Juice Your Prototype vs Don't Waste Time On It Too Early Topic!
So, In Gazza's " Gaz Nuclear's Red-Hot Robot Ultrarena" (http://www.makegamessa.com/discussion/1858/prototype-gaz-nuclear039s-red-hot-robot-ultrarena) Thread he posted a prototype of his game, to which I suggested (as usual) that it should have some juice added. Specifically in the form of camera shake, with my reasoning as follows:
Because it super annoys me when people discuss off topic things in a game's thread, I've created this thread for the discussion, because I feel it's worth having.
So first of all:
I'm not trying to be funny when I say add camera shake or juice to your prototype, I'm being dead serious. If you are making an action game, the game's feel is critical to my evaluation of the game. Game feel is part of a game's design. You cannot determine whether an action game is good on the rules alone. On top of that, juice is your way of communicating with the player. It tells the player when he is taking damage or firing or whatever.
Without camera shake, and a perceived sense of scale, a mech game feels like an FPS at timescale 0.2 with bad, unresponsive controls. WITH camera shake, it feel like I'm piloting a 5000 ton Mecha-Sterisand, stomping cars, firing a gun that shoots bullets the size of people and a laser that's capable of melting the polar ice caps. So I feel like Gazza's mech game has promise, but it's hard for me to tell, as the lack of scale and juice make it hard to evaluate.
I'm not saying that juice will make a bad game good. I'm saying, WITHOUT juice, a good game is bad.
On top of that, prototyping is learning, and juicing a game well is not trivial, and is a skill that needs to be practiced along with everything else.
Chippit disagreed that you should be adding things like camera shake in early prototyping stages, his reasoning:
I don't want to derail the thread, just slightly state why I think camera shake is important... I feel in a mech game the sense of scale and power you wield is super important. If you don't have camera shake on footsteps the game feels like a tardy FPS. It's also critical to get the player to feel the scale of the thing by adding e.g. knee high (or smaller) trees, so that the slow movement and momentum makes sense. It also needs to feel like you are wielding far larger weapons than a person on foot can, otherwise the overheat mechanic feels like an arbitrary hindrance. This is part of the fantasy and core to the game.
Secondly it's less than an hour's work and makes a HUGE difference in the perceived quality of the game.
But, even in jest as it most often is, the trope of replying to every prototype thread with 'add camera shake' is not only not helpful, is is genuinely bad advice. At the prototype stage, you want to spend as little time as possible on anything that isn't going to tell you whether this game will be worth finishing, whether it'll be a project worth continuing with. Polish changes like almost all forms of visual feedback (not including those that are genuinely required to convey mechanical information) are literally the last thing you want to spend time on. If you're taking an hour to implement simple camera shake, first of all you're taking too long, and secondly that's an hour you didn't spend finding out if your game was any good. When people share prototypes, what they really need is solid design advice. As cool as it looks, as trendy as it is to suggest, juiciness is not game design advice. It's UI advice.
Because it super annoys me when people discuss off topic things in a game's thread, I've created this thread for the discussion, because I feel it's worth having.
So first of all:
I'm not trying to be funny when I say add camera shake or juice to your prototype, I'm being dead serious. If you are making an action game, the game's feel is critical to my evaluation of the game. Game feel is part of a game's design. You cannot determine whether an action game is good on the rules alone. On top of that, juice is your way of communicating with the player. It tells the player when he is taking damage or firing or whatever.
Without camera shake, and a perceived sense of scale, a mech game feels like an FPS at timescale 0.2 with bad, unresponsive controls. WITH camera shake, it feel like I'm piloting a 5000 ton Mecha-Sterisand, stomping cars, firing a gun that shoots bullets the size of people and a laser that's capable of melting the polar ice caps. So I feel like Gazza's mech game has promise, but it's hard for me to tell, as the lack of scale and juice make it hard to evaluate.
I'm not saying that juice will make a bad game good. I'm saying, WITHOUT juice, a good game is bad.
On top of that, prototyping is learning, and juicing a game well is not trivial, and is a skill that needs to be practiced along with everything else.
Comments
IM(hqavlcob)O it adds to the fun of the game. We made an FPS prototype a while back and I was using any random asset and technically monsters fired projectiles, technically, guns killed them, etc. I invested a bit of effort in polishing it up, the rights sounds, decent effects, better anim timing and it immediately became fun. It was all about the feeling.
I think there are two big things about adding this seemingly trivial shit.
-Feedback. It helps tell players what the game is doing
-It makes the game feel good
I feel this is particularly important if you are presenting a game to the great unwashed masses instead of just to other game experts who will be analyzing the mechanics. I think that so many games that have really interesting mechanics and some awesome innovative ideas would have held me much better if only they had put some effort into the feedback (feeling).
