5. Metaphor

Your choice of metaphor changes game feel dramatically. I like the following example: imagine Gran Turismo, Project Gotham, or whatever your favorite “simulation” style racing game happens to be. Now substitute for the car a giant, balding fat guy running as fast as he possibly can spraying sweat like a sprinkler in August. Without altering the structure of the game, the tuning of the game, or the function of the game, the feel of the game is substantially altered.

All you’ve done is swap out a 3D model of a car for a 3D model of a giant fat guy running and you’ve got Run Fatty Run instead of Gran Turismo. This will change the feel of the game because you have preconceived notions about the way a car should handle. Obviously.

You know how a car should feel and move and turn based on your experience driving a car and looking at cars. Oftentimes, people will play a game -- horse riding gameplay is my favorite example -- and they’ll say “this doesn’t feel like a horse.” And you’ll ask them well, have you ever ridden a horse before? And they’ll say “no, but this doesn’t feel like a horse.” People have these built-in, preconceived constructs, mental models about the way certain things move and, by extension, how it should feel to control them.

The implication for prototyping is this: you need to take a step back and decide how much of your metaphor to represent in the prototype to get an accurate read on the game feel you’re building. Iconic is fine, but if it’s going to be a car, it needs to read as a car. The trick is not to limit yourself to only everyday objects, but to look at how you can use preloaded conceptions to set up, and execute on, expectations for how a thing should feel and behave when controlled.

6. Rules

Rules are the final layer into of a game feel prototype. Basically, you’re looking for longer-period objectives to give additional meaning to the sensation of control and mastery. If you’ve been noodling around with a mechanic for a couple hours, this shouldn’t be too much trouble since you’re probably already making up little goals for yourself. Race from point A to point B, scale this tall mountain, rescue five wayward puppies. These kinds of higher order goals define game feel at a different level: sustainability.

This is one of the most difficult things to do. You need to build in some longer period goals to find out whether or not this motion you’ve created has depth. This will necessarily be a bit of a rough test, and there’s really not a good way to get an objective read on depth unless you watch a bunch of people play the game, but you can get a sense of whether or not your mechanic is deep.

That is, whether or not you can have long-period sustained interactions that are deeper than the surface pleasure of steering the guy around the most basic context and spacing you’ve created. This is things like get to the top of the hill, get from A to B, collect X number of coins, sort all these things into colored bins, perform a certain trick at a certain location, and so on. Just about any goal implies a set of rules for achieving that goal.

This sort of testing brings your fledgling game feel up against the hard hammer of game-creation reality. You’re starting to try and create challenges that could become a sustainable game. This is a bit of a grey area, as it starts down the slippery slope of game design proper, but I would encourage you to consider creating these types of throwaway goals. Don’t consider them a prototype of the complete structure of the game.

Just throw a bunch of goals in there -- get around things, collect coins, get to a certain place -- find the coolest interactions, the coolest parts of the level. If you’ve been playing around in your level, tweaking the mechanics and spacing the objects, you have a good sense of what’s going to be fun about it. You’ve already developed a bunch of intrinsic, internalized goals: can I do a flip off this thing, can I get up there, can I do two flips before I land and so on. Just throw these in there and codify them.

Interestingly, there is a big difference between inventing goals for yourself and explicitly coding those goals into the game: completing a goal means satisfying the conditions of the impartial, third-party computer. It also means some kind of reward, no matter how meager. If you can’t come up with a bunch of different goals that are enjoyably challenging, that’s trouble. It might be time to abandon or significantly alter your mechanic.

Conclusion

At this point, you’ve proven whether or not your game is going to feel good at the most basic level.

With diligence and luck, you’ve got a game that feels great. Moment to moment, it just feels good to steer around and feel out the space. The spacing of objects is in perfect harmony with the tuning of your controls and you’re quickly finding the places where the spatial context crosses over and constrains the motion, yielding the most interesting interactions. You feel yourself starting to build skills that might give rise to longer period interactions.

Finally, you started adding on some rules that test whether or not this mechanic will be sustainable and may give you some interesting directions to lean into when you start designing the system dynamics that are supposed to sustain the experience across an entire game. You now have the foundation for a great-feeling game.

As a final note, consider the aesthetic beauty possible with game feel. Create something beautiful at the intersection of player and game. Remember: the first, last, and most common thing a player will experience when playing your game is its feel.

[Note: Super Mario 64 images in this article are courtesy of Wikipedia.]