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0:00 You've probably heard the term game juice thrown around a lot and maybe even game field, too. They're sometimes used interchangeably, but I think they can mean two very different things. Making a distinction as a game dev will help you apply the right juice at the right time. I want to try to give my point of view on that. The terminology might not matter that much, but I feel like the differentiation can be really useful to think about. Game field to me is making sure that whatever you're controlling feels good. It's way more obvious and easy to talk about with games where you control something directly like a vehicle, a platformer, a third person character. I see game feel as game juice applied directly to gameplay. So, not the squishy buttons, juicy sound effects,
0:45 and beautiful particles, but the code, the tricks, and the techniques used to make the game play alone satisfying. People often talk about that when creating a game where you'll control the character. There's a saying that if it feels good to move around with just your character, you're probably on the right path. It might feel good because your character has some weight, acceleration, deceleration. It might be leaning in the direction of movement, have great curves, for example, on gravity, and that avoids having the very stiff feel of linear acceleration. Great game feel usually feels smooth and inviting. The movement and animations are here to guide and inform the player. It's not just pretty to look at, but it allows the player to do what they want without feeling clunky. Cameras also be part in
1:30 smooth controls. A smooth camera will basically make you forget that it's here, whereas a bad camera will be in your way and prevent you from achieving what you wanted. Game feel is a lot of technical work to make actions easy, or should I say smooth to perform. You could compare that to UX, user experience. It's thinking about how people will interact with what you made and making sure that they'll be able to do it smoothly. A great way to better understand that is to look at games known for their great game feel. There are a lot of great examples out there from big studios to smaller indies. When I think about great game feel, here are a few that come to mind. Super Mario Odyssey, movement shooters in general, Titanfall, Pseudo Regalia, Celeste for 2D platformer, and maybe even Hades or Vodigo for rog likes. The common thing
2:16 in these games is that movement is pleasing and you could just spend time moving around without any particular goal. These examples are mostly hand animated, but there's another interesting technique which can lead to very organic and smooth animation, which is procedural animation. I'm sure there are plenty of examples out there, but the last one I can think of that marked me were Go Mechable and Arc Raiders, both in very different genres. In Go Mechable, you play this character that can morph into a bull, kind of like Metroid, but in a really smooth way. It's actually interesting to compare it to Metroid where going in and out of the bowl is way less smooth. Of course, these games are really different, but in Goikable, the bullface really feels like an extension of your move set and you feel that it was made to be used often. It gives you a lot of speed and power and serves a different purpose when
3:01 fighting or escaping enemies. In Metroid, it's more of a puzzle tool, so the transition are not made to go super fast. Gomeable really hones in the game feel on both movement and shooting. I'm sure there's a lot going on behind the scene to make the movement feel as good as it is. You don't really find yourself stuck on things or not doing what you want. And even if that happens, even if you miss the jump you wanted to make, you have the tools and abilities to quickly go back to where you wanted. By the way, I think this game is super cool and underrated. If you like fast rogue lights, definitely give it a go. It's an amazing example of good game feel in my opinion. Arc Raiders is the other example I wanted to bring out. In Ark, the character is using predefined animations. It's quite easy to see as very often there will be a disconnect
3:48 between your character animation and what it's really doing or how it's colliding with the terrain. That doesn't really matter, though, as the characters are made to be reactive enough for you to do what you want. You don't want a physics-based body that would stumble on some rocks while you're in the middle of a fight. What I really wanted to talk about was the arcs. These are the robot enemies that you fight in the game. They're not animated by hand, but procedurally, and some of them are even trained with neural networks to let them learn how to move. This, in my opinion, creates super interesting enemies that feel extremely alive. They will react very naturally to terrain, damage, and explosions. Because they're fully controlled by code, they continue to walk without missing legs or try to correct their flight, even with one or two missing props. This creates an incredible game feel where you really
4:34 think you're fighting real enemies. They feel almost organic and it participates in creating moments that could not happen with predefined animations. Of course, the procedural animation is one part and there's also lots of work on the enemy AI like the more classic state machine and such. The magic happens because the brain of the enemy is telling them to do certain things like search for you, pathf find, attack, etc. and the body reacts to those commands. I wanted to talk about procedural animation because I think it shows you that part of the game feel is choosing the right tool for the right kind of game you want to make. It's not because it works well in Go makeable or our creators that it would make sense in a fast FPS or Celeste. In some games, the
5:19 hard-coded nature of humanmade animation is much more preferable to have full control on what's happening. while in others the feel come from having a very physics-driven system which creates fun moments when things fall or interact in unpredictable manners. Something that might be very useful in a party game for example. I think the last thing to say about game feel is that you have to experience it. You only know if a game feels great if you're actively playing it. I've been deceived many times as a player seeing a game that looked great and was very juicy only to be disappointed when finally getting my hands on it. It's a very common pattern I see with artheavy games. The game looks stunning with an incredible art, but you can feel that the person making it might not be super experienced as a dev, or at least they put most of the effort on the art side. This creates a
6:05 big disconnect between what you're expecting of the game and what it feels like. Games are interactive, and even if your game is art or storyheavy, the feel that you have with basic interactions has to be on point [music] and catered specifically for the genre you're making. It doesn't mean everything has to be super reactive and fast, but that the interaction shouldn't be forgotten. That was game feel. Game juice, on the other hand, can be experienced through a GIF or someone else playing. When you look at Baltatro or Goable, you can clearly see and hear the juice without touching the game. You know it looks good and pleasing, but you don't have any idea yet if it feels good to play. Juice serves a very clear purpose, giving you feedback on what's happening and making it feel more real or impactful. In fighting or combat games
