4. Polish

At or around the same time you’re building context, you’re going to want to start putting in a bit of polish -- but only what’s essential to your prototype. Polish can include sprays or dustings of particles where things hit or interact, screen shake, view angle shifts, or the squash and stretch of objects colliding. The point is to convey the physical properties of objects through their motion and interaction. Any effect that enhances the impression that the game world has its own self consistent physics is fair game.

This is opportunity to take inspiration from the film, animation, and *gasp* the world around you. Look at the way things interact. If you hit a glass table with a hammer it will shatter, complete with noise, motion, and a spray of “particles.” The more clues like that you can borrow to inform the player of the physical properties of the objects they’re interacting with the better.

When prototyping, I like to list these cues out and sort them in order of importance to the physical impression that should be conveyed. As an example, consider the goal of making a game that feels squishy. This is a good place to start because to say that something is squishy implies visuals, sounds, tactile sensation. It provides a great benchmark: if something is squishy, it will deform in a certain way, like a water balloon or silly putty.

As these deformations happen, certain sounds accompany them; familiar squelching and schlucking noises which are hard for me to describe but easy to recall. It’s the noise of walking through deep mud, or kneading wet dough with your hands. Separating out the various pieces of squishiness as a physical property yields something like this:

1. Motion -- The thing must deform and bend when it comes into contact with other objects, especially relative to speed.
2. Tactile -- You can easily deform, mold, or stretch the thing
3. Visual -- To aid the impression of squishiness, the thing could look moist like a slug, translucent with tiny bubbles like Jello, or amorphous like putty or clay.
4. Sound -- Any movement or deformation of the object should be accompanied by squelching noises.

These comprise the physical clues that get assembled into your brain to create the notion of squishiness. Anything you can layer on top to fake these effects will increase and improve the impression of physicality and, hence, the feel. As polish is a notorious time sink, you want to limit the amount of time you spend creating effects to those which are crucial to demonstrate the impression of physicality you’re going after.

Something squishy needs to deform and to sound squishy, but it probably doesn’t need a full fluid or spring simulation. A simple squash and stretch deformation is probably enough to get the idea across.

So, yes, polish is time consuming but it’s also vital. A little screen shake or spray of particles can make all the difference in the world to a game’s feel.