Here is the uncomfortable truth that most game design documents will never tell you: a mechanic can work flawlessly on paper, pass every QA test, have perfectly balanced damage numbers, and polished visual effects—and still leave players cold. The ability fires.
The dodge rolls. The enemy falls. Everything checks out. And yet, something is unmistakably missing. Players do not experience mechanics; they experience how mechanics feel in their hands. That chasm between a mechanic that works and a mechanic that matters is called game feel, and understanding game feel design is the single most important skill that separates competent systems designers from the developers whose games players describe with words like “crunchy,” “tight,” and “satisfying.”
Game feel design is the intentional craft of making virtual interactions feel tangible, immediate, and significant. It is not a mysterious art bestowed by talent alone. After more than twenty years of building combat systems, boss encounters, and ability kits, the pattern becomes undeniable: game feel breaks down into three layers you can actually train, measure, and improve.
Those layers are responsiveness (how fast the game answers the player), intuitiveness (how the game reads the player’s intent), and viscerality (how the action lands in the body through push-back, hit flash, sound, and sparks). Remove any one of those layers and the mechanic still functions—but it loses its significance. This article will teach you exactly how each layer works, show you real examples from games like Celeste, Dark Souls, and No Rest for the Wicked, and give you a practical framework for building game feel into your own projects.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
- Mechanics alone are not enough — players experience how mechanics feel in their hands, not the mechanics themselves. Game feel design is the bridge between functional systems and memorable player experiences.
- Three layers define game feel — Responsiveness (under 100ms input-to-reaction), Intuitiveness (the game reads player intent), and Viscerality (impact lands in the body through audiovisual feedback). All three must fire together.
- The 100ms threshold is backed by research — Multiple academic studies confirm that delays beyond 100ms measurably degrade both player performance and enjoyment in fast-paced games.
- Juice follows an inverted-U curve — ScienceDirect research shows that medium and high juiciness outperform both no juiciness and extreme juiciness. More effects is not always better.
- Forgiveness techniques are game feel, not cheating — Coyote Time, Jump Buffering, and Corner Correction (as documented by Celeste’s Maddy Thorson) are intentional design decisions that make games feel responsive and kind.
What Is Game Feel Design? (And Why Mechanics Alone Fail)
The term “game feel” was given its most rigorous definition by Steve Swink in his foundational 2008 book Game Feel: A Game Designer’s Guide to Virtual Sensation. Swink defines it as “the tactile, kinesthetic sense of manipulating a virtual object—the sensation of control in a game.”
He identified three discrete components that must work in concert: Real-Time Control (the player has continuous, moment-to-moment influence), Spatial Simulation (the world gives virtual objects a sense of presence and weight), and Polish Effects (visual, audio, and haptic feedback that make interactions feel alive).
In his earlier Gamasutra article on virtual sensation, Swink drew a direct parallel to Disney’s 12 Principles of Animation, arguing that virtual sensation is “in many ways the essence of videogames, one of the most compelling, captivating, and interesting emergent properties of human-computer interaction.”
Yet despite Swink’s thorough framework, the game design community has chronically underutilized it. As critic Celia Wagar noted in her CritPoints essay on game feel, “There are 3 components: Real-Time Control, Spatial Simulation, and Polish Effects. None of these videos mention these things, placed at the start of the damn book. At this point I’m begging you.
PLEASE just read the damn book.” The frustration is warranted. Too many developers treat game feel as an afterthought—a layer of polish to be applied after the “real” design work is done—when in reality it is the very thing that determines whether players will engage with those mechanics at all.
Consider what happens without game feel. A combat system with perfectly balanced damage numbers and frame data feels “floaty” if hits lack screen shake and hit pause. A platformer with precisely coded jump arcs feels “slippery” if landing lacks any audio or visual cue. A dodge roll with correct i-frames feels “unresponsive” if the animation starts 150 milliseconds after the button press. The mechanic works. The math checks out. But the player’s body tells a different story, and players trust their bodies before they trust patch notes.
This is why the PSA at the top of this article matters so deeply: mechanics are not gameplay changes alone. You can implement the most elegant ability system ever designed, but if the player cannot feel it in their hands—if the responsiveness is sluggish, the intuitiveness is inconsistent, or the viscerality is absent—then that system will gather dust in the ability bar while players gravitate toward the one move that actually feels good to use. Game feel design is not decoration. It is relevance.
