Darryl Long

What is Game Feel?

Game feel is what it says it is, it is the way that your game feels and what it feels like to play your game. In this presentation Jan Willem talks about how small changes to the game can make your game feel better to play. These small changes like making your bullet travel faster, being able to shoot faster, screen shaking on impact etc etc, make your game feel more responsive and have impact. His main focus is giving feedback to the user and making all of your actions feel good and fun to interact with. These changes are important because even if you have amazing gameplay/story/character development within a game people won’t play a game that they doesn’t ‘feel good’, these changes within a game gives it more responsiveness to all of the player actions.

An example from one of my favourite games at the moment is Overwatch created by Blizzard. Overwatch is a competitive multiplayer game in which each team has six players who play different characters and compete against each other for different objectives. I’m mainly going to focus on one of my favourite characters Winston, who is a giant intelligent ape classified as a tank class and carries a large lightning gun. So when you walk around as this great big hulking ape, you see that the screen shakes slightly, but you also hear the big heavy steps he takes and these small interactions make you feel like you actually are playing as an ape.

He has a ability to jump really far and that when you land, you feel a great big crash and the screen shakes once again to notify you that you have landed and damaged enemies around you. When you shoot your lightning gun, you hear the faint crackling of electricity as you fry your enemies and you often also hear them being electrocuted. At then end of the game the whole screen freezes and notifies you of whether you have won or lost. Additionally when playing other characters there are small audio cues of when you land a head shot on another character that makes it feel so satisfying. All of these are examples on trying to improve game feel, these all contribute towards making the player feel like all of their actions are responsive and feel good.

What even is Chess?

So in the next two games not focusing on game feel, we come across two games that seem like chess games but are actually not. The first game is called It Is As If You Are Playing Chess and basically the player follows the prompts that come up on the screen that in general most chess players would actually make. 

The next game is called Speed Chess and it is simply, absolute chaos, there are 2 – 16 players all playing at the same time and making legal chess moves until their input is processed. The game ends when one of the teams eventually causes a check mate.

Now this may surprise you but these games are actually more similar than you may think. In both of these game, you mimic actions in which are typically made in a chess game but are both completely missing the point of chess. Chess is a strategy game between 2 people in which they plan and use strategy to outwit the other player and that is without doubt the main focus of chess, this battle of minds, and that is also what has made it so popular for so long. Both of these games mimic the actions made within the game but make no attempt to capture the strategy aspect of the game. The first game you follow the instructions and copy movements on the screen and in the second game you mash buttons to try and get your ‘chess’ move inputted into the game and hope that you win somehow. I believe that games that mimic the strategy and thinking aspect of chess would be better capture the concept of chess than simply copying the movements and rules of chess.