If you’ve ever played a fighting game like Super Smash Bros Ultimate, you know that satisfying feeling of landing a critical hit. While most of your punches trigger a small sound effect or perhaps a flinch from the other player, those game-ending knock-out punches produce an explosion of visuals and sounds.
When implemented correctly, juice, or “immediate abundant action feedback,” is a tool game designers can use to increase enjoyment for their players. The key to success with juicy feedback is that it must be success-dependent; the game should only provide amplified feedback when the player’s action is successful. If we got lightning bolts and metallic bangs every time we threw a punch, it would be hard to tell what exactly this amplified feedback was telling the player.
Although the juicy feedback in Super Smash Bros Ultimate is quite obvious, juicy feedback doesn’t have to be so extreme. This week, we played World of Goo, a physics-based puzzle game where players assemble living balls of goo into flimsy structures to reach a pipe at the end of the level. When the player successfully attaches another ball of goo to their structure, we get a cute sound effect and a splash of goo particles as the connection is formed. When the ball of goo fails to connect, there is no sound and no splash. This system of feedback is juicy, too, just on a smaller scale.
I think I understood the concept of juicy feedback before reading this week’s paper, but I thought that word was reserved for the kind of action feedback we see in Super Smash Bros Ultimate. However, as the paper explained, the strongest predictor of whether juicy feedback increases enjoyment is the evocation of curiosity, not how amplified the feedback is. In World of Goo, sometimes you have to place a ball of goo a little farther from your structure than you would like. You aren’t sure if the connection will form when you let go or not. There is a sense of curiosity in that moment, and it’s satisfying for the player when they hear that little snap and see the splatter of goo on-screen.
When designing games, we can use juicy feedback to make the game more enjoyable, but it would be wrong to assume that more lasers, rainbows, and explosions will make your game more fun. Focus less on how amplified the feedback is and more on when and why you are adding juice.
Bibliography:
Dominic Kao, Nick Ballou, Kathrin Gerling, Heiko Breitsohl, and Sebastian Deterding. 2024. How does Juicy Game Feedback Motivate? Testing Curiosity, Competence, and Effectance. In Proceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’24). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 365, 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3642656
