I read and watched a lot about game feeling beyond many I liked these best
- Jan Willem Nijman – Vlambeer – "The art of screenshake"
- Juice it or lose it – a talk by Martin Jonasson & Petri Purho
Game feeling is how you experience your interaction within a game. Does jumping feel good? Does the gun have a powerful feeling when using it? Is it satisfying when you destroy or kill something? Does it have a snappy control? Was it exciting to solve that puzzle?
The 30 Tricks of Jan Willem Nijman
I made my self a list of the 30 tricks to make a game feel good by Jan Willem Nijam:
- Basic Animations & Sounds: Makes the walking, jumping, pick up things, and shooting more fun.
- Lower Enemy HP: It’s more fun.
- Higher Rate of Fire: It’s a video game about shooting so put more bullets in there.
- More Enemies: Because of trick 2. you need more enemies to shoot.
- Bigger Bullets: Don’t use realistically sized bullets as it looks so silly, make them big.
- Muzzle Flash: Just make the first bullet frame a circle.
- Faster Bullets: Slow bullets are lame, make it faster.
- Less Accuracy: If your gun is not too accurate it looks more realistic and is more fun.
- Impact Effects: Let the player know he hit something, don’t just remove the bullets.
- Hit Animation: Let the player know that he damaged the enemies.
- Enemy Knockback: But knockback force if you hit enemies.
- Permanence: Don’t remove dead bodies, it helps you remember if you come back in a room with a huge pile of dead bodies in it.
- Camera Lerp: Smoother cameras make the character feel more in-motion.
- Camera Position: Your your camera to focus on important things in your video game.
- Screen Shake: This is an important rule add screen shake on explosions it looks so much more powerful than without.
- Player recoil: Shooting feels much more powerful with recoil on the player and you can use it to avoid that player do not shoot all the time as it has a drawback.
- Sleep: If you set a deadly hit sleep for 100 or 200 ms, it puts more meaning in that action, brawl games do that a lot.
- Gun Delay: Make the character and its props look like they have weight/momentum when moving.
- Gun Kick: Add recoil to things that would have it.
- Strafing: If you shoot and change the direction the shooting will be still in the same direction until you stop shooting to turn around the gun.
- More Permanence: Put ejecting shells in your game and make them permanent, it also helps to remember that you were in that room and that you did shoot a lot.
- More Bass: Add bass to your shooting and explosions they get much more meaning and power.
- Super Machinegun: Try ridiculous variations on how shooting performs, maybe three bullets a time, go crazy.
- Random Explosions: That is a funny one but it puts more action in your game if you put some random explosions to your game when you shoot enemies, don’t overdo it.
- More Enemies: You tuned up your gameplay so that you got the feeling you have not enough to shoot at.
- Even Higher Rate of Fire: Because it is more fun to shoot
- Even Higher Rate of Camera Kick: Make your camera kick in the direction of the action/shooting.
- Bigger Explosions: Seriously, who doesn’t like explosions.
- Even More Permanence: Put some dust after your gigantic explosions and let it fade slowly.
- Meaning: Let your player win or loos.
My Personal Addition
I have some more points for this list.
- Flashlight: Add a short bright light flash on explosions it feels more realistic and more boom, it looks good even without sound.
- Add more light: Attach light on rockets, it makes it more vivid.
- Hitpoints: Visualize hitpoints instantly on the location of the hit.
- Add a camera kickback: When you fire a gun add kickback to the camera, it looks more fun.