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[Former EA and THQ design director Mike Lopez continues his
analytical series by looking at pacing in games versus films and TV, explaining
how careful planning can produce a perfect intensity curve for games.
Continuing from his previous installment, Lopez sets out nine fundamental
points that will allow you to developing an Intensity & Pacing Plan for
your game -- a document that will help you craft a game with consistent,
entertaining pacing and reduce wasted work.]
Introduction
I am continually
surprised that many game developers in this day and age still utilize a very
old-school, haphazard on-the-fly method of level design. When questioned, they
argue they can produce a quality campaign with this technique.
The reality,
however, is that the cost of continually reworking levels and missions until a
user-appealing structure is realized is extremely prohibitive. Ultimately the
end results will always be a rougher progression that falls far short of a
riveting experience.
Because both film and TV have the luxury of significant
extra film footage, and the flexibility of editing, these linear mediums have
the advantage of relatively quick changes to pacing which is quite effective,
but these are luxuries that are not available to the interactive nature of games.
The only way to get there efficiently is to plan ahead.
I myself have
worked on and with many highly experienced and talented teams (Road Rash 3D, Bond, Scarface, Baja, etc.) in the past who, due to a
rushed or arbitrarily-ended pre-production, first generation engine/tools woes
and/or over-confidence thought their situation was different -- only to end up
throwing away almost all of the missions, levels and/or courses deep into
production. The level/mission production team then had to start over on a
massive body of work with only a fraction of production time remaining.
I only wish those
projects could have benefited from these freshly-solidified processes. These
talented teams have always regretted the time and cost of throwing away work,
and the level/mission production teams have all had to scramble to get the new
content built with often too little time left for adequate iteration and
tuning, making the quality suffer further.
Even world-class teams with vast
resources like the BioShock team (2K Boston/Australia) suffered through the cost
and pain of massive throwaway (in their case, I believe all of the missions were
entirely redone in the final nine months, and I suspect much of the level
layout and content was redone as well).
The cold, hard
lesson we must all see is that teams that over-confidently think they can avoid
those mistakes using old-school, on-the-fly level design methods are destined
to repeat the same highly costly content throwaway mistakes that much of the
industry has been making for at least the past 10 years.
For the top high-profile titles of today, that throwaway easily translates into millions of
development dollars wasted (enough to probably implement every design feature
from your wish list) and often results in large delays and costly ship windows
missed. It is time we all stop repeating the same unstructured level process
mistakes and learn to utilize pacing and intensity processes like the older,
more experienced, and more efficient entertainment industries (film and TV).
At a high level,
the entire pacing structure encompasses three major bodies of work:
- The Intensity &
Pacing Plan is a structured level plan with set intensity magnitude and
trend targets for the events in each level and over the entire campaign (Steps
1-7 below).
- The Initial Level Implementation is the first pass of
production for each level, where the level team will be using the Intensity & Pacing Plan as a
blueprint (Step 8).
- On-going Level Reviews and subsequent Level Iterations will
be conducted to better match the intensity, timing, and gameplay progression
targets (Step 9)
As these three
bodies will encompass the bulk of design production, they must be led by one of
the senior design leaders (ideally the creative director, lead designer, or lead
level designer) and also monitored and supported by all the key design leaders.
9 Steps To
Achieving A Mind-Blowing Pacing & Intensity Structure:
1. Brainstorming.
Assuming the team is not locked into a precise level sequence (e.g.
a movie recreation), get the entire development team together ideally for a
full day Pre-Production Kickoff off-site to brainstorm (note that with a
second day off-site, the team could further work on design/tech/art goals,
IP goals, production processes, and pipelines).
-
More people participating in the brainstorm means more ideas,
but it might make sense to break a large group into smaller sub-groups to
ensure more people have a voice in the process. These types of large scale
sessions also generate great creative and motivational buy-in within the team.
-
First, start the brainstorming with a session on specific
settings for the levels. Try to come up with two to three times as
many locations as you plan to implement. List, discuss, and record all the ideas
openly without qualification or judgment. Get everyone to list the
level locations in order of intensity and appeal.
