FUNDAMENTALS OF GAME DESIGN, SECOND EDITION
Progression and Pacing
A large video game—one designed to be played for more than an hour, say— is almost always divided into a number of levels. If you want the player to experience those levels in a sequence, they should exhibit progression of some kind: changes from level to level that represent growth in some form, or narrative advancement, or both.
The pacing of a level refers to the frequency at which the player encounters individual challenges. A fast pace creates stress, offering challenges at a rapid rate while giving the player no opportunity to relax. (Chapter 9 defines stress and discusses the relationship between stress and difficulty.) A slow pace offers challenges at a slow rate and permits the player to take his time about addressing them.
This section of the chapter discusses both progression and pacing, and how to design them properly.
Games obviously need to change from level to level, but how should they change? Designer Mike Lopez has written a useful article on the subject in his "Gameplay Design Fundamentals" column for the Gamasutra webzine (Lopez, 2006). He identifies five game features that should exhibit progression throughout the game; these serve us as a starting point:
■ Mechanics. Lopez uses this term to refer both to the core mechanics of the game and the actions available to the player. This book organizes these concepts differently, so we'll look at core mechanics here and actions later. Generally speaking, the core mechanics should become richer as the game goes along. In the early levels, especially the tutorial levels, the internal economy of the game should be easy for the player to learn. Later, the mechanics can become more intricate, as in games like the Civilization series. Many games also exhibit economic growth throughout the game, so the player is dealing with larger and larger quantities of resources— money, hit points, horsepower, or whatever the game deems to be of value.
■ Experience duration. Except for the occasional atypical level (see the later section "Make Atypical Levels Optional"), it should take more and more time to play through each subsequent level. This rule is not absolute, but generally speaking, levels later in the game should be longer than those earlier in the game.
■ Ancillary rewards and environmental progression. Ancillary rewards are unrelated to the gameplay: cut-scenes, trophies, unlockable content, and so on. (When the player gets to the end of Silent Hill 3, she earns the right to dress Heather, the avatar character, in new clothes and play the game again wearing them. This has no effect on the gameplay.) By environmental progression Lopez means enjoyable changes in the landscape of the game world, which makes sense when the game involves travel. Both of these provide novelty, one of the ways that video games entertain.
■ Practical gameplay rewards. These are rewards that directly influence the player's future gameplay: new vehicles in driving games; new gear or skills in role-playing games; new moves or characters in fighting games; new technology in strategy games, and so on.
■ Difficulty. Generally speaking, the perceived difficulty of the game should go up, remaining flat only for games for small children and some casual games. Chapter 11 dealt with this issue extensively.
In addition to Lopez's list of features, you may wish to consider a few more:
■ Actions available to the player. Lopez lumped these together with mechanics, but they aren't quite the same. A game can possess core mechanics that don't change much from level to level, yet still offer players new moves or other activities to perform as the game goes along. This is particularly noticeable in platform games. It's always a good idea to introduce new actions through a series of tutorial levels so that players can become skilled with one before learning the next one.
■ Story progression. As your player progresses through the game, he should also progress through the story, if it has one. Exactly how this happens depends on a number of design decisions you must make: whether the plot is linear or not, and what mechanism causes the plot to advance. Chapter 7 addresses these details.
■ Character growth. Video game characters often become more powerful through practical gameplay rewards, and sometimes they become more visually interesting
through ancillary rewards such as new clothing. But you can also make them grow in a literary sense: become more mature, well-rounded people. A character who doesn't grow, especially over the course of several games, eventually begins to seem like a cartoon character with no emotional depth.
It will be easiest to implement these features if you organize your game into a number of discrete levels, each of which contains its own environment, starting conditions, victory condition, and so on. However, levels are naturally rather artificial. If you want to offer a strongly storylike experience, you may prefer to avoid having breaks between one level and the next, and try to create an entirely seamless experience. Half-Life is a famous example.
The pace you choose for your level will depend to a considerable extent on the genre of the game you're creating; players expect a faster - or slower-paced game depending upon the genre. The fastest-paced games of all, the old 2D side-scrolling or top-scrolling shooters, required players to move the joystick and bang the fire button continuously just to survive. Multiplayer deathmatch shooters such as Quake and its kin represent the modern equivalent. (Stealth games such as the Rainbow Six series, which involve careful planning, often move at a slow pace except for a brief wild flurry when the enemy comes into view.) Adventure games use the slowest pace because much of the activity consists of interactive dialog (generally a story action rather than an action the player takes to surmount a challenge), exploration without much effort, and puzzle solving in which the players can take as long as they like. Play a variety of games and study their pacing. Chapter 13, "Action Games," discusses pacing extensively because it is so important in that genre.
CLASSIC ARCADE PACING
In arcade games, especially old ones such as Space Invaders, the pace at which the player faces challenges becomes faster and faster as each level progresses. If the player succeeds in beating the level—destroying all the invading aliens—he gets a few seconds of rest before the next level begins. The next level offers identical challenges, but it starts at a faster pace than the previous level started and ends at a faster pace than the previous level ended. The pace of Space Invaders increases both within each level and from level to level until it overwhelms the player and he loses the game. He cannot win; he can only hope to get a high score.
This classic arcade pacing explains how arcade games used to make their money. This scenario is now considered a bit old-fashioned and inappropriate for console and PC games because they don't need to make the player lose to force him to put more money in the machine. However, with the continuing popularity of retro gaming, classic arcade pacing remains common in simple web-based games such as Collapse!
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As a general principle, the pacing of a level in any game, especially a game with physical challenges, should alternate between fast and slow periods, just as the tempo of movements in a symphony or the levels of excitement in an action movie vary. Players need moments to rest, both physically and mentally, and on the whole, the faster the pace of the level, the more important rest becomes. A particularly stressful challenge should be followed by a brief period with no challenges at all and then by easier challenges that gradually ramp up to more stressful ones again. This also gives the player a chance to savor the pleasant emotions that accompany success.
Varying the pace not only gives the player a rest from physical challenges, it also produces a more balanced game. If overcoming a challenge requires spending a resource (ammunition or health or the like), then the more the player spends on a given challenge, the weaker and more vulnerable he is afterward. In his weakened state, he should not face another demanding challenge immediately. You should also make fresh supplies available to him immediately after he surmounts a challenge that costs him a lot of resources, as Chapter 11 explained. In shooter games, these traditionally take the form of boxes of ammunition and medical kits for restoring health, stored in an area immediately beyond a large group of enemies.
In role-playing games, enemies drop valuable resources when killed, thus helping to replenish the player's supply.
