CameraBeginner

Camera Shake

Briefly jolting the camera to sell weight, impact, or danger.

impactjuicecombatfeedback

Examples

Captured from this page's own interactive demo below.

Overview

Camera shake nudges the view randomly for a short burst, usually triggered by an explosion, a heavy hit, or a big landing. It's one of the cheapest ways to make an action feel like it has real physical force behind it.

It works because it borrows a real-world cue: things that hit hard actually do shake your point of view (through your body, through the ground). Reproducing that briefly convinces the player something impactful just happened, even if the actual on-screen change is small.

Emotionally it reads as impact, danger, or power — a punch lands harder, an explosion feels bigger, a boss's footstep feels heavier.

Interactive Demo

Amplitude14px

Duration300ms

Frequency18Hz

Use Cases

FPSCombatPlatformerExplosions/VFX

Best Practices

Do

✓Scale the shake to the event — a footstep and a boss slam should not shake the same amount.
✓Decay the amplitude over the shake's duration so it settles instead of stopping abruptly.
✓Keep it short (150–400ms) for most hits; reserve long shakes for genuinely huge moments.

Don't

✕Don't shake the camera during precision platforming or aiming — it fights the player's input.
✕Don't stack shakes uncapped; multiple hits in quick succession should clamp, not compound into nausea.
✕Don't use pure random offsets with no falloff — it reads as jitter, not impact.

Common Mistakes

⚠Shaking on every single hit, so the effect stops registering as special.
⚠Shaking the whole screen when only the local hit area needed emphasis.
⚠Ignoring accessibility — some players are sensitive to screen motion and need a way to reduce or disable it.

Implementation

Paste this into your AI assistant (Cursor, Copilot, Claude) to add the effect to your project.

Prompt

Add the "Camera Shake" game-feel effect to my project: Briefly jolting the camera to sell weight, impact, or danger.

How it works: Camera shake nudges the view randomly for a short burst, usually triggered by an explosion, a heavy hit, or a big landing. It's one of the cheapest ways to make an action feel like it has real physical force behind it.

Guidelines:
- Scale the shake to the event — a footstep and a boss slam should not shake the same amount.
- Decay the amplitude over the shake's duration so it settles instead of stopping abruptly.
- Keep it short (150–400ms) for most hits; reserve long shakes for genuinely huge moments.

Avoid:
- Don't shake the camera during precision platforming or aiming — it fights the player's input.
- Don't stack shakes uncapped; multiple hits in quick succession should clamp, not compound into nausea.
- Don't use pure random offsets with no falloff — it reads as jitter, not impact.

Implement the effect in whatever engine/stack the project already uses and follow its existing code style. Wire it up where it makes sense.