Lecture 17 - Game Feel.key
Transcription
Lecture 17 - Game Feel.key
CS 325 Intro to Game Design Spring 2014 George Mason University Yotam Gingold Announcements • Filming? Friday? ! • Final project groups (Thursday vs. Tuesday) ! • 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 6 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. 7 Mario 64 8 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. 9 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 10 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. 11 Steps to recreate 1. Create a gameplay garden for experimenting with mechanics, objects, and game feel. 2. ? 3. Profit 12 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. 13 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. 14 Input 15 Input • The only way a player can “speak” to the game • The tactile feel of the input device ! ! ! ! ! ! ! • Your game will automatically feel better if you hook it up to an Xbox 360 controller compared to a keyboard. 16 Natural mapping • A clear, intuitive relationship between possible actions and their effect on the system. • Stove burners and dials: 17 Natural mapping • Geometry wars: 18 Sensitivity • A rough measure of the amount of expressiveness inherent in a particular input device. • Button has very little sensitivity (on or off) ! ! • Computer mouse has a lot more (two axes of sensitivity) ? 19 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). 20 Response 21 Zuma • The frog rotates in place and faces the mouse. • This reduces mouse’s inherent sensitivity. 22 Strange Attractors • Single button turns on gravity wells. • Player still has fluid & subtle control over their ship. 23 Reaction sensitivity • 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. 24 NES Controller 25 26 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. 27 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. 28 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. 29 Donkey Kong 30 Context 31 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. 32 Context 33 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. 34 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. 35 Polish 36 Polish • Sprays or dustings of particles when things hit or interact. • Screen shake. • View angle shifts. • Squash and stretch. 37 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. 38 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. 39 Metaphor 40 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. 41 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. 42 Rules 43 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 44 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. 45 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! 46 Next Time • Playtesting each others’ games