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Gameplay Fundamentals Revisited, Part 2: Building a Pacing Structure
by Mike Lopez
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November 26, 2008
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Page 4 of 5
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8. Initial Level
Construction. Now, the level designers or world builders should
proceed with the initial level construction, using the target
specifications and framework from the Intensity
& Pacing Plan finalized in the previous step.
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The level builders and/or mission scripters now know where
the key level events should be placed and roughly how far in time they should
be spaced apart. Compensating for projected average player deaths and event
completion times, they can turn the time metrics into distance (assuming the
player avatar speed is locked down or close to final).
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These key designers also know where in time to build in
relaxing lulls, dialogue-points, or scenic vistas to reduce the tension after the
resolution of a major intensity event.
Using the projected distances between
the action events, they can also determine where to place these lulls -- although
less precision is needed with placement of lulls than with the action events
(just make sure they are close to that event).
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As they build out the level, they will fill the sections in
between each lull/action event/lull group and the next with the reusable portions
of gameplay in such a way that they help build the intensity up to the next big
action event (e.g. a sequence of battles with progressively more henchmen or
more challenge).
They must also be very careful during implementation to make
sure that the intensity of any reusable sub-events does not surpass that of the
next key action event so as to preserve the intensity target trends from the Intensity & Pacing Plan.
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When working in an Agile Development environment, begin the
first pass with a small set of levels that are adjacent (say levels 1-4 if there
are enough personnel for four level teams). For the second stage, initiate the
initial implementation for a second set of levels (say 5-8) and do a full round
of iteration on the first set. In the third stage, initiate the initial
implementation for a third set of levels (9-12), and complete another round of
iteration on sets one and two (levels 1-8). Continue this method until all
levels are working with initial implementation of all the key events.
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Note that if the project is more than two thirds of the way
into production without completing the initial implementation of all
levels/missions, then a full round of level/mission cuts should occur
immediately, and the Intensity &
Pacing Plan should be reworked. If cuts are necessary, then this signals
that the ongoing estimates from the leads have been inaccurate, and thus an even
more conservative level of cuts should be made at this point (ideally cut
30-50% more of the unimplemented levels than the schedule predicts there is
time to implement).
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Level designers should also utilize the lessons of theme
park design and urban planning to affect pacing via the level layout. Those of
you who attended Brian Upton's excellent GDC
2007 lecture on Narrative Landscapes will have a great
perspective on this. Visual pace can be created to coincide or contrast with
the pacing of the action to add to the highs and further enhance the lows in
intensity. Geographic elements such as sight line reveals can and should be
used to help release tension after a high intensity event, just as
claustrophobic sections and mental edge barriers can help heighten tension
leading into a major action event.
9. Review &
Iterate. Throughout
level production, the creative leaders and team leads must review the
in-game levels and compare them to the Intensity & Pacing Plan targets and trends. They must then
schedule appropriate time for the levels to be iterated on in order to
adjust the events to come closer to the targets. These reviews are also
the best time support and ensure the accuracy of the Gameplay
Progression Plan.
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Review the levels with those building them, and re-rate the
intensity of the in-game main action events (keeping the previous ratings out
of view so as not to bias the results).
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Compare the event intensity ratings to the target
specifications from the Plan. Where an intensity rating is different from the
target value, adjust the on-paper design specifications, along with the level
designers responsible for mission construction. Consider: adding, building up,
removing, or minimizing elements such as enemies, hazards, explosions, or moving
geometry. The idea is to evolve the event to bring it closer the intensity and
timing targets from the Intensity &
Pacing Plan. The pacing trends also must be maintained.
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The event ratings for an in-game level will also need to be
compared to the ratings for the other levels that fit around it in the
campaign. You will need to ensure that the first key action event of the level
is larger in intensity from the one in the level before it -- and that the last
action event of the level is larger in intensity from the level before (Figure
8 above).
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Using the design specification changes, create and prioritize
a change list of tasks and communicate those to the producer, project manager,
and appropriate lead for each level.
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Once deep into production (say 80-90%), then any functioning
Dynamic Difficulty system(s) can be leveraged to ratchet up the intensity further
for the highest action points and to lower it during the intensity lulls for
finer adjustment controls to the intensity of each event.
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Allow the level designers enough scheduled time to complete
another full iteration to all the levels based on the change-list of tasks.
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Repeat this review, adjustment, and iteration cycle
throughout production (at least every 4-6 weeks) and even into post-production
for final tuning. It is imperative that these reviews continue throughout production
so the team can track their progress towards their Intensity & Pacing Plan target trends and to avoid a costly and
time-intensive overhaul near the end of production that might otherwise likely
result in costly throw-away work.
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Every three or four months, the levels should also be
reviewed by the whole design team and ideally even shown to the whole
development team in order to allow everyone to give feedback, and to ensure the
range of viewers and opinions is as wide as possible. This also helps gain
buy-in from the entire team and lets them feel as if everyone has contributed
to the creative process from brainstorming to Final.
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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.
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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