Jan Willem Nijman - Vlambeer - "The art of screenshake" at INDIGO Classes 2013

Once I gave this sometime I actually enjoyed the concept quite a bit. I think it's a novel twist on the bullet hell genre, and I'm a sucker for single button/input style games. I'm playing on a mouse, specifically a Logitech G502 that I can "unlock" the screen wheel to be almost frictionless, which to me feels like the right meta for a game like this. Couple constructive criticisms: - Is there a pause button that I'm missing? If not, add one, I want to actually play this more but I need to be able to take breaks - The beginning is too easy. I'm biased as I like difficult games that encourage mastery, but I found myself dying early on runs because I was getting impatient with how slow the early progression is - I haven't played enough yet to know whether monsters eventually come from the top, but eventually they should, it would greatly increase the difficulty curve - Hitboxes feel a little meh, and don't seem to match the sprites - If there's sound, it wasn't working for me, which leads to... - Pump up the juice. You've got a great core loop, but you need the juice. One of my favorite game dev talks of all time would be perfect for you to watch and iterate with ( ▶ this video ) - Monster diversity. Again, maybe I didn't play long enough yet to get to newer monsters, but from what I can tell the only diversity is their looks, health, and approach angle. Monsters that are faster and incentivize different movement, or that shoot back at you, or blow up after shooting so you have to a

For me, the "owl" was all the polish and game feel. "The art of screenshake" by Jan Nijman of Vlambeer [0] was what helped fill in the steps to "making the owl". I think most people with reasonable know-how can make a basic game, whether it's asteroids, flappy bird, breakout, etc. For me, I never understood how to get past the "finished the tutorial" to "looks like an actual game". Screenshake, aka game feel/polish/production effects, was what made it gel. [0] ▶ this video

I don't think books and tutorials help that much. Playing and making games — a lot of games — might help you grow more as a designer than reading and watching YouTube. 1. Do master studies. Take a tiny environment or mechanic of a game you love and reproduce it for education, knowing you'll throw it away. Do this often. Get faster at it. 2. Ask people what their favourite game is. Play it. If it's fun to you, why? If it doesn't resonate with you, why? 3. Internalise the idea that ideas don't matter that much, execution is what matters. Good game designers can make otherwise boring games feel fun to play. (See "the art of screenshake" below.) 4. Make a lot of games. Make them small enough to finish. You don't have to release them all, but you should watch other people play them sometimes. 5. Don't listen to people who tell you not to watch YouTube for game design ideas, there are plenty of great videos out there that have positively changed how I think about game design: The art of screenshake (starts a little slow, but stick with it!): ▶ this video Designing to reveal the nature of the universe: link Game design is a search algorithm: link

Ultimately pretty shallow. This is more an exploration of how it feels to make a "sticky" game rather than how to actually make a sticky game. I certainly don't have any expertise or deep insight but I will say that one of the best videos I've seen on this is "The art of screenshake" by J. Nijman of Vlambeer [0]. There, he walks through what's a very basic 2d sidescroller shooter and adds in effects until it looks like an actual fun game. The idea being that layering feedback and effects so that every aspect of the game becomes more fun to play. It sounds like this podcast was focusing more on Hearthstone and Marvel Snap, both games which I haven't played but are more strategy and luck oriented than the kind of games Vlambeer makes. I think one of the insights there is that there's a non-commutative aspect of the game that allows for different strategies based on context. For example, A > B, B > C but C > A, like in rock paper scissors, or some of its generalizations [1]. I think this is what Magic the Gathering did with each of the colors. Maybe the keyword here is "mixed strategies"? Nijman's video highlights, to me, the importance of polish and how we basically understand that many core mechanics are fun and so don't need to be innovative if you add in enough polish or support around it. One other thing I'll mention is that A. Bruce who developed Antichamber had a GDC talk about his process of development [2]. One of the interesting points he made was that he got it in fro

I believe the term comes from the game development sphere originally. Martin Jonasson & Petri Purho (creator of Noita and Crayon Physics Deluxe ) gave a famous talk about it in 2010, Juice it or lose it : link Another classic talk on the same topic comes from Jan Willem Nijman in 2013, The art of screenshake : ▶ this video It's nice to see these terms being adopted by the wider software development industry, though I doubt we'll be seeing much screenshake on websites or utility apps any time soon.

> vlambeer, if anyone knows them I absolutely love their "art of screenshake" lecture. ▶ this video It really shows how there's a very high ceiling for polish and _feel_ when it comes to interactions. "Screenshake" is something that I'm sure a lot of people might look at and say: "oh, that would take 15 minutes to add", and if you're just talking about shaking the screen a bit, absolutely! But if you want to make the screenshake _really_ communicate a feeling and an emotion, there's so much more you can do.

> Art of screenshake ▶ this video I'm actually opposed to that. Adding screenshake etc. for boring games is essentially putting lipstick on a pig, i.e. adding a (short-lived) illusion that the game is fun while it actually isn't. The best game designs don't require any screenshake to captivate players for a long time. I mean, I'm not opposed to adding visual gimmicks during the polish phase. It should be used as a way to rescue a bad game though.

> I don't consider myself a person that good at writing stories (or anything other than programming) Read a book link > often find my games bland and boring pretty fast. Art of screenshake ▶ this video

Almost completely unrelated but I have long wanted an in-browser/real-time/javascript/FOSS 'synthwave screensaver' in the style that you sometimes see on YouTube [0]. Maybe I'll use your code as a baseline for it if I get the motivation. In terms of actual feedback, the game itself has a lot going for it. I would, at the very least, add some 'juice' to it, which would probably add a lot. There are many videos on it but the most enlightening one I found was from Nijman of Vlambeer [1]. You might need to take care with literal screenshake as it's 3d but there are many other suggestions that are relevant (kick back from firing, enemy blood/armor splatter, detritus persistence, small variations in bullet direction, etc.). [0] link [1] ▶ this video

The core essence of a video game is the game feel (which not everyone likes, because it's ill-defined). How does a player interact with a game? Via game mechanics. No amount of polish is going to make up for horrible game mechanics. Jan Willem (of Vlambeer), who hates the phrase "game feel", talks about it through a simple iterative process of improving game mechanics. See: ▶ this video

Here's Ryan Clark (Crypt of the NecroDancer) writing about what makes a game commercially viable: link Here's Jan Willem Nijman of Vlambeer discussing a large number of small improvements that make games feel good: ▶ this video Here's Rami Ismail, also of Vlambeer, explaining how making a game a week helps you develop an intuition for some parts of game making: link Here's a talk by Sid Meier (Civilization) about Interesting Decisions: link

I love these interactive demos of game dev techniques. Another great one is this Aztez post on fighting game effects - link - and Vlambeer's demo in their 'art of screenshake' talk ▶ this video

Great games! Great start! Here's a talk you might be interested in from one of the guys who made "Ridiculous Fishing" on the Art of Screenshake: ▶ this video Basically, it's a bunch of interesting points on how to make action games feel more responsive and fun.