Jack Kutilek / Writing / Timestepped Gamefeel

The book Game Feel (Swink, 2009) outlines a particular aesthetic in games and investigates the ways that a game's design and presentation contribute to it. It focuses on the joy we experience when we directly control an avatar in a simulated system, with realtime feedback and input allowing for fine-tuned adjustments of the game's dynamics as they happen - like driving a car, or... a spaceship. And it recognizes the way that the games as a whole, beyond just the mechanics, are designed to keep you in a flow state, baiting you with challenges that are just beyond your reach to guide you through the space of possible interactions and dynamics allowed by the game's systems. Playing these games is like learning to play an instrument, and then performing some songs that the game has written.

It defines a number of categories of 'metrics' that contribute to a game's feel:

• input
• response
• context
• polish
• metaphor
• rules

and a number of principles that make for 'good' gamefeel:

• predictable results
• instantaneous response
• easy but deep
• novelty
• appealing response
• organic motion
• harmony

I won't go into detail of these topics, their names are suggestive enough on their own. If you are curious, read the book (it's good). Together they form a theory of the ways that games can be designed to better facilitate this aesthetic. It's a fantastic theory, but I find it unnecessarily constrained in its definition. I think you can easily generalize the principles to a broader category of games without losing too much of the theory's utility. My main point of contention is the focus on organic motion, and its demands for realtime simulation.

While the focus on realtime control of systems does carve out a particularly distinct part of the aesthetic, it strikes me that even games without realtime control - games that simulate in untimed, discrete timesteps, often in a grid - can provide an alternative flavor of gamefeel that is a bit different, but still, I think, worthy of the name. Even though there isn't a continuous space to traverse in an expressive way, there is still a space to traverse: the state-space. Particularly when you have undo at your fingertips, you are able to dance your way through a maze of game states with an certain agility, experiencing a unique kind of gamefeel. Like operating a hexaflexagon, or the way that experts solve rubiks cubes, gliding through state changes with a surprising fluidity (helped by the actual realtime systems of realworld physics in these cases, but you get the idea).

We turn the game's systems over in our hands while we play, operating a complex device, shifting through states, performing increasingly complex incantations of state changes to reach certain key states on our path to a goal. Interpolated animations can help in this sense, giving a level of polish that sells a realtime system that isn't actually simulated (like, as Game Feel explains, the way that character animations sell a more complex movement system than is actually simulated) But they are not necessary. There is a distinct feel to flowing through a graph, a network, of discrete game states. You act, the system responds - predictable results, isntantanteous response - principles of gamefeel! In fact all the principles manifest in these games too. They are like playing asteroids by folding your ship through the metaspace, avoiding failstates, breaking down 'boulders' with the tools given to you so you can make it through the games challenges. There is the same room for a depth of exploration, the same room for novelty, harmony, appealing response, and fine control of the system. The motion is not necessarily organic (though again we can dress it up to appear moreso), but it is still dynamic and precise.

Let's look at some examples.

Consider: Block-pushing Puzzle Games. Puzzle games can use logical clues to direct you towards fantastic interactions between the mechanics that open up new possibilities in the state space. Or they can use logical clues to direct you towards fantastic logical arguments that help you solve the puzzle. Or maybe they do a combination of both. The point is, these games establish a state space of possibilites, and give you a series of challenges to help you explore it in a satisfying way. And you have direct control over the avatar, and the game responds immediately. But instead of timing-based challenges, the games give you logical challenges - you have to find your way through a huge maze of states to reach the win state. You are given clues, via the deterministic mechanics and carefully designed level layouts, that allow you to prune away the dead-end states and find the way through to the solution. So you are still not just given animations of the fun things you can do and asked to do them - you must explore, reason about what the game is asking of you, and discover them for yourself. It's just that, instead of feats of motion, you perform feats of state transitions.

