I’ve always thought we should aspire to this ‘bubblewrap effect’ when designing games. Most games, even the supposed AAA ones, comprise a fairly limited set of repetitive actions. If you can make those actions an enjoyable experience in and of themselves, regardless of gameplay, then you are onto a winner because no matter how good the player is at playing your game they will be having fun and come back for more.
Recently I’ve seen this loosely referred to as ‘juice’ or ‘game feel’ but these terms are rather vague and are often used to refer to all sorts of things. I’m talking about something pretty specific here – make all your repetitive actions as ‘urgey’ as popping bubblewrap. Usually this is a combination of both visuals and audio.
Now I’d already spent a lot of time on this stuff in Jetboard Joust but, whilst surfing GDC talks on YouTube, I came across this excellent talk by Jan Willem Nijman of Vlambeer on adding these types of elements to your game. I’d already implemented many of the techniques he talks about (camera shake, gun recoil, enemy and player knockback etc) but he made me rethink some aspects and put a bit more effort in to areas that were somewhat lacking.
So – here’s what I’ve been working on as the result of @jwaaaap‘s talk.
1. Bigger Bullets
To be honest a) this would never have occurred to me and b)I never would have thought it would work if it did. I was using little pixel squares for bullets as 1) they seemed appropriate for the size of gun and 2) this worked in Defender so why fix what ain’t broke? But I thought – ‘what the hell?’ and gave it a go. I started increasing the size of the bullets a little and was amazed how much better this felt, so I increased them what I would have thought was a ridiculous amount and it felt even better! It makes no visual sense whatsoever but the pistol (and particularly) the gatling gun are so much more satisfying to shoot now. I haven’t tried playing with the accuracy yet but should really do that too…
2. Camera Knockback
I already have some pretty hefty recoil on weapons but @jwaaaap suggests also recoiling the camera a certain amount when a weapon is fired. This didn’t make a massive difference in Jetboard Joust, probably because the camera is generally moving pretty fast anyway, but it is noticeable under some circumstances so I left it in.
3. Explosion Delay
Adding a very slight delay when an enemy is destroyed adds to the ‘jolt’ effect and makes destroying enemies much more satisfying. It’s subtle but it works. I’m using a delay of 32ms. I had to be careful here to not implement the delay until the next frame (ensuring the first frame of the explosion is drawn before the delay occurs) and also to clamp the delay time so that destroying a bunch of enemies at the same time didn’t result in a massive delay. I also improved the first ‘flash’ frame of the explosion by adding a ‘threshold invert’ to my collision shader and making the circles that briefly appear larger, brighter and less pixelated. Enemies really look like they’re getting nuked now!
4. Permanence
I had been wanting to do something to make battles seem more ‘permanent’ for some time and @jwaaaap‘s talk was the kick up the arse I needed. I talk about adding smoke in my previous post but that’s still not really permanent so I also added bones that fall from enemies when they’re destroyed and collect on the ground as a permanent record of the carnage that’s ocurred there.
Adding the bones was easy, the trouble started when I decided that they were too static and should react if the player hit the ground near them or crashed into a building that they were resting on. I didn’t want to run collision checking on every bone (there can be tons of them by the end of a level) so worked out a system whereby the world is divided into a series of overlapping ‘bone zones’. When a bone is static it is added to a zone and an entire zone can easily be discarded from the collision detection process in one go. I’ve used this approach before and it works well but I got myself into a bit of a flap with it here, plus it took a long time tweaking the various parameters so that the bones seemed to get disturbed by the correct amount. It still looks a little odd sometimes but its much better than having them totally static.
I’d really like to add some permanent damage to the buildings but I haven’t yet figured out a way to do this that would be a) be cpu/memory efficient and b) not involve creating a load more pixel art. I will continue to give this some thought – it could be that I’m underestimating the memory available on modern devices as a spent so long developing for J2ME feature phones!
So I hope that was all worth it and makes my game feel a little more like popping bubblewrap. I’d like to say these were the last gameplay tweaks before I release the alpha but watching my son play it has led me to implement just a couple more things…
Dev Time: 2 days
Total Dev Time: approx 99.5 days
My… What Big Bullets You Have!
These Bullets Are Ridiculous – But Somehow They Work!
Explosion Delay (Exaggerated), Smoke, And Improved ‘Flash Frame’
A Battle Amidst The Bones Of Fallen Enemies
Bone Bashing – A Stupid Detail That Caused Me Much Grief!
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