Game Feel: Why Your Death Animation Sucks

[Music] Hello. So, um, hi. I'm uh Nicole Berbetum. I'm a indie game developer from Romania. Uh, and also the founder of those awesome guys, which is quite ironic because legally I'm the only one in the company. Uh people also know me as um Celu and I've been uh making games for about I think five or six years. The number always differs every time I uh I um say it. And I've been making a lot of uh browser games uh made in Flash. Uh I've took part in many game jam and um for the past 2 years I've been working on my most ambitious project yet called Move or Die which is this uh four-player party game uh based around the idea that if you stand still you explode. Uh and uh I'm not only mentioning this uh

because well I've been working on it for wait three three years now two years uh and uh also because it's coming up um later this year but also because I'm going to use it in the context of game feel. I'm going to use it to talk about why your death animation sucks. So um I want to talk a bit about feedback. And I'm sure all of you know what um feedback is, but I'm not referring to the kind of feedback you get from a person. I'm uh referring to the type uh to the type of feedback that you get from pressing a physical button. Uh when you press a button on a controller, it feels much better than uh using a touchcreen. And I think we can all agree on that. Uh that's probably why I'm not such a big fan of uh mobile games. And uh the thing is game field doesn't only apply to games. It's basically feel with game appended to it. So we can see it

being applied in uh other um uh areas like have you noticed when you're when you're typing a message on your phone or when you're sending an email how when uh whenever you press uh a letter it pop it pops above your finger and it makes a little sound effect or maybe the phone vibrates. All of these are not cosmetic only. Uh they're also functional because uh now you no longer have to offset your um your vision from the keypad to the actual message to see if your input registered. You already know it did because you heard that little clicky sound or you felt the phone vibrate. So it makes the act of typing a message much much faster and more enjoyable. Uh and this is how game field can make an experience better. Uh, I want to show a few examples of a game field when it's done right and when it's not done right. And this is the first

[Music] example. Yeah. So, I don't know what that was. Uh, it's just a random game I found on YouTube. I don't even know the name of it. Uh but yeah, that game looks like it feels horrible. I mean, um there's a there's no uh muzzle flash on the shotgun. There's like a smoke asset that lasts for like three frames and the sound effect is really cheap and it doesn't make you feel like you're shooting a real gun. It kind of feels like you're playing around with a toy gun. Uh and it doesn't give weight to the weapon. So, that feels bad without even mentioning the way the guy died and that he has 24 rounds in a pumpaction shotgun. Uh, but that doesn't count. This is an example of a weapon done well. Are you drunk?

Right. So, that's Bullet Storm, and that feels amazing. Uh, that's a flail gun if I'm not mistaken. And it shoots two bombs chained together and you can see them wrap around your enemy and you can remotely detonate them and see the guts fly all over the screen. And that's so good. Uh, in conclusion, the thing is game feel is the kind of thing that uh when it's there, nobody notices it, but when it's not there, everybody notices it. It's the kind of thing that makes you say, "This game feels good, but I don't know why." And um I'm going to uh create a death animation in the context of move or die without using any um handdrawn frame by frame explosions or anything like that. And I'm going to try to make it feel good. So let's see. I am going to assume we don't have anything. So I'm going to start with the basics. And I'm going to need movement and a death condition. So, I'm going to skip the movement part because you can pretty much find all over the internet the

building blocks of game development, how to create uh physics. But for the sake of this presentation, uh I'm going to take the life mechanic out so you won't explode if you stand still. But I'm going to say that whenever a player jumps on another player, that player will explode. So, I'm talking about games here, and I could be showcasing this using photos or images, uh, sorry, or videos, but I'm talking about the game. So, let's make this interactive. So, it's going to be stupid and I really hope it works. What I have here is two controllers, and I'm what I'm going to attempt to do is have two people from the audience play the game in real time as I'm building it. So, who wants to try this? I want to see some hands up and somebody helps me spread these out. Give it to somebody around there. So, uh, or you cool. So, what I'm

going to need you two to do is whenever the game appears on screen, run at each other and jump on each other's heads. What I'm going to need everybody else do is give them a round of applause anytime they do so to show our appreciation for them helping me make this work. So, let's see if this work. [Applause] [Music] Go. Come on. Nice. [Music] cool, except it's not cool. It's horrible. It's not good enough. Uh there are no animations. The characters disappear instantly. It feels bad. It doesn't feel rewarding to eliminate your opponent. So, uh what should we add? We should add animations. So, I'm going to create an animation, talk a bit about

