What Features Influence Impact Feel? A Study of Impact Feedback in Action Games

TL;DR

This study analyzes how specific game design elements influence players' perception of impact feedback in action games, using NLP ranking and feature analysis to identify key factors affecting game feel.

Contribution

It introduces a 19-feature framework for impact feedback design and identifies critical features like hit stop, sound coherence, and camera control that influence impact feel.

Findings

Hit stop, sound coherence, and camera control significantly affect impact feel.

Lack of focus on these features can ruin players' impact perception.

The framework can serve as an evaluation metric for game design.

Abstract

Making the hit effect satisfy players is a long-standing problem faced by action game designers. However, no research systematically analyzed which game design elements affect such game feel. There is not even a term to describe it. So, we propose to use impact feel to describe the player's feeling when receiving juicy impact feedback. After collecting player's comments on action games from Steam's top seller list, we trained a natural language processing (NLP) model to rank action games with their performance on impact feel. We presented a 19-feature framework of impact feedback design and examined it in the top eight and last eight games. We listed an inventory of the usage of features and found that hit stop, sound coherence, and camera control may strongly influence players' impact feel. A lack of dedicated design on one of these three features may ruin players' impact feel. Our findings may become an evaluation metric for future studies.