I would rate feedback and the feeling of the game more important than visual fidelity.
Camera shake has become a meme these days, but it really does have its use. An FPS game, make the camera wobble about so it feels more like a blob of disembodied gun carrying marine rather than an AABB tracing into walls... Even more important if the character is acrobatic or dis-empowered. And a big stompy mech with ground stomping feet, hell yeah!
With the trivial effort of adding screenshake these days, surely it's worth it. (Just don't overdo it or it will seem like everything is a bag of hot air!)
On the flip-side, I can see the value in removing all potential crutches so one can evaluate whether or not the core mechanic is getting its desired result, but if the thing you're aiming for came from another game, maybe it was the combination of that mechanic shoveling out juicy explosions that made it enjoyable, rather than either of the two separately.
Of course not everyone values aspects of a game the same. Some people don't care about mechanics, some don't notice art, some are oblivious to the feeling. I love the feeling and the feedback in games when done well and there is a lot more to it than cheap screenshake or the cynical notion of "MOAR SPLODES!". I feel that a lot indies and other games are ignorant to the value of feedback and all the things that contribute to it.
I've been tinkering with effects for years for our stuff and I could bang on for hours about feedback, effects and making things feel good in games, so I'll stop here. If anyone is interested, I can rattle off some details about the various techniques we've used.
However, if the goal is to wow or sell or to build an audience, I can understand the need for more juice from a player perspective - these are the people who needs to connect with the game after all - just look at the quality of some prototypes out there and it quickly becomes apparent that there is some precedent.
I think a careful balance between these requests and speed needs to be maintained - but this by no means an easy task though....
Edit: Also, in the case of Gazza, I don't think recommending he adds "juice" would be good advice at all. His time good certainly be put to better use elsewhere.
For those that don't want to read the instructions. Just press z and then 1 to see the difference between "juice" vs "no juice".
[url = http://aztez.com/blog/2014/01/06/anatomy-of-a-successful-attack/]Anatomy of a successful attack[/url]
I think juice is a bad term for the concept being discussed here though. I'm not sure what to call it, but I know I tend to also think about it in terms of feedback. To me feedback means essential communication with the player, where juice means optional communication. Essential communication in turn means the display/sound/whatever that is needed to explain to the player what to do and why they are playing.
That a lot of juice can hide a weak mechanic from a casual observer...
And how expensive good juice is. A three-day game can easily take three weeks to juice up properly. In that example, the main kill animation is 1/10 of the complete juiced up sequence, many of which requires systems (for example, the blood spatter). So it all comes down how you want to spend your budget... new attacks vs. more juice.
(Of course, it also depends what you are prototyping in the first place. That prototype is obviously a juice prototype, not a mechanics prototype).
I think of juice not as a on/off switch though, but a continuum from the most abstract ("you hit the monster"-text message) to the most insane effects.
I agree that "juice" implies optional added effects that makes the effect of interaction more rewarding.
"Juice" doesn't mean information that communicates the world to the player and making the world immersive and consistent.
@Raithza is definitely talking about the latter. Technically it is still juicy feedback he is referring to, but the purpose of that feedback is different than that which is defined by the "Juice is or Lose it" presentation (or that of the World of Goo's creator who can up with the term). I think this statement isn't always true either, particularly in games like Breakout where immersion isn't a usually important. But @Raithza could have said "without feedback that is consistent with the content of the game world the game will always feel dissonant and hold back the enjoyment experienced by players".
But that doesn't mean that Gazza_N HAS to work on the feel of his mech-warrior game before he does anything else. I would personally, but I can't know where Nuclear Red-Hot Robot Ultrarena is headed.
If you're adding something because it solves a problem then that's cool (ideally it's better to *remove* something to solve a problem, but yeah) provided you actually understand the problem and are going about solving it in a useful/testable way. Ideally this is what player feedback is about - and you should look at adding player feedback in batches so that you can see how well the feedback solves the problem.
If you're adding something because it looks good then that's cool too, but it's not something that benefits from being tested in a similar way. So looks and general "juice" tend to shift people out of a prototyping mindset and into a production mindset. That switch it probably why there's the disconnect here.
And I think at the end of it all, communicating the mechanics of the gameplay is paramount in prototyping - yes sometimes the "feel" of the game *is* the mechanics of the gameplay, but often it's not.
So the key is to determine what is important to the mechanics of your game - to see "this is the thing that will make people want to play", and communicate that. First. And there are quite a few tricks to get to that point quicker. Screenshake may be one of them - it really depends on the game.
Everything past that bare necessity is polish and presentation, which is not the first cardinal in PROTOTYPING.
I thought tons about this stuff when I did my AMAZE Pecha Kucha, and I think it's important for people with less experience and available time (ie myself) to not forget the purpose of prototyping and stick to a clear goalpost in your exploration. That.