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What tiny feature have you added to a game that made a HUGE difference?

A topic by t0m_ok created 29 days ago Views: 1,518 Replies: 4

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I've been thinking about how sometimes the smallest additions end up making a game feel significantly better.

Not huge new mechanics, maps, characters or anything like that. I mean the tiny things that probably took nowhere near as long to make, but somehow changed the whole experience.

Things like:

a satisfying little sound when you click something
remembering where the player left off
a tiny animation that makes a menu feel less dead
NPCs reacting to something they previously ignored
changing one number that suddenly makes the balancing feel right
some completely unnecessary detail that players ended up loving

I find it interesting because it's really easy to spend ages working on massive features, only to add some tiny thing afterwards and think "why does THIS make the game feel 10x better?" 😭

So I'm curious:

What's the smallest feature or detail you've added to a game that made a surprisingly big difference?

And was it something you deliberately planned, or did you just add it randomly and realise afterwards how much better it made the game?

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CSAF — Core Systems Asset Factory29 days ago

Ours was a one line focus fix, and it came from a player report rather than from us.

Browser games on itch run inside an iframe. If your key handlers are on window, keys only arrive while the frame has focus, so a player who clicks anywhere on the page around the game loses the keyboard. One player told us the controls just stopped working after a while. We checked our web games and 7 of 38 had it.

The fix is a pointer handler on the canvas that pulls focus back: window.focus() plus canvas.focus({ preventScroll: true }), with a tabindex on the canvas so it can take focus. It took minutes and it removed the most confusing thing a player could run into.

If you ship HTML5 builds, it's worth clicking outside your game once and then trying the keys.

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t0m_ok27 days ago

That's such a good example because I genuinely wouldn't have thought to test that 😭

It's mad that something which takes a few minutes to fix can be the difference between "the controls randomly stopped working" and everything just working as expected.

Also 7 out of 38 is way more than I'd have guessed. Definitely adding the click-outside-the-game test to my list for HTML5 stuff now lol. Thanks for sharing!

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DarkBloodbane28 days ago

TBH it's hard to find answer to this question. The best one is Barshen Beasts, I've added SFX to slash attacks and enemy's shots and the game feels waay better.

On the contrary, there are opposite situations in which removing a feature made a huge difference in a positive way. I'm used to crouch or lying down feature from Contra series, however when making my own run 'n' gun, I couldn't draw and code proper crouching sprite so I removed this feature. The result was huge, it makes aiming downward easier and not conflicting with crouch mechanic.

Because of that, I don't add crouching mechanic to my run 'n' guns and I could make them quicker.

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t0m_ok27 days ago

That's actually a really interesting opposite example. I hadn't really thought about removing something as fitting this too, but it definitely does.

Sometimes you add features because they feel like they're "supposed" to be there, when the game actually plays better without them 😭

And SFX are honestly ridiculous for this. You can have the exact same attack before and after adding a decent sound and suddenly it feels about 10x more powerful lol.

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