game-feel-polish

Game Feel Polish

Polish is feedback layered on top of a committed gameplay result. This skill gives an agent one architecture for that layer and the numbers that make it read as impact instead of noise. The systems are adapted from Miisan's Liquid UI Kit for Godot 4 (MIT, see this skill's THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md); the Unity workflow uses UI Toolkit for new screen-space widgets. This is an implementation skill and reference kit, not a precompiled Unity package.

Use team-polish when the request is a multi-role release-hardening pass. When More Mountains Feel is installed, use its pinned project documentation and existing players; do not require an unbundled companion skill.

Rules that hold in every engine

1. One hub, one switch. Every effect is a call on one hub (Juice autoload in Godot, one service in Unity). The hub owns enabled and a 0 to 2 intensity multiplier. Turning enabled off must reset every owned effect: release time requests, camera offsets, screen pulses, transient labels, voices and rumble. Preserve pause and other owners' state. Keep essential notifications visible. Widgets work when the hub is missing; they only skip sound and shake.
2. Feel never decides gameplay. Fire feedback after the committed result. A refused action (a disabled button) gets a refusal shake and an error sound; state does not change.
3. Trauma, not "shake for N seconds". Overlapping hits add trauma (clamped 0 to 1); the camera uses trauma ^ 2 so small hits stay subtle and big ones slam. Decay by real time, not by scaled delta, so the shake keeps moving during hitstop.
4. Wall-clock time for time effects. Hitstop and slow motion measure their own end with the system clock; a freeze timed with scaled delta freezes its own countdown. Hitstop beats slow motion. A longer hitstop extends a running one; a shorter one never cuts it.
5. Remember the rest state. Tween helpers record the node's resting scale, rotation, position, and modulate the first time they touch it, kill the previous tween on that channel, and always return to rest. Spamming a punch can never leave anything stuck at the wrong size.
6. Fast out, slow settle. Impact tweens spend about a fifth of their time going out (quad ease-out) and the rest coming back (elastic ease-out). An even in and out reads as a wobble, not an impact.
7. Separate presentation channels. Use polygons, text and palette colours where custom drawing helps; give hover, press, intro and refusal separate state. Unity USS supports transitions: retain native styling, text and input semantics rather than replacing everything with custom drawing.
8. Sound is randomised and de-duplicated. Each sound is a bank of several takes; never repeat the previous take, vary pitch about 0.92 to 1.08, and drop a second trigger of the same bank inside 25 ms. Two identical samples on one frame double the amplitude and clip.
9. Pool what fights spawn. Damage numbers, audio players, and toasts are pooled or capped. Allocation on the hit frame is the stutter players notice.
10. Scale everything to impact strength. One impact(position, strength) call maps strength to shake, hitstop, flash, aberration, zoom punch, rumble, and the sound bank with tuned ratios. Screen-wide effects open only above a threshold so routine hits do not wash out big ones.
11. Prove it with A/B. Ship a toggle that disables all juice at once and compare the same screen with and without. If an effect makes no visible difference in that comparison, delete it.