Examples:
Mayan
Pyramid Complex, Cambodian Temple, Mesa Verde Cliff
Dwelling
-
Next, brainstorm a list of high-action events. These events
may be focused around the locations (say a Halo-style level hub with animated or unique geometry) or instead
around the universal themes of the IP (like a vehicle chase in a James Bond
game).
Shoot for five or
six events per level, so that you can later whittle those down to the best of
the best. If you cannot even come up with three events, chances are the
location may not be so interesting to build a level around. Separate out or
flag the location-agnostic action events that will work anywhere in order to
signify that their position could potentially be shifted to another level as
necessary. Get everyone to list the action event ideas in order of
intensity and appeal.
Event
Examples: Earthquake topples temple structure, cliff side collapses, dam breaks
and wave rushes through canyon, soldiers repel on lines busting through glass
wall to quickly outnumber the player, fuel depot explodes and causes cascading
explosions along pipeline, person or vehicle chase through tunnels, cascading
car explosions ending in fuel tanker explosion, outrun the lava flow, pillar
topples over, stone arch collapses, suspension bridge starts to unravel, barrel
explodes a hole in wall to reveal a squad of enemies, etc.
-
To round out the session, come up with a list of, say, five to seven generic events which utilize main
mechanics, which could easily be used with minor variations (i.e. combat with x
henchmen, vehicle chase in a different setting, or repurposed puzzles.) This
will be a short list of items that will be used to flesh out the rest of the
levels in between the key action events, and by definition these will not be as
exciting or unique as the key action events identified in the previous
brainstorming session.
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As a long-time software project manager, though, I'd like to gently note that the team scenarios painted for this article are somewhat best-case. That's not wrong for an article of this length -- it does no harm to promote the benefits of improving the pacing design process.
But it's worth bearing in mind that, as with any intersection between neatly defined processes and messy, individualistic human beings, there are numerous ways in which the locomotive can start to go off the tracks. Here are just a couple.
Brainstorming: Some people are naturally hardwired to prefer seeing the problems with other people's ideas, as opposed to generating ideas of their own. These folks are valuable, but they're more valuable later in the process. When coming up with an initial set of ideas, it can be useful to make it clear to everyone that the time for applying critical judgement will come later -- the "idea assassins" need to hold their fire during the brainstorming phase in order to encourage the more sensitive members of a team to participate. This improves the odds that there'll be enough distinct ideas generated to cover the range of intensities required in level design.
Buy-in: While teambuilding is useful, buy-in (i.e., enthusiasm management) often needs to be handled on a individual basis in order to effectively address the "ownership problem." In any development project, some members are likely to be the type of person whose sense of self-worth is intimately connected to the work they do. In these cases, it can be hard to walk the fine line between encouraging these often highly productive individuals to fully invest, and allowing them to feel they (and not the project) "own" whatever work they're assigned. While investment is desirable, these individuals will often believe that their agreeing to invest in some task constitutes an agreement on your part to let them perform that task however they want to do it. Any subsequent effort on your part to change or cut that task for intensity or pacing needs will be considered a betrayal of that supposed contract, and can result in persistent arguments, emotional confrontations, sullenness (and substandard work), denigration of your competence (creating an "us versus them" atmosphere among team members), and potentially the loss of a productive worker. It's not always possible to manage these individuals; what's important is recognizing that they exist and that they make achieving the goal of buy-in more complex than simply getting everyone to be enthusiastic about the project.
...
I'm completely on board with the goals described in this article, particularly the top-level goal of using a well-defined process for achieving emotionally satisfying pacing in level design. Following some form of the process suggested is indeed likely to yield better results, both artistically and commercially, than proceeding directly to implementation and hoping to iterate toward quality in time to meet a scheduled ship date.
It's just useful to recognize that some people seem to enjoy sticking their thumbs in the metaphorical eye of processes, no matter how good those processes may be. (Creative types may be especially prone to this.)
So by all means, follow the process ideas described here. Just be ready to handle the many forms of resistance, both overt and covert, that always occur when trying to persuade actual human beings to follow a process.
