Gamefeel Critique

Game feel (often informally referred to as Juice) is the tactile sensation that people feel when they play games. A juicy game makes interacting with it feel engaging and rewarding. This can be the result of eye-popping animations, strong sound effects, or just responsive input.

With the upcoming public open beta release, we want you to think more seriously about this issue. The purpose of this critique is to focus you as you go into the final push.

Preparing for the Critique

To help you understand the concept of game feel, you should watch the video Juice It, or Lose It. This illustrates the types of things that we are looking for in this critique.

Other than that, the only other thing to bring is a build of your game. We will essentially run this class as a playtesting session; we will just have a narrower focus than normal. The build can be the same build that you used for a previous playtesting session. But it should be stable and playable.

Running the Critique

As with most critiques, we will you with another group. You will play that group’s game and give them suggestions on how to improve the juiciness of their game. In a way, this is something that we have been doing in all of the playtesting sessions so far. But we want this particular session to be a deep dive that focuses on juice over general gameplay.

In particular, you should focus on the following questions while you play the game.

• What could be done to make the animations more satisfying?
• What could be done to make the sound satisfying, but not repetitive?
• What could be done to improve input responsiveness?

When time is up (about 20-25 minutes), the groups should switch. If you do not have much to say, we may cycle you to another group. But we want you to give as much feedback as possible to the other team.