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.

1. 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.

1. 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.

1. 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.

1. 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.

1. 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.

1. 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.

1. 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.

1. Pool what fights spawn. Damage numbers, audio players, and toasts are

pooled or capped. Allocation on the hit frame is the stutter players notice.

1. 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.

1. 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.

Workflow

Phase 1: Read before touching anything

• Repository instructions (AGENTS.md, CLAUDE.md, path-scoped rules),

the engine and version, and the project's motion or accessibility settings.

• Existing owners of time scale, camera offset, post-processing, tweening,

and audio playback. Extend the existing owner; never add a second tween, audio, or DI stack.

• Existing feel code. If a hub or kill switch already exists, route through

it instead of adding another.

• For Unity implementation, run unity-preflight, confirm the target version

and pipeline, and follow implement-task for the bounded change. Declare allowed paths and serialized ownership; new packages, scenes, config assets and renderer settings need target approval. Skill authoring alone does not require a connected Editor.

• Whether the project relies on the engine's theme system. The kit's widgets

draw themselves and ignore Godot themes; retrofitting a themed UI means configuring exported properties instead of inheriting colours.

Phase 2: Audit the target

List every player action in scope and the feedback channels it has today: on-object (punch, squash, flash), camera (shake, kick, zoom), screen (flash, aberration, vignette, warp), time (hitstop, slowmo), audio, haptic, and UI text (damage number, counter, toast). Classify each action by tier:

| Tier | Example | Shake trauma | Hitstop | | --- | --- | --- | --- | | UI click | button press | 0.10 to 0.15 | 0.03 s or none | | Light hit | pickup, small damage | 0.30 | 0.03 s | | Solid hit | normal attack landing | 0.45 | 0.09 s | | Heavy hit or crit | critical, big enemy hit | 0.75 | 0.12 s | | Kill or explosion | death, overload | 0.85 | 0.13 s |

Above 0.20 s of hitstop the game starts to feel frozen. Write the audit as a table; the missing channels are the plan.

Phase 3: Plan the smallest set

• Pick two or three channels per action, not all of them. Reserve

screen-wide effects (flash, aberration, zoom punch, slowmo) for the top tiers.

• Decide ownership: the hub routes effects through existing time, camera,

screen, audio and UI owners. Widgets call the hub and work without it.

• Put every tunable in one config resource (Godot JuiceConfig, a Unity

ScriptableObject) so designers change numbers without code edits.

• Respect the project's motion preference. When reduced motion is on, keep

a static success or failure cue and skip shake, zoom, flash, time-scale changes, and rumble. Do not add those silently to a project that already has such a setting.

Phase 4: Implement

For Unity read references/unity-port.md; for procedural widgets also read references/unity-ui-toolkit.md. Read references/juice-systems.md only for Godot implementation or source comparison. Implement only requested systems; a menu does not require combat hitstop, camera shake or a CRT pass. Keep each system in its own script and each widget's animation channels on separate tweens so they overlap without fighting. Bake asset lists (sound banks) into a resource; scanning the resource tree at runtime works in the editor and fails in exported builds.

Start from the defaults in references/tuning-numbers.md and change one number at a time.

Phase 5: Verify

Run references/polish-checklist.md. Minimum evidence:

• A/B comparison of the same screen with juice on and off.
• Spam test: repeated presses or hits leave no node at the wrong scale,

rotation, or position, no stuck time scale, and no clipping audio.

• Pause, focus loss, and scene change during an active hitstop or slowmo

release only the effect's requests and preserve the time owner's current state.

• Camera shake keeps moving during hitstop (real-time delta) and screen

grain keeps moving (clock fed from script, not shader time).

• Damage numbers, voices, and toasts stay within their caps in a busy

scene; measure allocations after warm-up.

• An exported or built player, not only the editor.

Report changed files, the per-action channel table before and after, the config values used, the A/B evidence, and residual risk. Report measured performance and unverified requirements separately.

Guardrails

• Do not tween gameplay state; tween presentation copies of it (displayed

value, ghost fill, intro amount).

• Do not let a full-screen post pass run when every parameter is zero; hide

the quad. Use one combined pass, not one pass per effect.

• Do not copy the kit's bundled assets without checking their licences. Its

sounds (Kenney, CC0), font (Bungee, OFL), and brand icons (Simple Icons, CC0) are not part of this skill.

• Do not use true random for takes or stagger slots; no-repeat or seeded

selection reads as designed, pure random reads as broken.

• Do not raise tier numbers to "make it feel stronger"; raise contrast by

lowering routine feedback instead.

Reference loading

• references/juice-systems.md: the kit's systems with condensed source.
• references/tuning-numbers.md: every default value in one place.
• references/unity-port.md: mapping each system to Unity C#.
• references/unity-ui-toolkit.md: procedural widgets, input, lifetime and UI checks.
• references/polish-checklist.md: audit table, verification list, report.

Related skills: team-polish for multi-role hardening, unity-optimization for measured performance work, game-code-review for review, ux-review for accessibility and HUD validation.

Source & license

This open-source skill is cataloged on AgentStack and links to its original source — we do not rehost the code.

• Author: furkantokkan
• Source: furkantokkan/agent-foundry
• License: MIT

Install and usage instructions live in the source repository linked above.