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saturday design dump: today we're gonna talk about "celebration." this is a term designers use when referring to "feedback which reinforces that something a player just did was important," and it's a way to make your game feel ~amazing.~ (thread)
it's a thing i often see missing in games, and it's also a critical part of *teaching* the game to players. if players don't understand when something important happened-- and if they can't evaluate important moments against each other-- it's harder for them to learn how to play!
often as designers we'll look at a system or a feature and say "you know, the feature is good, it's working as intended, but players aren't feeling the magic or don't understand what the system is doing. i think we need more celebration at [moment.]"
so, how do we do that?
so, how do we do that?
1. VISUAL EFFECTS. you need to cue the thing happening, on screen, at the moment it happens. in the gif above, the moment the player swipes, they see a burst of sparkles & a point value on each candy piece-- or a bigger burst of lightning for destroying many scattered pieces.
visual effects (VFX) should be concentrated on the thing you want to draw attention to most (i.e. your WoW character!) with secondary fx helping support that moment. a common mistake games make is to dial everything up to 100. this makes it hard for players to parse the noise.
vfx celebration can also be subtle. look at this gif from destiny where a player lands a headshot ("precision shot"); you'll see that the damage text turns yellow (it's normally white). that's it! but that's enough to cue to players "hey, you did the right thing."
in fact, in the above case, you wouldn't WANT to do more than that. players might be firing thousands of bullets a minute. if you dial the vfx celebration up too far, they won't be able to see what they're shooting, and it just becomes soupy visual noise.
2. SOUND EFFECTS (SFX). audio is one of the best ways to cue that you've done something right as a player. we use two terms here: "oneshot" for something short, and "stinger" for a longer, often melodic cue. here's a classic, well-known stinger:
usually w/ oneshots, we try to find something subtly positive to reinforce "that's good!" to players. can you hear this gif in your head? AC plays the same cue any time players pick up anything, so even though the animation differs, players know "that means it's in my inventory."
another common tactic with sfx is to scale it up in pitch over time. peggle 2 is incredible at this. every brick you hit, another pitch shift upwards... and then of course it ends in a harmonizing choir of angels! so good. so nice.
the biggest mistake i see with audio celebration is letting the audio cue hang long after the moment is over. more punctual cues which frontload the emphasis usually create better and more responsive feel. keep cues short and bursty wherever you can.
3. UI ELEMENTS. of course, you can always put a little banner in the player's face saying 'BATTLE COMPLETED' or similar. but there are other ways of treating UI to celebrate the player, too. let's look at this hearthstone gif because it's doing so many wonderful things...
first, you'll notice that when the player drags the card onto the board, it flashes quickly (ui) and then slams down with a "thud" (vfx, sfx); this is the primary celebration.
secondarily, in the bottom right, the player's mana lights up and then fades out once spent.
secondarily, in the bottom right, the player's mana lights up and then fades out once spent.
this is a great example of visual heirarchy. the big act is placing the card. but players are also peripherally absorbing the mana cost out the corner of their eye. they can understand that "bigger sparkle = more expensive action," but it doesn't scream for full attention.
secondarily, there's a super visceral move-and-slam when a card attacks. there's a lot going on in that moment. but that bright orange star with the damage number in it takes top priority in the celebration because THAT is the most important info players need to take away.
a bad version of this celebration could easily have looked like "we play animation of the characters actually battling!" and minimizing the damage numbers (and conclusion of the fight) off to the side. but then you'd be emphasizing what's cool over what's necessary to the player.
4. USE CONSISTENT LANGUAGE. when you get an exotic loot drop in destiny 2, a big gold orb drops and you see a gold notification. destiny 2 mostly reserves a gold visual treatment for exotics, which helps players learn "if i see gold, an unusually good thing just happened."
more importantly, if you use consistent visual language for one type of celebration, you need to be careful about using it elsewhere. destiny 2 using gold for exotics is pointless if everything else is also gold. it means players can't "learn" the celebration pattern.
5. CELEBRATE RARER THINGS MORE. this ties back into the heirarchy stuff earlier. huge celebration for every headshot (which could be 1000x per minute) is overkill. but things which happen once every 10 or 100 hours? celebrate the hell out of those! players have earned it.
6. NOT CELEBRATING IS AN AESTHETIC CHOICE. some games intentionally don't celebrate or celebrate negative moments. i find it hilarious that one of the biggest moments of celebration in a souls game is... dying. it subtly reinforces the feeling that the game hates you.
7. DELAYING CELEBRATION MAKES LEARNING TOUGH. let's look at Telltale games for this. they have this "[character] will remember that" celebration when you make a big choice. i suspect there was an early version of The Walking Dead where this celebration did not exist.
![7. DELAYING CELEBRATION MAKES LEARNING TOUGH. let's look at Telltale games for this. they have this "[character] will remember that" celebration when you make a big choice. i suspect there was an early version of The Walking Dead where this celebration did not exist.](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EtAALJUUUAEfWCC.jpg "7. DELAYING CELEBRATION MAKES LEARNING TOUGH. let's look at Telltale games for this. they have this \"[character] will remember that\" celebration when you make a big choice. i suspect there was an early version of The Walking Dead where this celebration did not exist.")
in Telltale games, feedback on your choices plays out in the story. you make a choice and then, hours of gameplay later, that choice comes back to impact you. but players can easily forget. "wait! what did i do which caused that to happen?!"
so this minor celebration helps reinforce to the player, "this specific choice will matter later on!" which then causes the player to file THIS choice away as more important than others. later on, they'll be able to connect the dots. "ah, i see, it's because I picked X earlier."
anyway. long thread, i'll end it here. but the tl;dr: a few quick rules for celebrating the player go a long way and will make a huge difference. if your game feels mundane or murky and you're not sure why, i hope some of this helps!
