Good Game Feel: An Empirically Grounded Framework for Juicy Design

"Good Game Feel: An Empirically Grounded Framework for Juicy Design" addresses a gap in game design scholarship: the term "juicy design," which refers to large amounts of audiovisual feedback that enhance player experience, remains vaguely defined. The paper seeks to ground the concept in practitioner knowledge and produce an actionable analytical tool. Its primary method is a survey of 17 professional game developers, whose responses were organized through an affinity diagram into categories including game characteristics, dimensions of experience, direct feedback, redundancy, and slickness.

The developer-derived findings emphasize that juice must be integrated holistically with all game elements and matched to genre, since feedback alone is insufficient. Effective feedback is characterized as exaggerated, multimodal, relevant, and non-overwhelming. Developers reported that game feel is intuitively recognizable yet difficult to articulate, a tension that shaped the authors' analytical approach. These categories were translated into an initial five-component framework, which was then refined through two rounds of case analysis of Candy Crush Saga and Downwell.

The final framework comprises three parts (Game Characteristics, Game State, and Direct Feedback) and 11 actionable questions. A central methodological finding is that intangible constructs such as "visceral" and "impactful" proved resistant to analysis and were reframed into concrete notions like feedback coherence and supplementary feedback. The authors conclude that juiciness concerns the game as a whole rather than feedback in isolation. Acknowledged limitations include the small developer sample and the absence of player perspectives, which constrain the framework's validity. The supporting literature combines empirical HCI and game studies research with practitioner texts and industry talks.