RE: Buy-In. The key with those emotionally invested and productive workers is to get them to assist their design peers in forming the layout of the Plan prior to assigning the ownership. This way all should feel the helped shape the Big Picture. It is also equally important to let them know that on top of the pacing structure there is still an ample creative space in which they will be able to express themselves through the bulk of the level design and implementation details.
You definitely want to do the intensity ratings as a group.
It seems to me that 95% of the time in a horror movie the viewer knows *when* scares are going to come but often the joy comes in how interesting and unexpected the depicted event situation is. If you really want to surprise the player then you can establish a pacing rhythm that runs like clockwork and then you intentionally but temporarily break that rhythm once the player has gotten used to it for a shocking surprise. Another technique is to establish a seeming low-risk lull and then to morph the situation instantly into a high-risk event. Surprise events should not be done in the same spatial realm as normal events (i.e. don't have a closed path leading to a clearing or open space where you would expect an event to happen).
Film and TV are also art forms and Hollywood has been successfully structuring pacing and intensity for years and leveraging cinematic techniques to steer the viewer's emotions.
There are no rules that say creativity is mutually exclusive to structured pacing. Only a fear or process change will keep us from realizing the successes of the top Hollywood blockbusters.
Well that's just an opinion to consider.
I'm really impressed with your article, and I wholly agree with the notion that game- and level design should be a structured process.
The problem is that pacing in an action game, even a "pure" action game with simple rules, is much more complex than the standard "crosscut saw" shape.
We did some research on pacing in Call of Duty 4. I don't have data nor results at home, but it's crazy stuff, really. Most of all, it's not one-dimensional. We started having constructive results only after we assumed intensity has two dimensions: tension (the feeling of not being in control of your own circumstance, e.g. the sense of danger) and chaos (the feeling of not being able to follow changes of your environment, e.g. the sense of everything happening "too fast").
These two use distinct kinds of surprise. "Tense" surprise is a sudden realisation: a pair of bombers is coming and they're going to sink the ship you're riding. You can't even see them, but you know what they mean. "Chaotic" surprise is a sudden perception: something explodes within your field of view. You have to see it in order to experience it. If a fuel tank explodes a mile away, it may just as well not exist.
Only tense surprises are "real". Chaotic surprises are perceived as noises. A key of jets flies right over your head, and you won't even notice them (I know I didn't). But when you're starting to slip out from the rescue helicopter you've just jumped on, and for a fraction of second captain Price seems not to notice - that's something you're likely to be still keeping in your memory in a few years' time. Jets are flashy, and yet they're irrelevant. But if Price doesn't grab your hand (and for a split second you're thinking that's the case), then you're going to die.
The biggest problem about this is that the sudden realisation can be anything. The realisation comes from a conjunction of meanings. If you arrange your meanings properly, you can convince the player to care about, say, a dog, or a lighthouse, or a rock. The very last scene in Call of Duty 4 is very ordinary in terms of eye candy, but it works the way it does because it's preceded by two other scenes (10% and 50% into the game), in which you die. You're expecting to die again, and then you don't. But if those two scenes weren't there, you would never expect to die, because the action game convention says you can't (you're the protagonist, after all). Most of the impact of the game is achieved by careful manipulation of various meanings, and not by pacing or intensity.
They didn't use the crosscut saw in Call of Duty 4. The most intense moment is the cutscene after nukes are launched. Everything afterwards is an exercise in successful damage control, starting with the immediate following mission, where the main relief is the sheer fact that the nukes haven't hit their targets yet. You're still in the game.
As far as CoD4 goes, there's no rule with regard to tension or chaos curve. Sometimes it has a peak in the middle of level progress. Sometimes it has two peaks: one in the beginning, and the other at the end. Sometimes it's flat. The most intense missions in Call of Duty 4 use relatively flat chaos curves, and flat tension curves with a lot of spikes in them. They're intense because of the resonance between the spikes. That's not so much pacing as timing.
Their core combat loop during urban warfare sequences is 45-60 seconds of heavy fighting followed by a "deep breath". This is usually something as small as a short corridor between roomfuls of enemies, or a staircase. If you just keep walking, it doesn't last for more than a second or two. But if you do stop, you can stay there for a few minutes and nothing is going to hurt you. Formally speaking, it's a high-intensity encounter followed by another high-intensity encounter, and then another one, and another. But in fact the pacing is completely under player's control. If you're feeling tired, you just stop and take as many deep breaths as you need.
