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Source: Juice It or Lose It (Jonasson & Purho)

4 min read

Source metadata

  • Type: Conference talk with live demo, plus published demo source code
  • Speakers: Martin Jonasson and Petri Purho (independent developers; Purho made Crayon Physics Deluxe)
  • Versions: recorded at the Nordic Game Indie Night (video uploaded by Jonasson, 24 May 2012, 15 min 38 s: “Juice it or lose it - a talk by Martin Jonasson & Petri Purho”, YouTube Fy0aCDmgnxg); repeated at GDC Europe 2012, Cologne, with the recording on the GDC Vault (Game Developer, “Video: Is your game ‘juicy’ enough?”, 23 August 2013)
  • Demo code: grapefrukt/juicy-breakout on GitHub (ActionScript 3, © 2012 Martin Jonasson and Petri Purho). Its README says the example was made for the Nordic Game Indie Night talk.

Key takeaways

  • Definition. Juicy things “wobble, squirt, bounce around or make little cute noises”; juice is a catch-all for whatever makes a game feel good to interact with. The speakers trace the term to the Gamasutra article “How to Prototype a Game in Under 7 Days” (“a juicy game feels alive and responds to everything you do, tons of cascading action and response for minimal user input”) and summarise it as “maximum output for minimum input”.
  • Same game, different feel. The whole demo is a Breakout clone whose rules never change. Effects are layered on one category at a time: colour; tweening and easing (blocks falling in with ease-out, overshoot (“back”) and bounce equations, random delays); “squeezing and stretching” (paddle stretch, ball scale-up on impact, rotation, velocity stretch, wobble); sound and music; particles; screen shake; and a face with eyes and a smile on the paddle.
  • Hit flash. On every collision “the ball will go white every time it hits something and then it’s going to scale back to its normal”, which the speakers say already makes the game feel “way better”.
  • Sound is the most cost-effective juice. Purho calls sound “the most cost effective thing you can add” and shows Swink’s two-circles demonstration from Game Feel: two circles that seem to pass through each other appear to bounce off each other once a sound is played at the moment of contact.
  • Screen shake is powerful and should be used with care. Shake turns the ball “from a stupid tennis ball to a helmet”; cranked up, it is “freight train mode”.
  • A/B demonstration. The talk ends by disabling every effect to show the plain starting game, then enabling them all at once. In the published code every effect is an independent boolean that defaults to false, with numeric sliders (for example screen-shake power 0–1, freeze duration 0–320 ms, freeze fade-in and fade-out 0–160 ms) on a panel shown and hidden with the Tab key.
  • Freeze (“sleep”) as a time multiplier. The demo code’s Freezer does not simply stop the game. It ramps game speed down to a multiplier over a fade-in, holds it for a duration, then ramps back to normal speed over a fade-out. The recorded talk does not discuss this effect; it is in the code only.

Notable claims

“It’s about maximum output for minimum input.” (Jonasson, in the talk)

“Adding juiciness to your game makes your game better 100% of the time, guaranteed.” (Jonasson, in the talk; delivered half in jest, and immediately qualified with “it’s impossible to give broad statements that are true for everything”)

“If a game’s juicy, it’s way more fun to interact with it and it feels more professional.” (Purho, quoted by Game Developer, 2013)

Relevance

  • game-feel: the origin of “juice” as working vocabulary, and a model for A/B testing feel by switching layers on and off.
  • vfx-shape-and-timing: hit flash, scale punch and freeze as timing devices.
  • playtesting: the all-off and all-on comparison is a ready-made playtest protocol for feel.

Open questions raised

  • The talk asserts that juice always helps. Later talks pushed back on this; for example, Folmer Kelly’s “Don’t Juice It or Lose It” (GDC Europe Independent Games Summit, 2014) argued that polish can erode immersion when it ignores the game’s context (Game Developer video report, 17 October 2014; the talk itself was not watched for this summary). Where is the line between juice and visual noise?
  • The demo shows effects without measuring their effect on players. How should a team test whether a given effect actually improves the experience rather than just adding noise?

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