Keeyai.com

There is a cool article at gamasutra by a team that created 50 games in a semester at carnegie mellon. The four of them essentially went through pyweek a bunch of times in a row, constraining themselves with nearly identical rules and applying theme restrictions the same way. Their post mortem article about what went well, what didn’t, and just overall advice on how to rapidly create games was pretty good, and I suggest you read it here. The advice I liked most was this:

Make it Juicy!

“Juice” was our wet little term for constant and bountiful user feedback. A juicy game element will bounce and wiggle and squirt and make a little noise when you touch it. A juicy game feels alive and responds to everything you do – tons of cascading action and response for minimal user input. It makes the player feel powerful and in control of the world, and it coaches them through the rules of the game by constantly letting them know on a per-interaction basis how they are doing.

It is a solid, concise definition of a very very important concept for this kind of game, and can be extended to anything, games or just programs. It also comes with a handy short word you can throw around and people, or just toss at the wall and watch it slowly slide down.