Two games can share mechanics, art and audio — and one feels alive while the other feels dead. The difference is a hundred tuned numbers: hit-stop lengths, easing curves, camera lag, squash scale. This lab exists to find those numbers and write them down.
Try the AI Game BuilderEvery piece starts as gray boxes with the complete feel layer: fall gravity heavier than rise, coyote time, input buffering, camera lookahead with smoothing. Art never rescues a game that feels wrong — so feel is proven by play first.
The checklist is table stakes; the craft is the numbers. Hit-stop per impact class, decaying rotation-free shake, a named easing family for every motion, squash scale on landings. A checklist item that exists but is mistuned is a finding here.
Every piece must prove its responsiveness: sustained 60fps with recorded frame-time samples, input-to-response within two frames, feedback within 100ms of every interactive event — measured via telemetry timestamps, recorded in the ledger.
A tuned hit-stop range or the right easing family for a landing works identically in canvas, Godot and Defold games. The lab’s findings port as numeric, engine-agnostic rules into the guidance every 2D build follows — that portability is why this lab exists.
Sheets + inventory — the shared standard.
Gravity, coyote time, camera — tuned as gray boxes, written down.
Mocap sprites; hit-stop, shake, easing — tuned with reasons.
60fps frame samples, 2-frame input latency, 100ms feedback.
Engine-agnostic feel rules flow into all 2D builds.
Each card is a piece produced by the loop above — newest first.
The lab launched with the professional game-feel standard — its first pieces are being tuned and audited right now.
The accumulated micro-decisions that make interaction satisfying: how gravity asymmetry gives a jump weight, how 60 milliseconds of hit-stop sells an impact, how a camera’s lookahead keeps the player oriented. Individually invisible, collectively the difference between alive and dead.
Because feel knowledge is numbers plus reasons, and nobody writes the numbers down. Each cycle’s FEEL_NOTES document — every constant, why that value, what the rejected values felt like — becomes research the whole platform builds on.
Phaser’s tweens, cameras and particle emitters are exactly the juice toolkit, on the professional web-2D framework — the shortest path from a feel hypothesis to a playable test.
That’s the point: feel constants are engine-agnostic. The ported rules bind every 2D game the builder ships — canvas, Phaser, Godot and Defold alike.
Every 2D game the builder ships inherits this lab’s feel research.
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