Make Your Game Feel Good: One Action at a Time
To make your game feel good, pick the one action players repeat most and give it an instant response, a sound and a small reward. Change one detail at a time, and judge it by playing, because your AI cannot feel the difference.
Which action should you start with?
The one the player does most often. A hundred small repeats shape the feel of a game far more than one big moment does, and a weak jump cannot be saved by a beautiful ending.
Say you are making Hammer Hen, an invented game where a hen cracks walnuts. Press a key and the walnut disappears, and a number goes up. It works, and it has all the thrill of stamping a ticket.
What do you add, and in what order?
Here is one pass over that single action. The values are our starting points for you to tune by hand, not measured rules.
| Step | What changes | Starting value |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Instant response | The hen moves in the very same moment you press | No delay at all |
| 2. Sound | A crack that varies a little each time | Pitch shifts by about 5 percent |
| 3. Anticipation | The hammer pulls back just before it falls | About 60 milliseconds |
| 4. A tiny freeze | Everything stops for a moment on impact | About 50 milliseconds |
| 5. Squash | The walnut flattens as it is hit | About 15 percent for 80 milliseconds |
| 6. Shards | Bits of shell fly out and fade | Five or six pieces |
| 7. Screen shake | The picture jolts, on big hits only | 2 to 3 pixels for 100 milliseconds |
Work from the top. Response and sound are the cheapest changes and usually the most noticeable. Stop as soon as it feels right, because the steps are a menu and not a checklist.
What makes it worse?
- Too much at once. If every tap shakes the screen, big moments have nowhere left to go. Save the strongest effects for the rarest events.
- Effects that slow the player down. A pretty animation that blocks the next press turns into a chore on the hundredth nut. The player's next press always wins.
- Effects nobody asked for. Some players get dizzy from shaking, so give them a setting to turn it off.
For jumping, feel depends less on effects and more on forgiveness. Have a look at coyote time, jump buffering and variable jump height. Spielerando can pass these blueprints to your AI with ready-made code through an MCP connection. For that you need a free account with Google or e-mail. It does not look at your game or code.
Paste this to your AI
I want my game to feel better, one action at a time. The action: [the thing players do most].
1. Draw that action as a Mermaid diagram, step by step, from the key press to the moment the player can act again. Put the time each step takes on the diagram, using what is really in the game. Quote where you found each number. If you cannot find one, write "unknown".
2. Check the drawing: is there any step where the player's next press gets ignored? Show me.
3. Suggest the smallest change that would make this action feel stronger, and say what the player should notice.
4. Make that one change, keeping every value in one place with a plain name, so I can tune it by hand.
5. Tell me what you changed and what you tried. You cannot feel this game, so do not tell me it feels better. Tell me exactly what to do to judge it myself.
Wait for my verdict before the next change.
Or skip this and connect the MCP: your AI then finds all of this by itself.Connect the MCP
How to check it worked
- Press it twenty times in a row. Is it still pleasant, or has it become a chore?
- Press as fast as you can. Does anything lag behind or get swallowed?
- Mute the sound. If it suddenly feels empty, the sound was doing the work.
- Turn the change off and on. If you cannot tell the two apart with your eyes closed or open, undo it.
- Watch someone else. Do they sit forward, or smile at the crack? People show you what they will not say.