Planted:
Status: seed
Juice is the non-essential visual, audio & haptic effects that enhance the player’s experience.
For example, the delightful chimes sound that plays when Mario collects a mushroom.
The 1UP text that appears is essential.
Communicating the player gained an extra life.
The sound is the Juice.
Non essential but serves a purpose:
- ▪ reinforcing Mario did indeed collect the mushroom,
- ▪ that this was a good thing, by using a delightful sound &
- ▪ giving the player a small reward. Encouraging them to collect more & teaching them how to play.
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‘Juice’ was our wet little term for constant & bountiful user feedback. A juicy game element will bounce & wiggle & squirt & make a little noise when you touch it. A juicy game feels alive & responds to everything you do – tons of cascading action & response for minimal user input. It makes the player feel powerful & in control of the world, & it coaches them through the rules of the game by constantly letting them know on a per-interaction basis how they are doing.”
Below is a delete button.
When clicked, it displays a delete-in-progress message.
Use the range input to increase the button’s level of Juice.
- ▪ None: The button fulfils functional requirements.
Juice can:
- ▪ teach,
- ▪ make something feel more lively,
- ▪ improve the sense of responsiveness between the player & what their controlling,
- ▪ give the player a greater sense of impact,
- ▪ make an action satisfying,
- ▪ increase enjoyment, immersion, engagement & excitement,
- ▪ create a sense of reward,
- ▪ enhance the player’s emotional connection to the game &
- ▪ make an experience more memorable (emotions are the foundation of memory).
Juice is about the tiny details.
It’s about squeezing more out of everything.
It’s about serving the user’s emotional needs, not just the functional.
It originated in games but can be used in other types of software.
Game Feel is described as the tactile sensation of manipulating a digital agent.
In Super Mario 64, the player gets joy from just moving Mario around, without the need to complete objectives.
This is achieved by juicing Mario.
The nuance of how he gradually moves from a walk to a run.
The spring coil & explosion when jumping.
A celebratory “ya-hoo” while in the air.
Game Feel taps into the human nature of performing actions that have no purpose.
They just feel good.
Take this like button from Josh Comeau’s website.
Clicking it triggers satisfying animation & sounds that makes you want to keep doing it.
The Obstacle
An obstacle when attempting to make the user feel is the pane of glass separating them from the content.
Preventing the user from touching it.
In addition, the way we talk to software is heavily muted by the input device (controller, mouse, keyboard, …).
Only allowing a vocabulary of button presses, mouse positions & joystick angles.
Game developers compensate for this using redundant techniques.
For example, to acknowledge 1 action, like a button press, the developer could use multiple animations, sounds & vibrations.
Priority
There is a trend to juice rare events in non-game software.
For example, an explosion of confetti to celebrate completing onboarding or a funny animated 404 page.
Game developers do the opposite.
They focus on the mundane, routine tasks.
Because these are the foundation the rest of the software sits on.
Steve Swink broke down what the player does most in Mario 64:
- ▪ 20-something hours: completing the game, defeating Bowser, getting all 120 stars.
- ▪ Every hour or two: completing a ‘boss’ battle.
- ▪ Every half an hour: getting access to a new area or painting.
- ▪ Every 5 minutes or so: completing an objective, getting a star.
- ▪ Moment to Moment: steering around, running, jumping, performing acrobatics.
Completing onboarding is like completing the game. It happens once. Juicing it has little effect on the overall experience. Compared to juicing the moment to moment events.
How to Create Game Feel
Rahul Vohra talks about a design process where interfaces begin as toys. A toy being:
- ▪ fun,
- ▪ without a goal,
- ▪ indulges moments of playful exploration &
- ▪ create moments of pleasant surprise.
We play with toys, but we play games.
A ball is a toy, but baseball is a game.
The best games are made with toys.
Thinking back to Mario 64.
The way Mario feels is the foundation of the game.
So before creating levels, Mr. Miyamoto (principal director) had a test garden made.
An environment where a user could move Mario around. Pick up objects & interact with the surroundings.
A toy playground where they could test & refine how Mario felt.
In web development, this would be like Storybook.
Rendering components in isolated environments.
Components lose their purpose when they are not wired together in an app.
They turn into toys you can play with.
Where you can test & refine how they feel.
The Habits app helps the user build habits.
Based on the theory, if you do something everyday for 66 days, it becomes a habit.
The user enters something they want to make a habit.
For example, reading.
Everyday, they are presented with a checkbox.
If they have read, they click it. Indicating they have completed their task for the day.
The video to the right shows two checkboxes.
A standard checkbox & a juiced checkbox.
While the standard prioritises functional requirements, the juiced prioritises emotional requirements.
When a user taps the standard, it acknowledges the action.
When a user holds down the juic