sprite sheets versus asset sheets, export pack, and implement them. So the first thing I do uh in mover or die is I split the character into many tiny pieces. Then I can later import in Adobe Flash where I make all my animations and I animate uh uh I animate them in Flash and then I have to decide how I implement the the graphics in the game. The most most common uh method is sprite sheets. And I'm sure all of you know what a spreadsheet is. And just in case somebody doesn't, uh it's basically all the frames of the animation stored in a bigger image. So, uh I don't use this. The reason I don't use this is because it's quite a big image uh and um uh it takes a lot of resources and especially if you have a game with really high resolution assets uh and a lot of animations, it can basically make your computer catch on fire. So, um, what I

am using is something I call asset sheets, which I'm still not sure if it has an official name, but that's what I call them, which is basically the same thing, but instead of exporting each frame of the animation, I export each uh part of my character and then export the animation separately using a custom exporter as a text file. So, this is how a frame looks like in the animation. And I have there the x y coordinates, scale, rotation, alpha, and I can um interchange these variables very easy. So um as a comparison, this is how the sprite sheet would look for those like what four or five animations I showed before. And this would be 5700 by 3100 pixels, which is quite a lot. Uh in comparison, this is the asset sheet, which is 460 by 210, which is less than 1% of the number of pixels. So, uh, the advantage with asset sheets is that they're they're small, they're flexible, optimized. Uh, you have individual

control over many variables. I could, uh, for example, if I wanted a different character with a bigger right leg. I wouldn't have to export another like sprite sheet and go through the whole process again. I could just, uh, change the scale number in the code and have it done real time. So, that's awesome. And another awesome thing is interpolation. I'm sure you all played the game that uh uses sprite sheets animations and uh tries to go into slow motion and it looks really choppy because it plays the same frame uh multiple times. But with uh asset sheets and having the frame as text, you can uh spread them apart and interpolate between them and create data where there is none. So you can have really smooth slow motion which looks really awesome uh and it's really awesome to have as a tool. So, uh, let's see how the game looks with animations in it. [Music] Go. Nice. It It already looks much [Music]

better. Who's the yellow one? You're the yellow. Who's the blue one? Oh, by the way, let's do something. Every time you die, pass the controller to somebody else. One more. Cool. Enough of that. It's not good. It's still not good enough. There are animations, but um it still doesn't feel rewarding. So, uh what could I add to make this feel better? Any suggestions? Just yell it out loud. Screen shake. Sound. Sound effect. Somebody said sound. Good. So, I'm going to add sound effects. So, um, for sound effects, I'm going to do movement, death, and the environment. So, uh, sound effects are really important and they make a huge difference and it like it's really sad to see that developers leave this at the last step in the development. Uh, and they're really important because they completely change

the feel of the game. So, here are uh, some examples. I've sent uh game uh some gameplay footage uh to some sound designers and I asked them to do sound effects without any context. I just gave them a a piece of footage without any sound in it. So this is how it [Music] sounds. Okay, fair enough. Uh the thing is I did this with multiple sound uh designers. So here is another example and how it completely changes the way the game [Music] [Applause] feels. As you can see, this one was a bit more moody. There was a lot of uh echo and it felt like a bigger environment only by uh changing the sound effects. Uh lastly, this is uh a

last third example which is my personal favorite. See [Applause] why right? So you can see how important sound effects are. Um so let's add sound effects. I'm going to add sound effects uh for movement. And it's really important to have them be very subtle and a lot of variation. So, um, let's start with a jumping sound effect. It's going to sound like this. Cool. So, this is a simple, uh, jumping sound effect. The thing is, it repeats a lot and it's really annoying when you have like when you play a game and there are like only two footstep sounds and it's really freaking annoying. So, what I'm going to do is make it subtle, and I'm going to turn down the volume, which is right off the bat much

better. But I want to add variation. So, I'm going to use a little trick here. Uh, instead of using multiple sound files, what I'm going to do is bend the pitch of the sound in real time every time it plays. So, with that, it's like one line of code, and you get this only by uh by adding a slight um pitch band. So, that's a a simple jumping sound effect. Uh, when it comes to footsteps, uh, really subtle and a lot of variation. Uh, I didn't add any footsteps in a move or die because there are four characters. They're really small and they run really, really fast. So, having footsteps for those would be kind of suicidal. Uh, so I skipped that and um jump to the death sound effect, which I'm going to combine multiple sounds to create a satisfying end result. So, I'm going to start with strong impact that sounds like this. Awesome. Uh, I'm going to layer it on top of a smaller impact. Cool. And finally, I'm going to

need a really satisfying squishy sound. Yeah, it doesn't make much sense, but it's going to make more sense later on. So, I'm going to combine all of these to create this sound effect. Nice. Now, this sounds like satisfying. When you kill somebody, you want to hear this. Uh, and one last thing, uh, the environment. It's really important to add sound effects to your environment. You notice those little two blocks that disappear when you touch them. They're going to make this sound and that's it. It's really important because, uh, you want to add context to the world around you. When you play a first-person shooter and you knock over a chair, you want to hear it hit the ground. Otherwise, it doesn't have weight to it. So, bless you. Let's see how the game sounds with sound effects in it. [Music] Nice quick controller. And come on.

