Game developers explain the little tricks players don’t notice that improve gameplay

Written by. Nick Mosier based on the original Japanese article (original article’s publication date: 2022-03-09 21:22 JST)

Salman Shurie, founder of Gesinimo Games, recently posed this question to game developers on Twitter. “What secret things did you add to your games to make the game easier to play that players never noticed but did so much for the game?” We’ve seen some developers take to social media to post these sorts of techniques before, which appears to have sparked Shurie into starting the exchange.

Shurie starts by introducing one of their own techniques. “In my game Fistful of Nothing, made every enemy only able to attack you with their weapons only if they’re on screen just to take that element of frustration that comes from getting killed by an off-screen enemy.”

It looks like a number of other games have devised ways to adjust enemy attacks based on the player’s field of vision as well. Sam Suite, a programmer at DANG! behind the boomerang action game Boomerang X, revealed in a response that “in Boomerang X, most flying enemies will try to curve around and attack you from the front if they’re out of your field of view.” Similarly, Arkane Studios’ Laurent Couvidou explains that “In Dishonored 2, NPCs don’t strike as often when you turn your back on them.”

Respawn Entertainment gameplay programmer Ian Holstead talked about the Prowler creatures that appear in the game. According to Holstead, “Prowlers will never attack you while you’re knocked or self resing (otherwise it’s nearly impossible to self res near prowlers).”

Aether Studios CEO Dan Fornace showed a technique used in the platform fighter Rivals of Aether with a slow-motion video. The game takes inspiration from Super Smash Bros. where the goal is to knock opponents off the stage. What Fornace demonstrates is that when a player is slightly below the ledge of a stage, dash specials will compensate for this and bump them up a bit so that they land on the stage. Even if players are slightly off with their placement, the game itself is helping players pull off their moves as intended.

When it comes to player inputs, many developers make use of something called input buffering or input caching. In the case of the side scrolling action game The Bleak Divine, developer George B. Green explains that to correctly allow players to dodge roll when landing after a jump, the game caches a dodge input entered by players while in the air. Since players can’t dodge in the air, the game checks for the cached input to become valid in the next few frames. Taking and holding these inputs in advance lets the game give users a smoother experience.

Joe Mirabello of Terrible Posture Games also revealed an interesting bit of information about the roguelike shooter Tower of Guns. “I made the first two runs of Tower of Guns harder and the third easier in order to help the player feel like they were ‘getting the hang of things.’”

Riot Games technical designer George Oliver added, “In some of League’s game modes I made teams leave spawn faster based on how many more towers they have over the enemy team,” following up with, “It made everything feel faster paced and made games where a team is getting absolutely stomped end quicker so losing felt less painful.” Games even have stuff going on behind the scenes to help influence how players feel.

Tim Skafte, a 3D artist who worked on titles such as PLANET ALPHA, had an interesting example about a game that’s currently in development. It sounds like the game is going to be a roguelike that uses dice in some capacity, and Skafte explains, “whenever the player rerolls a dice, we reroll once but if it comes up the same we reroll it again.” We don’t know much about the game at this point, but it sounds like guaranteeing a different outcome on rerolls is increasing player satisfaction. You could say it’s something that’s made possible by it being a video game.

Games seem to employ a lot of little techniques behind the scenes to smooth out gameplay that players likely don’t notice. If you’re interested in seeing more examples, check out the original tweet here.