One of the most important parts of game dev, aside from making the game (and finishing the game, and marketing the game), is making the game good. “Good,” of course, is a vague term.
In general, there’s always a lot of talk about polish, and how polishing can go on forever as an apparent bottomless pit. There’s also the idea of juice, that you should pack your game full of audiovisual satisfaction to make even the most mundane game experience feel engaging. Such juice is often also tied up in discussions of how the game feels to play.
Although most people have an idea of what all these terms mean, I find it often helps in development to solidify similar terms as various perspectives to approach a project from. I propose that one can think of juice and feel as overlapping sets of experience, both of which are enclosed by the broader objective of polish.
Game Juice
Juice is about making a game satisfying from an audiovisual perspective. It serves to emphasize the video (and audio) parts of video game.
Some common components of juice include animations, camera motions (such as shake and kick), sound design, dynamic music, colour theory/modulation (such as flashes and gradients), particles, VFX, and tweens/smooth interpolation.
What differentiates juice from the general audiovisual elements of a game is the fact that juice aims to heighten the experience through additions, rather than providing the game’s baseline sound/visual foundations.
Of course, juice does not need to be bombastic. Juice can also be subtle, such as with small particles, environmental effects, or the restrained application of animation principles. The goal of juice, ultimately, is to take the core game and to turn it into an experience. Thus, the necessary elements will depend on the game in question.
Game Feel
Feel, on the other hand, is about making a game satisfying to interact with. It is the toy perspective of game development. How can the game feel fun, even if the player has no explicit goal?
Game feel overlaps with game juice since a lot of making a game feel good involves making sure there is satisfying audiovisual feedback. For example, a platformer is fun to mess around in if the audiovisual feedback of running around and jumping is satisfying on its own, such as through animations, particles, sounds, and camera movements.
Of course, not all of game feel involves juice. Some unique elements of game feel include the careful designing and tuning of the game’s input scheme, and how the choice of control scheme (controller, keyboard, touch) will be leveraged (quick time events, haptics, familiar UI/UX). It also involves adjustments to adhere to player psychology, such as safeguards that favour the player, like coyote time and input buffering.
Game feel involves the linkage of satisfying audiovisual feedback and consequences with comfortable, learnable, and cohesive input schemes in order to connect player and game.
Game Polish
All of juice and feel, plus more, is encompassed within polish. Game polish is, frankly, quite broad, as it encompasses everything that unifies the desired player experience of the game. Another way to think of polish is that it’s everything that makes a game professional. A well-polished game may have feel and juice, but the main key is that all the different elements work together to create a unique experience.
Alongside feel and juice, nearly every refinement-based activity contributes to polish. Things like game balancing, bug fixing, narrative pacing, UI/UX design, and art direction consistency all make a game more polished.
The essence of polish, thus, is the focus on the experience that is intended and the streamlining away of things that detract from that experience. For example, good tutorialization (or even the ability to teach the game without any tutorials) is critical to polish, as it allows the player to learn the game without becoming distracted or confused. The unintended rough edges are sanded out from every part of the game so that the game feels like one cohesive whole, rather than many discrete interwoven pieces.
What’s Cinematic?
The distinction between game juice/feel and game polish, in my view, is quite similar to the idea of what makes something cinematic in filmmaking.
Oftentimes, the initial view is that something is cinematic if it uses advanced, cinematic techniques, such as slow motion, bombastic set pieces and FX, colour grading, professional sound design, and the like. It is easy to chase this view of “cinematic” since it is composed of easy, tangible skills such as video editing and the operation of expensive film gear.
However, while this provides the cinematic “look,” the true essence of cinematic work is that of storytelling. These tools are all used in pursuit of one particular story or narrative that the director intends to tell. This is the difficult and nebulous part of filmmaking, but it is what gives the medium substance over mere style.
Similarly, game juice and feel are important techniques to make a game come alive and feel interactive. But, ultimately, they are a part of game polish, which encompasses not just the “quality” of the game, but the cohesion of the game into an interactive experience for the player. Polish wields the tools of juice and feel so as to tell the “story” of the game to the player, whether that be a literal story or a metaphorical one, in the best way we know how.