6:52 in general, you have things like screen shake, hit stops, and hit flashes. Those are not just for decoration. They inform you that you landed a hit or got hit, but they also make it feel impactful. If you removed everything, you just throw a punch, it would go through the enemy, and that would be it. Technically, it would work. The enemy would lose health, but it would just be incredibly unsatisfying. and worse, it wouldn't inform you of what happened. There are lots of examples of really juicy games out there, and I think juice really elevates the experience. Usually, games with simple aesthetics will compensate with very juicy feedback. In this kind of juice, movements are exaggerated a lot, making mundane things feel really important and interesting to look at. I think this is something powerful about indie devs, as they're not expected to have super high fidelity graphics, [music] so they can put a lot of effort
7:38 into juice. Valstro is a good example, but again if you scroll Twitter for gamedev videos, [music] you will come across many interesting examples. I want to take Arc as an example again, but this time for its game juice. It might not be as obvious as first, as the game is leaning towards a more realistic appearance, which usually don't feel juicy in the gamey way we might think about. Even its interface is relatively boring and not super juiced up. In comparison to the previous examples, Ark
8:25 doesn't appear as juicy, but the sound design is particularly juicy in my opinion. FIRST OF ALL, IT'S REALLY PRESENT. You hear noises, gunshots, explosions, or even just arc noises a lot and from very far. The sounds are very unique, recognizable, and powerful. They're not just pretty, though. They serve a real purpose. They tell you a lot about
9:11 what's going on. You know when a player's shield has been destroyed. You hear when someone is breaching a container. You know exactly what kind of enemy might be behind a door and even what their status might be. Sound also tells you what enemies are about to do. if they're searching or if they're locked on you and about to fire. This is, in my opinion, a perfect example of juiciness, serving an incredibly important role in giving you feedback about what's going on. This is extremely important in an extraction shooter where you have to be aware of so many different things at all time and where anything could kill you very fast. In a different example, the new game I'm working on, Lexis Bell, is a relatively simple word game that some people might call boring. I knew the look of the game would be simple and it actually is useful because I can put a lot of effort in trying to make the game juicy,
9:58 especially in its UI. I've got really good feedback about the game being fun to play during the first public play test. But even before that, I've got a lot of comments from people seeing the game and finding it really juicy, but I'll let you be the judge of that. This is an important point about GameJu. I think it can be used as a way to grab people's attention. You can see it as a marketing strategy. We're not all super talented artists and our games might look a little bit simple, so juicing things up can help getting people [music] intrigued. I'm personally particularly sensitive to that. Maybe because I love juice and I'm a game dev, but I usually stop whenever I see a juicy game to learn more about it. Even if it doesn't look immediately like my jam. As we've seen, the differences are small and there's not always a clear delimitation between aim field and game juice. I still think it makes sense to
10:44 try to separate the two to understand when to implement them. There are lots of debates around when to add juice to a game. Many people say you should keep your prototype ultra simple and just test the mechanics and systems. While many others argue that sometimes you can't really get a feel for an idea if it's not juiced up a little bit. Imagine trying to test a very prototypy version of Celeste with absolutely no juice, especially game feel. You'd probably have a bad experience. Movement might feel stiff. You get no help from the game and basically no indication of what's happening. [music] By the way, this is how many beginners game will feel. They're technically correct. Like, if you press right, the character goes right, but the way the character moves is incredibly stiff and unpleasant. I'm pretty sure you've experienced that if you tried to make games. You learn how to make something move, but couldn't
11:29 really figure out why it didn't feel great. Some other games are only fun or at least made tremendously more enjoyable by having a good amount of juice. I think some of the incrementals out there are a good example of that. Every small interaction you do is rewarding by giving you more numbers, but also because things react, move, emit particles, sound effects, etc. Just moving around in a skill tree, hovering in and out of buttons, unlocking more stuff is incredibly rewarding because the game is juiced up. If you were to see or play a game like NodeBuster with absolutely no juice, you'd probably feel like it's a boring game. The juice is a reward for completing an action and also a way to encourage you to keep going, promising that you're going to get even more as the game continues. In the end, what I want to show you is that juice serves a purpose, and applying it on the
12:14 right thing at the right time is super important. It's not just polish. It's not something useless you add only at the end to make your game pretty. It's a core part of development to make sure that the game looks and feel how you want. I hope this shows you how I think about game juice and how important it is to make your game more alive and more enjoyable. I'd love to talk more about juice in future videos, discussing different types of juice and in what situations to apply them. Let me know if it's something you would enjoy. If you want to go further and learn more about games used with GDAU, I made a course. And if you're watching this in January, it's still on sale. You can use the code ho ho ho 2025 to get it at $12.99 or the link in the description. In this course, I go over various techniques to transform a simple breakout game into something way juicier, covering twins, particles, animation players, basic
12:59 curves, and more. Don't hesitate to check it out. Link in the description. I also do consultations, so if you ever feel stuck, you can book a call with me using my Cal link in the description. I also want to thanks my supporters on Patreon who are helping me making these videos possible. If you want to support me further, or maybe you already bought my course, Patreon is a great way to help. That's it for the self-promo. Thanks for watching this video. Let me know what you think of my analysis, if we can call it that, and I'll see you in the next video. Bye.
