I just had one of those moments with sound design, on my indie simple steps and it blew my mind how something so simple can change the whole vibe. Anyone else had that “holy crap, this is it” moment? Let’s hear your stories!"

Yeah for sure. Check out game feel(game juice) videos if you already didnt.

Absolutely! It’s wild how the smallest tweaks can completely transform a game. I had a similar moment when I adjusted the jump animation timing in my project, just a few frames of delay made it feel so much more responsive and satisfying. It’s like the game finally ‘clicked.’ Sound design is a game changer too! What kind of tweak did you make that had such a big impact?

forgetting you turned something off weeks ago for reasons... then rediscovering it can be mind blowing also.

had that happen a few times recently with some post processing effects.

on top of everything else i had to do my game page videos again lol

one obvious one: holding down shift used to be stealth walk and replaced it
so crouching doubles as stealth and shift became running 🏃

and a not so obvious one: reloading 
the guns suddenly felt more personal
and the combat was less arcadeish
then of course not everyone liked it  🤔
so now I still insist on reloading anims but made them really fast (max 1 sec)

Turning off volumetric fog doubling framerate. I think everyone underestimates how much of a performance hit fog can have.