The Three Layers of Game Feel: Responsiveness, Intuitiveness, and Viscerality
After two decades of building combat systems and watching players interact with them, the pattern crystallizes into something teachable. Game feel is not magic. It is not the exclusive domain of “gifted” designers. It breaks down into three layers, each of which can be trained, measured, and systematically improved.
When all three layers fire simultaneously—when an enemy telegraph triggers a responsive dodge that behaves consistently and lands with satisfying impact—the player does not think about individual systems. They simply feel that the game is good. Pull any one layer out, and the moment collapses. The mechanic still works. It just loses its significance.
Responsiveness: The 100ms Rule That Makes or Breaks Your Game
Responsiveness is the most measurable of the three layers, and the one with the most rigorous academic backing. It answers a single question: how fast does the game answer the player? The critical threshold, confirmed by multiple research studies, is 100 milliseconds. Below that number, players perceive the game as responding to their input. Above it, they perceive the game as ignoring them.
Kjetil Raaen’s PhD thesis on response time in games (2015) found that “the average response time is 133 ms, above the ideal delay of 100 ms”—meaning many shipped games already fail this threshold before network latency is even considered.
The Raaen and Grønli survey on latency thresholds confirmed that “work on improving latency of games often quote 100ms as acceptable latency for fast-paced games,” with genre-specific tolerances: rhythm games demand roughly 50ms, while strategy games can absorb more. A Clemson University study by Jørgensen further established that “delays over 100ms decrease player performance, and user enjoyment decreases for higher delays.”
The implication is stark. If your game’s input-to-visible-reaction pipeline exceeds 100ms, no amount of visual polish or clever design will compensate. Players will feel a persistent, nameless frustration—the sense that the game is “slow” or “laggy” even if they cannot articulate why.
This is why Shigeru Miyamoto, when developing Super Mario 64, famously said that “once that [analog stick controls] felt smooth, we knew we were halfway there.” The controls came first. The levels came second. Responsiveness was the non-negotiable foundation upon which everything else was built.
“Once the N64 prototype was finished and delivered to us, we saw that it handled the movement and controls almost perfectly. That was the moment we first realized this was going to work.”
— Shigeru Miyamoto, 1996 Developer Interview
Intuitiveness: When the Game Reads the Player’s Mind
If responsiveness answers “how fast does the game react?” then intuitiveness answers a more subtle question: “does the game understand what I meant to do?” Intuitiveness is the layer of game feel design that reads the player’s intent and acts on it, even when the player’s input is imperfect.
It is the reason Mario’s jump does one thing on the ground and another against a wall. It is the reason a dodge window in one fight behaves the same way it did in the last fight, and the fight before that.
The academic framework for this comes from Pichlmair and Johansen’s comprehensive survey (2020), which analyzed over 200 sources and identified three domains of game feel design: Physicality (tuning), Amplification (juicing), and Support (streamlining).
The Support domain—streamlining—is where intuitiveness lives. As they write, “Streamlining allows a game to act on the intention of the player, supporting the execution of actions in the game.” This is not dumbing the game down. It is removing the friction between what the player wants to happen and what actually happens.
The most famous practical example comes from Maddy Thorson’s work on Celeste, which implements ten specific “forgiveness” techniques: Coyote Time (you can still jump for a short time after leaving a ledge), Jump Buffering (pressing jump slightly before landing still registers), Halved-Gravity Jump Peak (holding jump gives more air time for adjustment), Corner Correction (the game wiggles you around head-bonks), and six more. Thorson’s insight is profound: “You might have noticed a pattern! All are centered around widening timing or positioning windows, so that everything is fudged a tiny bit in the player’s favor. I think that this is a big reason why Celeste can feel kind even though it’s very difficult—it wants you to succeed.”
Intuitiveness is not about making games easier. Dark Souls is deeply intuitive despite being punishing—because its rules are consistent. When you learn that a dodge has specific i-frames, that knowledge holds for every subsequent encounter.
The game reads your intent (“I want to avoid this attack”) and supports it with a reliable, predictable system. The frustration in games with poor intuitiveness comes not from difficulty but from inconsistency: when the same input produces different results, the player stops trusting the game, and trust is the foundation of feel.
