Tweaking them numbers: Game Feel

Elyaradine

I saw recently that there was an indie developer who was lecturing a game design course, and one of their projects was to take a Mario Clone that he and his friend had written (with some magic hacking to get the original game's values), and play with the numbers to get the same feel as the original game.

I'm not sure whether he had anything to do with the writing of this book (maybe it's the same guy?), but on the book's site, they've got exactly that: Mario Clones with numbers exposed for tweaking and experimentation.

Play one of the Super Mario Brothers roms on NESBox, and see what numbers you come up with? :)

dislekcia

You should ask Swink if that was him lecturing or not ;)

What an awesome exercise! Now if only everyone working on a Sonic game would do the same thing... Have you seen how horrible the newer Sonic stuff feels? Gods.

Elyaradine

Well, now that you mention Sonic, there's this epic site that describes every piece of physics in the 2d Sonic games: how many pixels per frame things move, how far, how the slopes and loops were created, how the physics were done for them even though it was still a tile-based 2d engine, etc. It's pretty damn amazing.

http://info.sonicretro.org/Sonic_Physics_Guide

Jdog

Awesome links!! Thanks!

Will definitely have a go at this. Also, has anybody read the aforementioned book? It seems like a potentially interesting read...

Elyaradine

I haven't read the book (yet(?)), but the author did write an article on Gamasutra about game feel. It's pretty intuitive, but it's nice to see the points laid out well. :)

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/130734/game_feel_the_secret_ingredient.php?print=1

hermantulleken

It's a great book. It puts some method to what many people just say "try it until it works" (which annoys me no end), has some great case studies, and it has some very cool graphs to make points vividly clear. Buy it!