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Comment by optymizer | Hacker News Reader

This is highly subjective, but I spectated a few games and the amount of shaking that is happening seems excessive to me. Maybe the kids are impressed by all the shaking going on, but I find it hard to focus when the thing I'm focusing on keeps jumping around.

On a related note, I think screenshakes are extremely overused in indie games. It's so cheap to add that it cheapens the games.

  - Threw a grenade? Boom. screenshake. 
  - Shot a bullet? Boom. screenshake. 
  - Picked up an item? Boom. screenshake. 
  - Let out a big sigh? screenshake. 
  - Physically shook your display? Double screenshake.
  - Rolled your eyes at all the screenshakes? There's a screenshake for that too

In StarCraft, the screen didn't shake even if you dropped a nuke on someone else's base. I guess the good folks at Blizzard at the time didn't watch that one GDC talk, "Juice It or Lose It", so they had to come up with a different way to make a good game.

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You're comparing the wrong genres. StarCraft (age of empires, etc) is an RTS where you have a god view. Screen shakes make little sense when you, the player are removed from any of the characters and the terrain in play. From a usability perspective, these games also have a ton of information the player needs to process in a teeny amount of time. Screenshake would seriously mess with the player's ability to stay focused on what needs to prioritized. Hell, pro SC2 players even turn off ragdolls and environmental particle effects so that there's even less "noise". Does that mean Blizzard artists were compensating for poor gameplay when they implemented those?

Meanwhile, "arcade" style games like platformers, bullet hells, puzzles (tetris etc), turn based card games, etc need to juice up the moments when important things happen (because these aren't games full of subtlety moment to moment), and don't have a crazy amount of complex information on the screen that gets sacrificed in a screenshake.

To note, Hearthstone and Diablo III both have plenty of screenshake, although I believe you can turn them off (and many indie games heavy on screen shake offer this option too).

Juice is indeed very important to make games "feel" good, but perhaps more devs need to ask "is the juice worth the squeeze?" to not turn off players like you.

The game has a very robust config that allows you to alter the amount of shaking. I also did not like it. I turned shake and bounce all the way down to 0%.

Indeed, I was very impressed by the extensive configuration options, and of course ability to export/import them.

You can remove almost all of the visual effects in Tetr.io ghost piece transparency, background images, grid visibility etc.

You can even adjust key repeat speeds, manual drop speed and everything related to game play. It's extremely versatile in that regard and easily the top 1 tetris clone in my opinion.

You might want to turn down Config > Gameplay > Board Bounciness/Damage Shakiness.

> Maybe the kids are impressed by all the shaking going on, but I find it hard to focus when the thing I'm focusing on keeps jumping around.

No need to be snobby. For the record, I'm in my 30s, and I disagree with the central thesis of your comment.

Too much shaking in spectating, I'm actually getting motion sick.

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