Viscerality: Making Impact Land in the Player’s Body
Viscerality is the most immediately noticeable layer and the one most often confused with “polish.” It encompasses every technique that makes a virtual action land in the player’s body: push-back on hit, hit flash on the damaged character, screen shake on impact, sound design that sells weight, particle effects like sparks and debris, and—perhaps most crucially—hit pause (also called hitstop or hitlag), the brief freeze at the moment of contact that gives the eyes time to register the collision and sells the force behind it.
Hit pause is not merely cosmetic. As Celia Wagar explains in her analysis of hitstop, “Having the smooth arc of the character’s attack paused at that point of collision helps sell that the collision actually happened, gives the eyes a few frames to register and confirm it happened, and makes the impact seem a little more powerful.” In fighting games, hitstop serves mechanical functions too: Street Fighter 2’s entire cancel system exists because of hitstop, extending the window during which normal moves can be canceled into specials. Masahiro Sakurai dedicated an entire episode of his game design YouTube channel to eight specific hit stop techniques used in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate.
The absence of viscerality is equally instructive. Dark Souls 2 is frequently criticized for feeling “floaty” compared to the original, and one major reason is the lack of hitstop on weapon impacts. As Wagar notes, “If you don’t have hitstop, like say, Dark Souls 2, then it weakens the impact of the hit perceptually, and makes it harder to tell a hit occurred.” The mechanic is identical—damage is dealt, i-frames function—but the viscerality is absent, and the combat feels hollow. The numbers work. The feeling does not.
Real Developer Stories: Game Feel in the Wild
How Celeste Forgives the Player — and Why That Changes Everything
When Maddy Thorson set out to build Celeste, the goal was a precision platformer that felt hard but fair. The genius of Celeste’s game feel design is not in its difficulty curve or level layout—it is in the ten forgiveness systems running silently beneath every jump and dash.
Coyote Time gives you a few frames to jump after walking off a ledge. Jump Buffering lets you press jump slightly before landing and still get the action. Corner Correction nudges you around obstacles your head barely grazes. Each technique is tiny in isolation—three to six frames of leeway, a few pixels of wiggle room—but together they create a game that feels miraculously responsive without ever lowering the challenge.
I remember the first time I played Celeste’s harder B-side levels. I was dying constantly, but I never felt cheated. Every death felt like my mistake, not the game’s. That emotional response is not an accident—it is the direct result of game feel design that wants you to succeed.
Thorson’s quote captures it perfectly: “Everything is fudged a tiny bit in the player’s favor.” The player never sees the fudge. They only feel the fairness. And that feeling—trust in the game’s systems—is what keeps them pushing through hundreds of deaths instead of rage-quitting after ten.
Dark Souls and the Power of Deliberate Weight
Dark Souls takes the opposite approach from Celeste’s forgiveness and arrives at equally powerful game feel through deliberate restriction. As Celia Wagar’s analysis of Dark Souls combat explains, “By slowing down your attacks, the souls games put you on the same timescale as enemies.
Enemies need to be slow so you can react to their attacks and defend against them, and slowing down your attacks to match theirs means there’s more of a risk that they’ll interrupt you before you interrupt them.” Every swing becomes a commitment. Every dodge is a calculated risk. The weight is not a flaw—it is the feel.
A developer colleague of mine spent two years on an action RPG that was “basically Dark Souls but faster.” The team was baffled when playtesters described the combat as “muddy” and “unfair.” The issue was not speed—it was that faster player attacks against slow enemies broke the shared timescale that made Dark Souls feel coherent.
Players could attack with abandon and still dodge away, eliminating the tension that the weighted feel created. The fix was not to slow everything down but to ensure that player commitment matched enemy commitment, preserving the delicate balance where every action felt significant. Speed is not the enemy of feel—consistency is its best friend.
No Rest for the Wicked: All Three Layers Firing at Once
No Rest for the Wicked, developed by Moon Studios (the team behind the Ori series), provides perhaps the clearest contemporary example of all three layers working in concert. As IGN described it, the combat is “deliberate, tactical, and every swing of the sword counts.” But the reason every swing counts is that the game feel design ensures you feel every swing. A single basic enemy strike runs all three layers simultaneously: the telegraph fires fast enough that the player can react (responsiveness), the dodge window behaves the same way it did in the last fight (intuitiveness), and the contact lands with stagger, sound, and hit pause that sell the moment (viscerality).
