Happy Birthday Disc Room!

A game feel thread from the archives

Happy 4th birthday to Disc Room, the intergalactic slaughterhouse by Kitty Calis, Terri Vellmann, Doseone and myself!

I’m still very proud of this game, it’s a unique combination of (highly accessible) bullet hell gameplay, cryptic puzzles, and sci-fi exploration… but also a score chasing arcade game!

Here’s a trailer explaining what the game is all about.

Back in 2020 I wrote a “Disc Room Game Feel Details” thread on twitter, and today felt like a good day to clean up and re-digitalize that thread on a website that is not yet heading towards the bottom of the sea…

To get you in the zone listen to the Disc Room OST while you read.

Disc Room Game Feel Thread

Content Warning: cartoon blood (in-game you can swap this for confetti)

Proximity Wobble:

The character shakes when close to a disc to make things feel more urgent. We also slow down time (and the music) by up to 10% when close to/on top of a disc.

Dodging in both space and time:

In most cases a close getaway is more fun than a death, so collision masks in Disc Room are incredibly generous. Faster discs have smaller masks than slow ones. We also stretch collisions in time, you're allowed to be inside a disc for up to 3 frames.

Directional Shake:

Heavy impacts can offset the camera in a direction to make them feel bigger, and so that the player clearly knows what hit them.

(Also, we save right on death, after the sounds play. This can cause a little bonus freeze frame "game feel" effect depending on your specs.)

Big Impacts:

The first time you die from a new disc type, the blood splat is bigger and we play what we called a fancy "cinema sound", which is basically a super bassy WOOMPPP.

This is one of those things that players won’t deliberately notice, but it just lets us hit their lizard brain a tiny bit harder.

Bonus GIF:

Seamless Intro:

The game's intro comic fades right into the first gameplay, a great detail Kitty really had to sell me on before we tried it out.

Small side story: Kitty also really had to convince me to put this submarine in Minit, which became my favorite part of the game. Lesson learnt.

Unnecessary Parallax:

Each room has a top layer with black silhouettes that move slightly slower than the rest of the camera. Gives it a nice spacious feel. A camera moving slightly to follow the player even though the whole room fits on the screen can make a game feel much more dynamic!

Clear Deaths:

Another thing that we liked about Disc Room right from the start is that the death screen is super clear. No matter how busy it gets, you can see the disc that caused your death, and exactly how difficult the room was at that point.

Game feel is all about communicating information to the player, and sometimes the inherent nature of the game sorts that out for you! Not gonna say no to that.

Little notes:

For the audio Dose did a lot of amazing big sound, but maybe the more tiny subtle things were even more important… In this video you can hear how the Mirror ability changes pitch based on distance.

Dash Tricks:

You can tap for short dashes, or hold to dash further. However: If you release within a disc, it pretends you're still holding the button until you're in the clear.

We make some exceptions to this (and the 3 frame collision window) with discs we know people want to die from (yes, that’s a key feature). Here for example it prioritizes the gold disc collision over all the others you're on top of.

Bullet Time:

The slow ability actually makes you move slightly faster and shrinks your hitbox. Great for tight escapes!

Menu Questions:

The pause menu always shows a random question in the top left corner. It's a fun way to present more lore, and we wanted to give the player something to think about after they quit the game.

Dev scores:

Great idea by Kitty to add the dev team to the leaderboards. It gives everyone at least one friend on there, and also provides an extra non-mandatory challenge for those who seek it. We had it off by default at first, but quickly realized it should be the opposite.

For those wondering: Kitty, Terri, Dose & myself casually played the game throughout development, and whoever had the highest score on a room became the dev team there. It's baked into the game, so you can beat us once and for all!

At this point some people might think "uhh, not all of that is game feel", but it's all user experience. Games are a fully entangled mess of audio and visuals and code and performance. All of it is important and looking at it separately will make you miss Some Shit!

Little fun fact intermezzo:

Disc Room can be classified as a Big Dumb Object game.

Doppler Effect:

there's a super soft ambient wooshing sound that saws make when they fly by, it's pitched up slightly when moving towards you and down when moving away.

Bus Stops:

Disc Room gives players multiple moments where they can "hop off the bus" aka stop playing and be happy. There's the normal ending, hard ending, getting all rooms & discs, going after gold or dev scores, and then the challenges. This is a really important design principle to us.

And finally:

We’ve made sure that Disc Room will always be Set In The Future. It used to be set in 2089, but just so that our ancestors don't have to deal with the whole "this is the year disc room was set in" drama we add an extra year whenever necessary. This is what it looks like now:

Thanks for reading! Disc Room is out on PC, Switch and Xbox. You don’t have to play it but I would appreciate it if you bought it.

-JW