This can be embellished in different ways. Baba Is You (Hempuli, 2019) has a wonderful bounce as it animates between grid cells, providing a smooth feel of movement that also lets you intentionally snap to the game's grid. A Monster's Expedition (Draknek & Friends, 2020) lets you input a sequence of moves as fast as your fingers will let you; it accelerates its animations to keep up with your actions. Many puzzlescript games also afford you this flexibility, by just not using animations - your avatar jumps from grid cell to grid cell, but there is still an undeniable continuity between states. Corrypt's (Brough, 2013) boxes feel sticky in the way they will follow you, and you have to scrape them off by moving perpendicularly to them so they will stay put. Kine (Frey, 2019) was born out of this gamefeel - exploring the way that blocks can bound their way through a grid. It has levels that are literally meant to evoke the feel of dancing! Ethereal (Recabarren & Batista, 2019) has an excellent amount of juice to help amp up its gamefeel. It really leans into the unity of both Swink's gamefeel (with its interpolated line movement) and the sort I am describing here (with they way you switch between lines while playing, and trigger certain state changes).

Or consider: Stepping Games (as described in What to say instead of Roguelike, an excellent breakdown of the terminology surrounding 'roguelikes'): "A game where the player controls a single character who moves in discrete steps on a discrete board, and where the environment reacts immediately to your steps. The layout of the board is important to the gameplay." Think: Rogue (Toy et al., 1980), Crypt of the Necrodancer (Brace Yourself Games, 2015) when playing as the Bard, DROD (Hermansen, 1996), Ending (Steed, 2013) (and it's upcoming sequel Unending). Threes (Sirvo, 2014) or 2048 (Cirulli, 2014) might fit in here too. In these games, you have total control over an orchestra of actors through a combination of direct and indirect action - you control how a single avatar moves, and a variety of enemies and traps react to your movements in predictable ways based on the player's position and obstacles that exist in the level layouts. Stepping games may be less focused on logical reasoning, compared to puzzle games, and more focused on processing a large number of entities to complete a level (like processing data - orchestrating some reactions in the system in a certain order to achieve some output). But they are still played in discrete timesteps, and they still present a form of this statespace gamefeel.

Having a small number of inputs helps; it enables a quick response from the player and direct control of the system (instantaneous response!). Tactics games like Advance Wars (Intelligent Systems, 2001) or Into the Breach (David & Ma, 2018) are also about managing a number of actors in discrete timesteps, but they lack an immediacy to the actions that is necessary for gamefeel. Partly due to the way each turn is planned ahead of time and then executed, and partly to due to the complexity of managing a cursor and selecting multiple actors in sequence. Block-pushers are generally controlled with directional buttons only (with two other buttons for undo and reset), Stepping games use the same (or sometimes a few more for diagonal movement). With only this small set of direct inputs you frequently develop short sequences of inputs that accomplish a variety of subgoals, knocking the system in a limited number of ways to produce a huge variety of dynamics. As you master the game, you dance your way through these movements, orchestrating higher and higher orders of state changes so that you can complete each challenge.

And both of these realtime and timestepped games have the same high level structure! Swink's gamefeel games have context and rules and metaphor that clue you in to where the fun of the game is and provide you increasing levels of challenge so you can bootstrap your way to the necessary skill levels to realize all the fun. They provide these clues much in the same way that logic puzzles are set with clues that direct you towards fun logical arguments on your way to the unique solution of the puzzle. Or in the way that puzzlegame levels are arranged to have you discover an interaction in the mechanics you hadn't considered before, and leverage it to solve the puzzle. All of these games are focused on surfacing - through play - a distinct, essential, crystalized form of Systems, waiting for you the player to discover for yourself the structural and visceral curiosities embedded in them.

I am a big fan of games that focus on this aesthetic, and this structure of play. It facilitates a kind of guided, self-directed learning. It makes virtual systems as easy as possible to internalize, so that we can temporarily replace our sense of self with the game's - so we can be the game - and spend some time in a new mode of thought, and a new mode of action. The principles of gamefeel that Swink outlined are incredibly helpful for thinking about how to achieve this aesthetic, and you can put it in all kinds of games - not just ones about fine, realtime control of an avatar. Tim Roger's In Praise of Sticky Friction is a kind of descriptive taxonomy of a wealth of little moments of gamefeel, focused on describing the experiences rather than theorizing about the design. I want to read an article praising the various frictions in these timestepped games, there is surely enough variety in this additional wing of gamefeel to support one.

~~~

Jack Kutilek
April 2021

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