Thomas Mahler, Moon Studios’ Creative Director, has been vocal about the importance of game feel, frequently sharing the influential “Juice It or Lose It” talk by Martin Jonasson and Petri Purho with developers whose games lack sufficient feedback. His insistence on juice is not aesthetic preference—it is design philosophy. The Ori games were celebrated for their movement feel long before No Rest for the Wicked, and that institutional knowledge of game feel design carried directly into the studio’s approach to combat. When Mahler says a game needs more juice, he is not asking for more particle effects. He is asking for more significance.
The Science of Juice: Why More Is Not Always Better
The Inverted-U Curve: Evidence That Juice Has a Sweet Spot
One of the most dangerous misconceptions in game feel design is the assumption that more juice is always better. If screen shake makes impacts feel good, then more screen shake must feel even better, right? A 2018 ScienceDirect study on the effects of juiciness in action RPGs demonstrates conclusively that this is false. Researchers tested four levels of juiciness—None, Low, High, and Extreme—across measures of play time, player experience, and engagement. The results revealed a clear inverted-U curve: Medium and High juiciness significantly outperformed both No juiciness and Extreme juiciness across all measures. Games with no juice felt dry and unengaging. Games with extreme juice felt overwhelming and chaotic. The sweet spot was in the middle, where feedback amplified the action without drowning it.
This finding has profound implications for game feel design. It means that every piece of feedback you add must earn its place. Screen shake on a heavy hit? Earned. Screen shake on every footstep? Noise. Hit pause on a boss’s devastating slam? Essential. Hit pause on a basic potion use? Distracting.
The craft of game feel is not about maximizing effects but about calibrating them—matching the intensity of feedback to the significance of the event. As the original coining of the term “juice” in a 2006 Game Developer article defined it: “A juicy game element will bounce and wiggle and squirt and make a little noise when you touch it… tons of cascading action and response for minimal user input.” The key phrase is “minimal user input”—juice amplifies action; it does not replace it.
Six Mistakes That Drain Juice From Your Game
Mike Salyh’s article on juice-draining mistakes provides a practical checklist for developers trying to improve their game feel. The six mistakes are:
Unresponsive Controls: The leading cause of dry gameplay. If your input-to-reaction pipeline exceeds 100ms, no amount of visual polish will compensate.
Robotic Motion: Linear interpolation (lerping) feels unnatural. Objects in the real world accelerate and decelerate—easing functions create the sense of weight that makes virtual objects feel real.
Dead Stillness: A screen that is completely still when no one interacts feels lifeless. Idle animations, subtle background motion, and ambient effects maintain the sense that the world is alive.
Missing Feedback: Every single player action should produce a visible, audible, or haptic response. Silence and stillness after an input is the definition of “feeling broken.”
Lack of Emphasis: Important events should be highlighted. If a boss’s devastating attack produces the same visual response as a basic enemy swipe, the player cannot distinguish threat levels.
Flat Audio: Sound is arguably the most underutilized tool in game feel design. A satisfying “crunch” on impact sells weight more effectively than any visual effect alone.
Salyh also shares a brilliant trick for games that require slow animations without sacrificing the illusion of responsiveness: “When the action begins, immediately snap the character into a slightly different stance. That quick motion will lessen the sting of the slow animation to follow. He may swing slow, but he raises his weapons at the speed of light.” This technique—visible in Bloodborne’s combat—preserves responsiveness in the player’s perception even when the actual animation timeline is deliberate. The first frame of response is what the body registers; the rest is read as intentional timing.
Building Game Feel: A Practical Framework for Developers
Figure 7: Building game feel requires iterating across timing, code, audio, and visual systems simultaneously.
Step 1: Audit Your Responsiveness First
Before you touch a single particle effect or record a single sound, measure your input latency. Frame the question precisely: from the moment the player presses a button to the moment the game displays a visible reaction, how many milliseconds pass? If the answer exceeds 100ms for any core action—jumping, attacking, dodging, interacting—you have a responsiveness problem that no amount of juice can fix. Use frame-by-frame analysis tools or high-speed camera recordings to measure actual player-perceived latency, not just the code-side input processing time.