An argument in your favour: all of their turning points are very structured, because they were implemented with the same "stepladder" progression. Each turning point is a pair of events. The first one is a "tense" surprise: somebody tells you your ship is going to be bombed. It does rise the tension, but it usually doesn't change the chaos level. Only after the sudden realisation sinks into your mind, when you're finally understanding what's going to happen to you, the second event happens, and all the hell breaks loose. That's the sudden perception. There's fire everywhere, the water is pouring in, and the ship is starting to lean on the side. It's not a surprise, because you knew it would happen. It works because you knew.
The absolute masterpiece of tension control is the Chernobyl mission, and you only give a handful of shots in it. The most intense moment in that mission happens when a bunch of soldiers pass by. You're in control. You don't even have to move much. But they're passing very, very close to you. One of them could step on you. The mission ends with an interlude, rather than a peak. The most action-oriented event of that part of game happens at the beginning of the next mission, and you trigger it consciously all by yourself.
I don't think pacing is the ultimate goal of a game, even if it's a simple first person shooter. Pacing is important, but it's only a tool, and it should be used differently for different goals. But I do think that a process similar to the one you described is crucial to successful development, because it allows the team to choose their goal and stick with it.
What makes pacing more difficult for games than it is for TV and films is that with the non-interactive media, the creators can assume that the participent is going to be viewing from start to end in one sitting. This is a luxury game designers don't have, as all players play at a different pace.
Certainly the increasing wave pace is not the only viable one. CoD4 did an awesome job capturing the chaos of war and if chaos is a key objective like that on-going spikes seem to have worked quite well.
For teams that do not have the experience of several iterations in the genre it might be harder to figure out their pacing type and it would serve them well to consider the Hollywood type structure I proposed is the alternative is no structure at all.
Thanks again for your excellent insight.
However, I disagree with the claims that thrown-out content is universally a bad thing. I can think of some valid reasons, even good reasons to throw away content, and lots of it. Maybe I'm being a bit nit-picky here, but the expectation that no content should ever be thrown out is be a very dangerous one, for both scheduling and gameplay quality.
Design Iteration
It can be difficult to predict what the most fun parts of your game are going to be. Write as many design docs as you want, once you have a playable experience everything changes. It is very useful to purposely create a bunch of "throw away" content early in the process to get a feel for things, find out what’s fun and what isn't, and help steer the forward direction of the game. It’s better to find out something is a flawed idea with quick throw-away content, than discover it late in the project in the midst of final content production.
Planning
It is tremendously useful to sketch out portions of the game with throw-away art, content, and even programming. This may catch some serious technical or design issues early on, and clarify what needs to be done. If you plan on getting things right the first time, you'll end up married to the mistakes you'll inevitably make. The lessons learned with throw-away content will allow you to appropriately schedule the game, and will make the final version much better.
Content Pipeline
One of the many difficulties of making a game is that there is a whole lot of design, gameplay programming, and tools work to be done before you can even begin creating the final content. But these things don't magically appear out of a hat. The content team is, and should get their hands dirty way before the content pipeline is 100% production ready. Sure, this creates all sorts of headaches as the tools, gameplay, data formats, and design are all in constant flux as content is being created. And you're pretty much forced to throw away this early content. Or, if you try to save it, it will probably cost you more time, and be inferior quality than if you just scrap it, and recreate better content later on once you have more focused design and better tool support.
Still, it is critical for the content pipeline to be used as it is being built. Your content team is the client for this pipeline, and they need time to learn it, and provide critique as it develops. By the time the pipeline is finished, it will be fire-tested, and the content team will be trained up and bought into the process. Most importantly, the content team has had a chance to experiment and make mistakes before creating the real content for the game. You'll be able to hit the ground running at full speed.
Unfortunately, this means a lot of content gets thrown away, but I would argue this is a worthwhile cost.
I do agree with Mike Lopez on the merits of intensity and pacing planning. But it isn't a magic bullet that will make "wasted" content disappear. Good planning will help prevent radical design and vision changes down the road, which is certainly a good thing. But it doesn't abolish the need for throw-away content.
