Tips for making your game feel like a great game with juicy tips and tricks collected from my experiencies, fellow lovely colleagues, books, videos, etc.
The feeling of impact with screenshake is a great improvement for your games. A good balanced screenshake on firing a bullet, being hurt, grab someone or close explosions can improve for sure the feel. I like to keep the shake realistic (only shaking when the player is doing an action that generates an impact).
Enemies on being hit, on picking something, make something shiny, everything could get use of color blink if it's interactuable with the world of your game.
Powerful interpolation formula to make everything smoother, like camera movements, aiming, everything.
- The formula:
Lerp(a, b, t);Where...- a The start value.
- b The end value.
- t The interpolation value between the two floats.
Great thing is, that you can combine lerps functions and make combinations of smoothness with camera - weapon - movement and more.
This technique allows you to set something invincible and the player will know it, it's commonly used as a ghost time effect to let everyone know that you can't be hit or you just were created, stuff like that.
This is another great thecnique that must be used really balanced, to generate a feeling of impact (could go really well with screenshake as well). Usually Freeze frame durations varies between 1 and 3 frames. it'll surely depend on your game. Make sure you creates this effect in certain occasions and not all the time because it could create visual fatigue or something similar.
This is one of my most valuables experiments in one of my games and it generates a finisher-like satisfaction when you're about to do a critical hit, or execute someone. It's cool! it shouldn't last too much and not happen too often as it can get boring.
A great technique to generate a flash effect when you want to give some kind of advice to the player, like he's being hurt, or something is too bright on the screen, or something big exploded.
Make a festival of particles and create a visual-enhanced show for your players when they move, shoot, attack, destroy, and more. Do it moderated and it'll be great, an option for disabling it would be awesome to those that doesn't like these kind of stuff on-screen.
If you want to create a candy look in action games, it's highly suggested to make the bullets big, maybe with trails and muzzle flash, it will improve the aesthethics of the game if you like these retro effects (Commonly focused for 2D but still can be applied to 3D if you want to experiment).
It'll give strenght and impact to your movements, specially in heavy shots like Shotguns, saw-offs, etc. Don't overuse or you'll end up with similar problems that screenshake or freeze frame will have.
In action games, slash and attacks actually need to be as fast as possible, instant impacts generates the correct responsive feeling you may want to give to your games. Designers recommend not be too long animations, less than 5-6 frames in the slash/attack movement will do the job.
Even if you have a slider for balancing stuff (Which is great, I highly recommend it), make sure you do your best balancing the visual effects your game can have. Screenshake, freeze frames, blink times, it's important to make it really stable and without going on manual configurations, the player should feel a great experiencie with your game at first glance. It's all about the visual/auditory feedback the player receives from your game.
I know it can take time and patience (trust me, I know how hard it can be), but with time you'll end up with your official values for this tricks and it'll likely improve your game like a missile!