Common responsiveness killers include unnecessary input buffering that delays reactions, animation priority systems that prevent canceling, and network-related latency in multiplayer games. Address these at the architectural level. As the research on latency thresholds demonstrates, every millisecond below 100ms is an investment in player satisfaction. Raaen’s thesis found that the average shipped game already operates at 133ms—33ms above the ideal. Shaving just that gap would meaningfully improve perceived game feel for millions of players.
Step 2: Design for Intuition, Not Just Precision
Once your game responds quickly, ensure it responds correctly—and by “correctly,” I mean in accordance with the player’s intent, not just their literal input. This is where forgiveness systems come in. Implement Coyote Time for platformers (allow a few frames of jumping after leaving a ledge). Add Jump Buffering (store jump inputs pressed slightly before landing). Use Corner Correction to nudge players around tight gaps. In combat games, implement input buffering so that attacks queued during the recovery of a previous action fire on the first available frame.
The goal is not to make the game easier—it is to make the game fairer. When a player presses jump within a few frames of leaving a platform, they intended to jump from the platform. The fact that their finger was slightly late is a motor control limitation, not a strategic miscalculation. As Thorson observed about Celeste, the game “wants you to succeed”—not by lowering difficulty, but by ensuring that the challenge comes from the right thing (understanding when to act) rather than the wrong thing (having pixel-perfect timing on a 1/60th-second window). Audit every player action and ask: “When a player fails at this, is it because they made a bad strategic decision, or because their finger was three frames too late?” If the answer is the latter, you have an intuitiveness problem.
Step 3: Layer in Viscerality with Intentional Calibration
Only after responsiveness and intuitiveness are solid should you add viscerality—and you should add it with surgical precision, not a fire hose. Start with the most common player actions and add feedback that matches their significance. A basic attack gets a modest hit flash and a short hit pause (2-4 frames). A heavy attack gets screen shake, extended hit pause (6-10 frames), and a satisfying audio crunch. A boss’s ultimate ability gets the full treatment: massive screen shake, extended freeze, chromatic aberration, and a sound design that makes the room vibrate. The hierarchy of feedback intensity must match the hierarchy of event significance.
Remember the inverted-U curve: too much juice is as bad as too little. Test with real players and watch for the moment where additional effects stop enhancing the experience and start overwhelming it. As Brad Woods notes in his guide to juice, “There is a trend to juice rare events instead of common ones. This is backwards. Juice common events more, because they happen more often.” The basic attack a player performs ten thousand times deserves more attention than the ultimate they use once per boss fight—because the basic attack is where the player spends the vast majority of their time forming their impression of how the game feels.
When “Bad” Game Feel Is Actually Good Design
It would be dishonest to present game feel design as a simple optimization problem where more responsiveness, more intuitiveness, and more viscerality always produce better results. Deliberate subversion of game feel can be a powerful design tool when used with clear intent. Horror games use input latency to create helplessness—the sluggish controls in Silent Hill are not a technical limitation but a design choice that makes the player feel vulnerable. Strategy games use lack of viscerality to maintain analytical distance—Civilization does not need screen shake when you research a technology because the satisfaction comes from long-term planning, not moment-to-moment feedback.
Dark Souls itself demonstrates this principle. The “weighted” feel of its combat—slow attacks that cannot be easily canceled, dodge rolls with committed recovery frames—is technically less responsive and less forgiving than a character action game like Devil May Cry. But that restriction is the point. As Wagar’s analysis explains, it creates tension through commitment. The “bad” feel relative to faster games is actually a precisely calibrated tool that produces the franchise’s signature emotional experience: dread, relief, and the exhilaration of survival.
The critical distinction is intentionality. When Dark Souls limits responsiveness, it does so consistently and in service of a specific emotional goal. When a game limits responsiveness because of poor optimization or careless input handling, the player feels the same frustration without the emotional payoff. The difference between “intentionally weighted” and “accidentally sluggish” is whether the restriction serves the experience or undermines it. Ask yourself: does this limitation make the player feel what I want them to feel? If the answer is yes, keep it. If the answer is “I hadn’t thought about it,” fix it.
