material there is with which to interpret and appreciate the psycho-simulative process. Conscious game-entrainment is a valuable tool for understanding one’s own mind, providing a designated space to negotiate the complexes of the unconscious. VR games are already being considered for clinical use in the treatment of phobias, and researchers have designed a video game that functions as a CBT course. There are also the countless testimonies of people who intuitively turned to gaming as an instrument of self-care in response to a variety of behavioral disorders.

In addition to its direct therapeutic application, conscious game-entrainment has another important social capacity: the cultivation of new aesthetic fluencies. Video games and other digital media have already profoundly changed our visual habits and comprehensions (as the rising fields of UX and UI can attest). There is no common system of signification to describe the attentional postures (much less the embodied experience) demanded by new media. Yet to best appreciate and employ the forms of the current culture, we need to sensitize ourselves to their affective functioning. In their classic survey of visual media, Practices of Looking, Sturken and Cartwright lay it out: “Digital imaging’s multiplicity of perspectives and its openings for multiple entry points and potential for new combinations of [players] and objects suggest many possible entry points into engagement in the ongoing making of worlds and worldviews.” The broader our awareness of our self-association within the virtual, and the more definition given to the sense-impressions derived therein, the more we as players are able to intentionally participate in the transformation of our worldview.

It also seems self-explanatory that video games as a creative medium would benefit from players and developers consciously exploring styles of symbolic engagement.

________

* There are still a few common-sense models to make use of in interpretation. We’ve discussed the player-character’s role as a mediator of psychic content, an ego or organizing principle. So what is being organized? Levels and stages can be seen as planes of action, the psychic ground, or lattice of context that frames whatever interactions it contains. As in dreams, a light area and a dark area are likely to inspire different evaluations, as are interior vs. exterior environments, etc. The act of consuming objects or enemies for the sake of growth or progress can be handily codified into integration experiences – especially if this integration confers new abilities or areas. Key characters and bosses can be seen as personifications of the themes of their domain, or as constellations of psychological archetypes (whether they are of any particular import is determined subjectively by the player).

[simon-long-blog]

Game juice please

I recently taught myself and added to an old project some small game feel tweaks.

There is now camera shake and the game freezes for a split second when you hit an enemy.

It’s not perfect: the camera doesn’t quit reset to its original position and I also had to make the camera shake quite vigorously to get through gif compression.

These small tweaks definitely add something to the overall feel of playing the game.