Feel

Week 12 · Juice, Feedback, and the Moment of Loss

⚡ Live demo inside — you’ll drive it yourself

Photo: Lino Wirag, CC BY-SA 4.0 — a pinball machine’s playfield

Nothing requires the shake

A block breaking needs no screen shake to stop existing.

The logic is identical with or without one — same collision, same removal, same score update.

Photo: Lino Wirag, CC BY-SA 4.0

Juice changes nothing about what happened

— and everything about whether it registered.

Same event. No feedback.

Same event. Full feedback.

Try it — identical outcome, two feelings

Try it: two blocks, identical outcome, one button

No juice

▮
Felt impact

Juice on

▮
Felt impact

Press Break both blocks — same outcome on each, watch how differently it registers.

Both blocks break on the same click, with the identical outcome. Watch how differently the two announce it.

Twelve weeks, one argument

  1. Foundations

    1. 1Why Failure Feels Bad
    2. 2The Taxonomy of Losing
    3. 3Lives, Continues, Arcade Economy

  2. Design decisions

    1. 4Checkpoints — Architecture of Mercy
    2. 5Permadeath & Consequence
    3. 6Death as Narrative Engine
    4. 7Difficulty as Communication

  3. People & culture

    1. 8The Ethics of Assistance
    2. 9Speedrunning & the Death That Isn’t
    3. 10Losing Together
    4. 11Comedy, Rage & Aesthetics

  4. Craft

    1. 12Feel — Juice & Feedback

Failure is designed, at every layer, on purpose.

The final project

Design an original fail state — real, prototyped, or specified on paper — and be ready to explain the failure it’s designed to produce.

  • worth 40% of the course, due next Monday
  • judged as a whole: one well-considered fail state beats an ambitious system nobody had time to design
  • a playable prototype, or a fully specified paper design — both count
  • 500–800 word justification, plus a live 3-minute presentation

Get the brief on your phone

comp4020-agentic-coding-studio.github.io/comp4020-ass2-BobDuke31/assessments/final-project/

The final project brief

Scan now — worth thirty seconds while it’s on screen, before it’s just a link to hunt for later.

Final projects, today

Three minutes each. Make the fail state legible on sight.