Mechanics Without Feel Are Just Numbers
The gap between a mechanic that works and a mechanic that matters is not bridged by better balance, more content, or prettier art. It is bridged by game feel design—the intentional craft of making virtual interactions feel tangible, immediate, and significant. The three layers are not optional enhancements; they are the difference between a player who engages with your systems and a player who endures them. Responsiveness ensures the game answers the player within the 100ms window their body demands. Intuitiveness ensures the game reads the player’s intent rather than punishing their motor limitations. Viscerality ensures that when actions connect, they land with enough sensory information to be felt, not just observed.
In No Rest for the Wicked, a single enemy strike runs all three layers at once—and the result is combat that players describe as “crunchy” and “satisfying,” not because the damage numbers are different from any other game, but because the moment of contact has been designed to be felt. Pull any one of those layers out, and the mechanic still works. The dodge still has i-frames. The attack still deals damage. The numbers still balance. But the significance evaporates, and the player is left with a functional system they have no emotional reason to engage with.
Game feel design is not magic. It is a trainable, measurable, improvable craft built on three layers that have been validated by academic research and proven by decades of player experience. The tools are available. The research is published. The examples—from Mario 64’s analog stick to Celeste’s forgiveness systems to Sakurai’s eight hit stop techniques—are documented and accessible. The only question left is whether you will treat game feel as the foundation of your design or as an afterthought to be patched in later. Your players’ hands will know the answer before they ever read a patch note.
Frequently Asked Questions About Game Feel Design
What is game feel design?
Game feel design is the intentional craft of making virtual interactions feel tangible, immediate, and significant to the player. Coined rigorously by Steve Swink in his 2008 book, it encompasses three core components: Real-Time Control (continuous player influence), Spatial Simulation (physics and weight), and Polish Effects (visual, audio, and haptic feedback). Game feel design determines whether players describe your game as “tight” and “satisfying” or “floaty” and “unresponsive.”
Why do mechanics alone fail to create good gameplay?
Mechanics define what a game can do, but game feel determines whether players actually want to do it. A perfectly balanced combat system feels “floaty” without hit pause and screen shake. A precisely coded jump arc feels “slippery” without landing feedback. Players do not experience mechanics—they experience how mechanics feel in their hands. Without responsiveness (under 100ms), intuitiveness (the game reads intent), and viscerality (impact is felt), mechanics are functional but insignificant.
What is the 100ms rule in game design?
Multiple academic studies (Raaen 2015, Jørgensen 2012) confirm that 100 milliseconds is the critical threshold for input-to-reaction latency in fast-paced games. Below 100ms, players perceive the game as responsive. Above 100ms, both performance and enjoyment measurably decline. Some genres have even tighter requirements: rhythm games demand approximately 50ms, while strategy games can tolerate more latency.
What are forgiveness techniques in game design?
Forgiveness techniques are game feel systems that read the player’s intent and support execution, even when input timing or positioning is slightly imprecise. The most famous examples come from Celeste: Coyote Time (jumping after leaving a ledge), Jump Buffering (registering jump pressed before landing), and Corner Correction (nudging around tight gaps). These techniques do not lower difficulty—they ensure that challenge comes from strategic decisions rather than motor control precision.
What is hitstop (hit pause) and why does it matter?
Hitstop is a brief freeze—at the moment of collision during an attack—that gives the player’s eyes time to register the impact and sells the force behind it. It is not merely cosmetic: Street Fighter 2’s cancel system exists because of hitstop, and Smash Bros uses it for its SDI (Smash Directional Influence) mechanic. Dark Souls 2’s lack of hitstop is widely cited as a reason its combat feels weaker than the original’s, despite having the same underlying mechanics.
Can too much juice make a game worse?
Yes. A 2018 ScienceDirect study found that juiciness follows an inverted-U curve: Medium and High juiciness significantly outperform both No juiciness and Extreme juiciness in play time, player experience, and engagement. Too little juice feels dry; too much feels overwhelming. Every piece of feedback must earn its place by matching the significance of the event it amplifies.
How do I improve game feel in my own game?
