Game Dynamic

So far emphasis has been placed on realistic simulations using physics models and elaborate equations when building the  water dynamics, including concepts such as buoyancy forces and how water waves are naturally formed (see previous posts Part 1 and Part 2 for more details). 

But when it comes to controlling the pirate ship, most of the realism has been thrown out the proverbial window in favour of searching for that magical right feeling you get when just aimlessly controlling a game character is a pure joy.

Finding the Feeling

Making sure it Just Feels Right™ when playing a video game is a paramount aspects of game design, but also one of the hardest and most elusive part of the craft.  The goal for every game designer is to immerse the player in an engaging and rewarding experience.  But what to do and where to start when trying to achieve the right feeling?

What knobs to turn

So what can the game designer tweak and tune in order to change how the game feels? There are of course many more or less eluding aspects related to the feeling of a game, such as responsiveness,  aesthetics, sound, and animations. 

However, one tangible and quite central metric is something that can be described by the the Attack, Sustain, Release graph, which quantifies how the game responds to player input and the feeling you get when controlling a game character. 

The Attach, Sustain, Release Graph

The horizontal axis represents time and the vertical axis represents some quantity that change over time when it comes to controlling a game character, such as the speed or the rate of rotation.

As an example; if studying a game character dashing  across a platform for some amount of time, the Attack phase is the time it takes for the character to accelerate to full speed after pressing the run button. The Sustain phase is the duration the player is pressing the run button and character is propelled forward at max speed.  Finally the Release phase is the time it takes for a character to come to a halt after the player has stopped pressing the run button.  

Short attack and release phases lead to a direct control but the movement can be perceived as artificial and mechanical, where as a long attack and release phases will give the impression the character is running on ice.

Bits and Pieces

The following bullets are a few aspects that have been added to the latest version of Pirate Sea Jam with the intention of achieving a nice feel to the game.

• The rate of which the ship turns is increased with the speed 
• The ship sways sideways when turning and the amount of sway is affected by the turn rate and speed (watch out for capsizing)
• The sailing speed is mostly constant, but sailing against the wind has a minor speed penalty, as apposed to letting the wind direction have a strong influence on the ship's speed
• The masthead pennant turns according to the wind direction
• The masthead pennant flutter increases with ship speed
• The sail flutters a bit when sailing up against the wind
• The helm rotates as the ship turns
• As a highly experimental feature, the player can activate a super boost to achieve short speed bursts 💨💨💨

Is it there yet?

One way to evaluate if the game feels right is to see how satisfying it is to aimlessly move around in a bare bones game world. In Pirate Sea Jam that would correspond to sailing the pirate ship around in a silent and empty ocean without any obvious game objectives to see if that feels interesting and engaging. 

Try out the current version of Pirate Sea Jam for yourself and leave a comment to this post about what you think should be improved regarding the basic feeling when controlling the pirate ship. 

The keyboard inputs are as follows:

[A] turn port  [D] turn starboard | [Left Shift] Super boost | [R] Reset

Next up

And of course, one obvious way to make the Pirate Sea Jam game more interesting is to add some gun powder and cannon balls. Making it possible to fire the guns at some targets is coming up in the next version. 

Ship ahoy!