This take-home lesson is about one of the prominent game development discussions of the last few years: game juiciness. The study portion of the lesson consists of watching talks and analysis videos from prominent figures in the (mostly indie) game development community. To assess the lesson, you should identify 3 take-away techniques or concepts per video that can be added to your game project.
Watch the study videos in the following order:
- Juice It or Lose It by Martin Jonasson and Petri Purho in GDC Europe 2012. This talk ignited a movement within game development on increasing the juiciness (i.e. additional modes of communicating the intent and intensity of the game with the player past those identified by Swink in Game Feel) of games. Juice It or Lose It identifies several practical methods for adding additional juice to games by introducing them in a layered and compositional approach.
- Why Does Celeste Feel So Good to Play? by Mark Brown of Game Maker's Tookit. By applying the basic concepts of Swinkian game feel to indie game Celeste while analyzing the game's mechanics in a way consistent with Juice, Brown bridges the space between to the two areas through examples and analysis. Through interviews with the designers of Celeste Matt Thorson and Noel Berry, Brown brings the impacts of composing the core game mechanics to light.
- Level Design Workshop: Designing 'Celeste' by Matt Thorson in GDC 2017. This lesson's conversation between juice, mechanics, and design is continued into the realm of applied level design in this talk by Thorson. Thorson succinctly describes the basic mechanics in Celeste and describes how they are applied to and create constraints for the 300+ levels designed for Celeste. As the description of the level design process progressions, Thorson shows the complexities of his design process in the forms of combinations of gameplay systems along with designing levels for multiple types of play ranging from novices to speed-runners.
Your task is to identify at least 3 concepts, rules of thumb, or tools from the study videos in a way that applies them to your game project.
- Game Feel: Why Your Death Animation Sucks by Nicolae Berbece of Those Awesome Guys in GDC Europe 2015.
- The Art of Screenshake by Jan Willem Nijman of Vlambeer in INDIGO Classes 2013. "Just fill your game with love and tiny details."
- Don't Juice It or Lose It by Folmer Kelly of NOPOPOP at GDC Europe 2014.
- Juicing your Cameras With Math by Squirrel Eiserloh of the Guildhall at SMU in GDC 2016.
- Building a better Jump by Kyle Pittman of Minor Key Games and Gearbox in GDC 2016.