Follow this three-step framework: (1) Audit responsiveness first—measure input-to-reaction latency and ensure it stays under 100ms for all core actions. (2) Design for intuition—implement forgiveness systems like input buffering, Coyote Time, and consistent rule sets that read player intent. (3) Layer in viscerality with calibration—add hit pause, screen shake, audio, and particles that match the significance hierarchy of your game’s events, remembering that common actions deserve more juice than rare ones.
References
[1] Swink, S. (2008). Game Feel: A Game Designer’s Guide to Virtual Sensation. Morgan Kaufmann. Available at: https://gamifique.files.wordpress.com/2011/11/2-game-feel.pdf
[2] Swink, S. (2006). “Principles of Virtual Sensation.” Gamasutra/Game Developer. https://www.gamedeveloper.com/design/principles-of-virtual-sensation
[3] Wagar, C. (2020). “You Don’t Know What Game Feel Is — Read the Damn Book, Please.” CritPoints. https://critpoints.net/2020/05/23/you-dont-know-what-game-feel-is-read-the-damn-book-please
[4] Raaen, K. (2015). Response Time in Games: Requirements and Improvements. PhD Thesis, Simula Research Laboratory / University of Oslo. http://home.simula.no/~paalh/students/KjetilRaaen-phd.pdf
[5] Raaen, K. & Gronli, T-M. (2015). “Latency Thresholds for Usability in Games: A Survey.” NIKT. https://www.ntnu.no/ojs/index.php/nikt/article/view/5252/4728
[6] Jorgensen, K.F. (2012). “How Responsiveness Affects Players’ Perception in Digital Games.” Clemson University. https://people.computing.clemson.edu/~sjoerg/docs/Joerg12_RespInGames.pdf
[7] Miyamoto, S. et al. (1996). “Super Mario 64 Developer Interviews.” shmuplations.com. https://shmuplations.com/mario64
[8] Thorson, M. “Celeste & Forgiveness.” https://www.maddymakesgames.com/articles/celeste_and_forgiveness/index.html
[9] Wagar, C. (2020). “How Dark Souls Changed Combat.” CritPoints. https://critpoints.net/2020/09/12/how-dark-souls-changed-combat
[10] Wagar, C. (2017). “Hitstop/Hitfreeze/Hitlag/Hitpause.” CritPoints. https://critpoints.net/2017/05/17/hitstophitfreezehitlaghitpausehitshit
[11] Sakurai, M. (2022). “Eight Hit Stop Techniques.” Masahiro Sakurai on Creating Games. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tycbMSjDDLg
[12] Jonasson, M. & Purho, P. (2012). “Juice It or Lose It.” Nordic Game Jam. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fy0aCDmgnxg
[13] Nijman, J.W. (2013). “The Art of Screenshake.” INDIGO Classes / Vlambeer. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJdEqssNZ-U
[14] Pichlmair, M. & Johansen, M. (2020). “Designing Game Feel. A Survey.” IEEE Transactions on Games. https://arxiv.org/abs/2011.09201
[15] Mikkelsen, R. & Wirman, H. (2024). “Making Sense of ‘Game Feel’ through Affective Science.” DiGRA 2024. https://dl.digra.org/index.php/dl/article/view/2223
[16] “The Effects of Juiciness in an Action RPG” (2018). Entertainment Computing. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1875952118300879
[17] Salyh, M. (2020). “6 Mistakes That’ll Drain the Juice Out of Your Game.” Game Developer. https://www.gamedeveloper.com/design/6-mistakes-that-ll-drain-the-juice-out-of-your-game
[18] Woods, B. “Juice.” Brad Woods Digital Garden. https://garden.bradwoods.io/notes/design/juice
[19] IGN. “No Rest for the Wicked’s Crunchy Combat Is More Dark Souls Than Diablo.” https://www.ign.com/articles/no-rest-for-the-wickeds-crunchy-combat-is-more-dark-souls-than-diablo-ign-first
[20] Brown, M. (2018). “Secrets of Game Feel and Juice.” Game Maker’s Toolkit. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=216_5nu4aVQ
Game Developer | Designer | Creative Storyteller
Matt Dogherby is a passionate game developer and designer based in Brisbane, Australia. With a career spanning over 15 years, Matt combines technical skill with a deep love for storytelling to create games that captivate and inspire. His unique perspective is shaped by the laid-back energy of Brisbane and his lifelong connection to the ocean, where he often trades coding sessions for surf sessions.
