FUNDAMENTALS OF GAME DESIGN, SECOND EDITION
PACING IN THE LORD OF THE RINGS
For a wonderful example of varied pacing from literature, read The Lord of the Rings.
Almost every major adventure or threat the Fellowship experiences in the first two volumes is followed by a period of rest and refreshment to heal wounds and in particular to replenish food supplies. The hobbits flee the Black Riders and take refuge with Farmer Maggot. They are caught in the Old Forest and rescued by Tom Bombadil. After the attack at Weathertop, they find shelter in Rivendell. After losing Gandalf in the Mines of Moria, they find succor in Lorien, and so on. This change of pace not only creates emotional variety for the reader, allowing her to enjoy the beauty and warmth of the heroes' places of shelter after the terrors of their journey, but it also makes the story more credible. No one can carry six months' worth of food on his back, so the supplies had to come from somewhere.
The Da Vinci Code, notwithstanding its financial success, is less credible in this regard. Involved in almost nonstop action from start to finish, the heroes never seem to need any sleep.
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You can vary the pacing in a variety of ways: by creating an area free of challenges in which the player can simply explore; by creating an area that contains only low - stress challenges; or by making the player's avatar temporarily invulnerable or
particularly strong as a reward for successfully overcoming a demanding challenge. You can also deliver a bit of the story through narrative: Watching a cut-scene, for example, gives the player a moment to relax.
You will find it easiest to vary the pacing in games that involve avatar travel through a linear space, because you can control the sequence in which the player confronts challenges. Games that give the player freedom to explore at will give you less control. In genres that use multipresent interaction models rather than avatar - or party-based ones, you may have little control at all. For example, in a real-time strategy game, the pacing depends to a large degree on the player's own style of play. Those who attack aggressively experience a faster pace than those who slowly build up huge armies before attacking.
Although the pacing of a level should vary from time to time (depending on the genre), the overall pacing of the level should either remain steady or become more rapid as the player nears the end. A longstanding tradition in action games, and many other genres as well, calls for the inclusion of a boss to defeat at the end of the level: a particularly difficult challenge. Victory, and the end of the level, reward the player for defeating the boss, and this sometimes includes a cache of resources or treasure as well. Bosses, although something of a cliche, fit neatly into games with a Hero's Journey story structure. Chapter 13 discusses bosses in greater detail.
Levels should not, in general, get easier and easier as they go along. If the player does well, positive feedback may come into play to make the game easier, and you will need to design the level, or the core mechanics, to reduce that effect. Chapter 11 discusses positive feedback at length, including various means of limiting it.
Years ago, video games shipped with large manuals that explained how to play the games. Designers had no other way to teach the player because the distribution media (cartridges and floppy disks) couldn't hold enough data to spare any room for tutorial levels. Nowadays, however, all games should be designed so that the player can start playing immediately. Games still use manuals, mostly in electronic form, but for detailed reference information rather than instructions.
Instead of instructions, games offer tutorial levels—early levels that teach the player how to play. Every commercial game except the simplest ones should include one or more tutorial levels. Although tutorial levels require more time and effort to build than a manual does to write, tutorial levels have the tremendous advantage that they let the player learn in a hands-on fashion. Players learn physical activities, such as how the control devices function in the game, far more quickly if they can try the actions for themselves.
A tutorial level is not simply an easy level or a short level. A tutorial level should be a scripted or partially scripted experience that explains the game's user interface, key challenges, and actions to the player. Use voiceover narration, text superimposed on the screen, or a special mentor character to explain things to the player.
As you design one or more tutorial levels for your game, consider these key principles:
■ Introduce the game's features in an orderly sequence, starting with the most general and most often used features and proceeding to the more specialized and rarely used ones. Your tutorial should introduce each individual action that the game permits, but it need not discuss combinations of actions and what effects they may have. The players can work that out for themselves.
■ Don't make all the game's features available at once. It will only confuse the player if he happens to select, by accident, a maneuver that you haven't yet introduced, which produces an effect on the screen that the player doesn't understand. Disable features until the tutorial introduces them.
■ If the interface is complex, as interfaces tend to be in many war games and construction and management simulations, introduce the information over two or three tutorial levels.
■ Highlight user interface elements that appear on the screen with an arrow or a colored glow whenever your explanatory text or helpful guide character refers to them. Don't just say where these items appear on the screen and make the player look for them.
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■ Let the player go back and try things again as often as he wants, without any penalty for failure. All the costs of making a mistake that you might put into the ordinary game world should be switched off in the tutorial levels.
Make the tutorial levels optional. Experienced players may not need them and will be irritated by being forced to go through them. (America's Army violated this rule, largely because of the game’s function as a representation of the U. S. Army. The developers wanted to make the point that not just anybody would be allowed into the army, so the tutorial levels symbolized Basic Training in the real army. America's Army is not a pure entertainment product, however.)
