“Game-Feel” Part 2
A screenshot of SimCity. Will Wright talks about his classic game in his MasterClass (linked below).
Source: By Will Wright, Maxis Software/Electronic Arts (original software); Don Hopkins, DUX Software (Unix port)
Reflecting on This Week in Game Development
I’m still working on The Last Humble-Bee.
I continued to focus on making my character’s movement “feel good” to the player. I finished reading “Game Feel: A Game Designer's Guide to Virtual Sensation” by Steve Swink and as a result, made many subtle changes to controlling my character. I tweaked the jump gravity parameters (eg, making the downward effect of gravity LESS to give a floatier feel), increased the feeling of “knockback” as you attack enemies, and adjusted movement speeds and animation speeds, to name a few. At this point, I think I’ve really locked-in the character movement input and response parameters.
Next, I’m going to wrap-up this segment of tweaking for game-feel (at the character-level, at least) by adding controller support to the game. There’s nothing quite like holding a game controller in your hands as you move your character around! I think this will also make a huge game-feel difference.
In the meantime, I’m learning more about level-design (links shared below) so that once I’m ready to flush out interactions (eg, enemy behavior vs player behavior) and give the player some interesting “game-questions” to answer, I can design the levels in a way that supports that. I’m also watching a masterclass in Game Design from Will Wright, the developer behind “SimCity”.
Other Inspirations
In non-game-development news, I started reading the Harry Potter books. For the FIRST TIME! I mean, yes, I’m a bad millenial. But I did watch the movies! Hey, better late than never, right?
Links:
Game Feel
Level Design
MasterClass