Game Feel: Coined by Steve Swink (article summary here) used more or less ambiguously since then to refer to the “tactile” quality of control systems in spatial games. Basically how the game responds to the input.
The main idea is: a game should feel engaging to play even after the plot, points, level design, music, and graphics are removed.
Alexander Brazie breaks it down to 3 components:
Responsiveness is about reducing delay from intent to input to action to feedback.
Intuitiveness is the development of game logic that translates player inputs into the intended result.
Viscerality is the craft of recreating physical sensation.
To increase responsiveness and intuitiveness games often “cheat” that is: they don’t accurately simulate physics.
Most platformers don’t use actual physics. Here’s a few examples from Celeste.
Juice
The even more vague but related idea of juiciness relates more to the visual feedback, the effects that are not strictly necessary to the gameplay but give it a character and a make it satisfying.
These talks are casual, a bit goofy and performative but they describe aspects of the game that can really make a difference: how the game provides a feedback, how to make every action feel satisfying, what are some simple strategies to make a game feel more alive and dynamic…
Here’s a breakdown of an attack in a combat game
Team Discussion
Analyze your game:
-Do the control system feel as responsive as it can be? Are there expressive or mechanical reasons why it shouldn’t be responsive?
-Does it feel intuitive? Are testers frustrated by the controls? If you don’t use standard movements and camera control is there a good reason?
-Feedback, viscerality and juice: what are some elements that can use some “juice” to provide more feedback and a satisfying response?