TumbleSeed devs explain how they implemented HD Rumble in such a convincing way

Coming from a Polygon interview...

“The biggest difference between HD rumble and what we’re all used to from previous controllers is precision and responsiveness. With old rumble motors, when the developer wants the haptic feedback to kick in. the motor takes a small but measurable amount of time to get to the desired intensity. We’re able to immediately jump to the feedback we want with HD rumble. That alone makes it a more one-to-one experience regarding what you’re seeing, hearing and feeling.” - programmer David Laskey

“With traditional rumble, frequency and intensity are linked. So, in other words, to make the rumble effect more pronounced, the motor has to spin faster. HD rumble on the Switch is much more detailed — sort of like a sound you can feel. We were able to use it to create a recognizable feeling for the game’s core mechanics, and being able scale the intensity of those sensations without sacrificing their identity really helps them feel real.

I rolled marbles, clay pots, rocks, salt blocks, acorns and sticks across different surfaces and listened really closely to the relationship of pitch and volume as they sped up and slowed down. And what was really interesting — particularly with a marble rolling across a smooth wooden surface — was that the change in volume was much more pronounced than the change in pitch. It was a perfect opportunity to take advantage of what makes HD rumble different.

We took special care to make sure that HD rumble always parallels what the sound is doing. When the seed stops, the sound then abruptly fades to nothing, accompanied with a slight bump or hit. I know from doing a lot of synthesis work that sounds that increase in volume logarithmically are more ‘real’ sounding than things that increase linearly. David and I worked out an intensity curve that fades the rumble in logarithmically too. It’s those kinds of dynamics and the blend of engaging two senses: hearing and touch, that give TumbleSeed’s rumble its unique physicality.” - composer and sound design Joel Corelitz

from GoNintendo