I recently saw this video explaining easy ways to make your game feel “juicy”. I don’t know if I’d heard this specific term used before, but it meant exactly what I would have assumed it to mean: Adding a bunch of effects to maximize the impact of each interaction. This video was made a decade ago, so maybe it’s just an artifact of that time — and particularly that time in indie game development — that this quality of juiciness, of extra sensory impact, is treated as inherently desirable. To me it seems a quality entirely possible for a game to have too much of — and, indeed, much of the time now when I see a short clip of a new game, when I see the smooth tweening and screen shaking and flashing particle effects and freeze frame on every impact, I am immediately turned off.
It’s so noisy.
This, naturally, leads me to consider when I do enjoy these techniques being used in games I play, as well as how I tend to deploy them in my own project. For the most part, partially due to personal preference and partially due to the retro style of my game, I tend to eschew this sort of juiciness, to prefer a crunchy style of gameplay and rendering with fewer moving elements. At the same time, there are several effects one might consider juicy layered on top — particle effects for damaged enemies and terrain, screen shake for impacts, controller rumble, slowdown on hit, and some animated post-processing/overlay effects. The question is, though, where did I make the choice to add these effects, and what led me to do it?
My overriding priority in game design (as in most things) is clarity, and this seemed such a self-evident value that until thinking about this I only had a vague conception that others might have different priorities. To me, all art is about communication, and game design even more so — not only are you communicating an idea to the player, you are communicating a way for them to communicate with the idea, to form some kind of interesting loop, a systemic relationship. The game succeeds or fails based on how interesting the ideas themselves are to engage with, certainly, but even before that it succeeds or fails on how well it can tell the player what the ideas even are or how to engage with them. With this priority set, “crunchy” design is the clear default state to start from — the minimum set of elements to convey the action, minimal distance between action and depiction, minimal extraneous detail to distract from these important elements. However, while this is the ideal starting point, it’s neglectful to stop here — used judiciously, “juicy” techniques can add clarity, just as using them carelessly can reduce it.
As an example, let’s take screen shake. If you add screen shake every time the player attacks, every time an enemy attacks, any time you receive damage, etc, then it is noise that screens out useful information by adding visual chaos. However, if it’s used solely in specific circumstances — such as a large opponent landing on the ground or grabbing something heavy — then it becomes a way to convey the opponent’s state and position to the player implicitly even if they’re off-screen. Similarly, controller rumble can convey health levels, post-processing can convey proximity to danger, particle effects can convey successful (vs deflected or ineffectual) attacks, and so forth. These “juicy” techniques are a channel for communication — beyond just conveying bombast and impact, they can convey whatever the designer wishes, whatever they find most relevant for the player to know, about the world of the game.
Of course, it must be said that sometimes obscuring information is desirable, is the point. Maybe you want a screen shake effect to convey the visual chaos of being under bombardment and the impossibility of doing complex maneuvers under those circumstances, or a high-intensity post-processing effect that masks fine details to create something subjectively similar to an adrenaline rush. These are valid creative decisions, but ought to be considered choices rather than merely stumbled into. There is little long-term satisfaction and enjoyment in impactful effects created for their own sake. These tools, these movers and shakers, are useful inasmuch as they allow us to create and communicate a world — and with each tool we add, with each new communication method, we must take care to control what we communicate, lest our games cry wolf too many times and be ignored.
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