You need a good process. But a little (or a lot) of "content chaos" and experimentation in the initial stages will make your game a lot better in the long run.
However, the majority of the cost of content being thrown away is inflicted when the first proper review of a large chunk of content is performed too late. For instance, a level turns out to be no fun after it's been fully built. This could easily cost your team several thousand man-hours, which is probably more than most teams spend on all of their throwaway prototypes.
In other words, you can and should afford to throw away a few meshes, but you cannot afford for them to have ten thousand polys each. You can throw away a piece of code, but not after you've asked the programmer to handle all the exceptions and edge cases.
Even worse are instances when a game goes into production after the team has skipped design, planning and prototype phases. You build half of your levels, and only then you realize that half of your weapons are too strong while the other half are useless, your enemies are boring, and the custom action set you invented for your protagonist doesn't work. The final game becomes a de facto prototype, and that's just stupid.
The problem comes when as Jacek says the content is nearly complete and still is not fun. Or the level does not support the core mechanics well and has to be scraped. In other cases it may be related to late changes in engine technical requirements (do it all in 20% less memory). Scrapping a single level early on with rough art and low detail is no big deal. Scrapping all the environments and/or missions towards the end of production is a nightmare for the schedule, level production costs and ultimately the gameplay quality (more time implementing levels means less time polishing).
Sean you make some great points about new technology and about experimentation in levels which I agree with completely (I have actually been sketching out another article on the importance of *early production* level design experimentation in defining what I call "Patterns of Fun" that should be varied throughout all the levels).
Just my opinion.
I have done some quick research about quality and the user perception once, and there is some insight i had which may help .
Pacing is important but it wouldn't raise "the perceive quality" of game, it only remove "the defect". A well pace game is "expected" by consumer as a given, removing an annoyance doesn't make it "good" just "ok" or "acceptable". The element that would add quality is "timing", it is a subtle difference but it make a difference. So we need such a method as a given for basic quality, it's a very good article and I'm rather stun that's it is not use in our industry.
Everybody assume that because somethings is art or creative you won't use "guideline" which is awfully wrong as art is literally full of process and techniques, but they are so ingrained in the act that we don't pay attention anymore.
Animation which is about "expressing souls" is one of the most "normative art" and still can express a lot of things, principally because of the process. Animation became an major art form when Disney maked "snow white" and it could have done it because he had created "normative" tools such as storyboards, exposure sheet and model sheets. §It had permit sharing a creative vision and doing large scale quality project with depth and sensibilities,beyond the comical immediate fun that was given, just like Video game, cartoon was suppose to be FUN!. Maybe we should look more closely animation than movies for insight on production process (animation is after all still heavy from design to 24 images seconds the 1 hour and a half movies)?
Jaceck also made a very insightful distinction, great comment! I may try to add something. What he had called "tense" and "chaos" are known elsewhere as "cognitive" and "visceral" and you can apply it to more than pacing. There is many great artist in video game, we have great looking character with a lot of "visceral" appeal, but they are view as "bland" because they lack "cognitive appeal" (the concept behind them is not interesting). A character like James BOND is everlasting because of his cognitive aspect ( a contrasting concept of the "playboy" (not discrete and connect with people) is a "spy"(discrete and hidden from people) with license to kill people) contrary to Rambo (a “soldier” that “kills peoples”, no contrast) which ages very quickly despite good visceral appeal. Call of duty 4 was interesting because it subtly subvert a lot of expectation concerning a war game (not always about shooting, and most discussion around me about the game is whether it is a glorification or a denunciation of present days wars, maybe it was not intended but it had helped the game to get into the mind!
Portal is an exemple of game well paced (room give unity of place, time and challenge) with good timing and also having good "visceral" appeal (moving through portal) and "cognitive" appeal (the cake is a lie, the weigthed companion cube, the concept of the portal gun GLADOS). And it does so despite not so original settings (dystopian future with bad robots) but it is such a design!
I hope this comment helped broaden the scope of the excellant article and the no less exellant comment of Jaceck
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kano_model