Good Game Feel: An Empirically Grounded Framework for Juicy Design Kieran Hicks, Patrick Dickinson, Juicy Holopainen School of Computer Science University of Lincoln Lincoln, Lincolnshire, UK {khicks, pdickinson, jholopainen}@lincoln.ac.uk Kathrin Gerling e-Media Research Lab KU Leuven Leuven, Belgium
[email protected] ABSTRACT Juicy design refers to the idea that large amounts of audiovisual feedback contribute to a positive player experience. While the concept is popular in the game design community, definitions of the concept remain vague, and it is difficult to analyze which elements contribute to whether a game is perceived as juicy. In this paper, we address this issue through a combination of industry perspectives and academic analysis to provide a more detailed understanding of contributors to juicy design. We present results from an online survey that received responses from 17 game developers, and create an affinity diagram to derive a framework that facilitates the analysis of juicy design rooted in developers’ perspectives. Through application to two commercially available games, we refine the framework, and contribute a tool that makes the idea of juiciness actionable for researchers and designers. Keywords Juiciness, Game feel, Design, Framework INTRODUCTION Juicy design refers to the idea that large amounts of audiovisual feedback contribute to a positive player experience (Gabler, 2005.; Jonasson 2012), and there is anecdotal evidence that some of its elements can contribute to positive player experience and