Nice. Cool. I have to go really fast through these because I don't have much time. So, you know what I'm going to say? It's not good enough. So, um, what I'm going to do next is I'm going to add something I call death paint. I need a way to show where a character died and reward you for eliminating your opponent by leaving a little uh splatter on the background. So, what I did is I went on the internet and found these uh assets and I changed them to match the colors of the player. And what I'm going to do is spawn one in the background whenever somebody dies. So, they're going to look like this. Um I'm going to add a bit of variation by rotating them and changing their scale. Uh, but they will match the the player's color. So, they're going to look like this, which is absolutely horrible and it looks ugly. So, um, what I'm going to do is I'm going to render them behind everything except the background. So, that's much better, but

it's still not good enough. I want it to also make a make an impact on the floor and on the tiles around you. Sorry. So, uh, what I'm going to do is I'm going to create an alpha mask for the ground and the tiles, and I'm going to apply that on a second layer of paint that's going to go on the foreground. So, that's going to look like that, which is much much better. Uh, also, it's on additive uh, blending mode. But before the demo, I want to add one more thing. Uh because we all love particles, I'm going to add particles that fly out of the player that died and they're going to leave a little splatter everywhere they touch um the ground or the tiles around them. So, let's see how the game looks with those. Make a [Music] [Applause] mess. Come on. We need some blue. There we go. Cool. Imagine this with four

players. Nice. Now, these flatters also fade out in time. So, it tells you when a player died in time. So, enough of that. You know what I'm going to say. It's not good enough. So, uh, what should I add to make this feel even better? Somebody said something around here. Screen shake. Is anybody from Vamir in the audience? So, uh, I'm going to add a few final touches. I'm going to add screen shake, chromatic aberration, uh, shockwave, and haptic feedback. So, uh, screen shake, it's really simple. Uh, it's going to play out whenever somebody dies. This is a bit too much for the sake of the presentation. So, I'm going to tone that down a little bit. And it's going to look like Come Oh, there we go. Cool. So, that looks good. Uh, but it's still not good enough. I'm going to add chromatic aberration. uh for those who don't know is basically splitting the color channels and offsetting them which

is slowly becoming the new lens flare of 2015. So I'm going to do that and animate it whenever somebody dies and it's going to look like this. Cool. Which is again a bit exaggerated. Uh and also I mentioned shockwave. I'm going to create basically a white donut that keeps growing and I'm going to apply that as a displacement map on the whole screen whenever somebody dies and it's going to make this ripple in the screen which looks really satisfying. Uh, and finally, haptic feedback. The controller will vibrate whenever you die. You guys won't be able to tell this, but those who are playing will. So, go ask them after the presentation. Um, and let's see how all that comes together in the game. [Music] Nice. You're having

fun. Cool. So, uh, all of all of these are really important because, um, not not only do they look good, like the chromatic abration and the screen shake and all that, they also let you know that somebody else died somewhere else on the screen without you having to look there. Uh, so it gives you like a contextual um, uh, peripheral vision. So, I'm going to say that's good enough, at least for now. Um, but there are there are a lot of things uh you might have missed. Uh, there are um, have you noticed the little props that are on the ground that characters can kick around? It also gives a weight and depth to the to the universe of the game. Uh, the landing dust. Uh, this is really important. There is a mode in the game where every player is invisible on the same screen and you have to figure out where you and the other players are only based on that little puff of dust. uh the eyes, the characters look at each other all the time and this is really

important to have um personalities injected in your characters and in the in the full game uh they uh they're happy when they win, they cry when they lose and when you're tied with somebody score-wise, they give each other mean looks. Uh and finally, rhythm. All the background uh elements pulsated on the rhythm of the music. So that gives the game uh a nice rhythm to it. And uh one last thing uh before I end this, I want to end this on a high note. So I'm going to try to make something epic. Uh can the yellow player go in the other uh corner of the screen and the blue one in this one? Okay, stay there. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to do a countdown. And when I say go, I want you to run at each other and jump on each other's head. Uh except I'm going to make this a bit more epic. Let's see if this works. So stay there. Ready? Three, two, one, [Music]

go. Go, go, go, go, go. Blue. Let him kill you. Let him kill the timing. Nice. Thank you. Thank you very much. This was just a small uh demonstration. The whole game is currently in early access on Steam. You can um get it there and give it a try. And um again uh thank you for having me here and let's this keep let's keep this conversation going. You can find me on Twitter, Skype, Facebook, whatever. If you're using email, do that. Uh let's keep this conversation going and um if any of you have any questions or if we have time for questions. Yeah, we have time for questions. Go ahead.

Anyone? I could I could leave the game. All right. Ah, that won't work. Never mind. All right. Thanks. Thank you.