Hi, there, welcome to Extra Credits! My name is Daniel, I'll be doing the talking.
This is James, he'll be doing the writing,
and that over there is Allison, who's in charge of the pretty pictures.
We are here to talk about these and this week, we want to talk about pacing.
Take a look at this here chart.
I don't know who made it, I found it years ago, and I haven't been able to find it again since,
but this right here, this is pacing.
Let's have a closer look.
This graph represents an ideal example of pacing, provided by Star Wars: A New Hope.
The curve shows our engagement with the film at any given time.
Let's start at the beginning.
We kick things off with a big chase and battle sequence where Princess Leia is captured by The Empire.
Nice, exciting start. You have my attention.
Then things settle down a little as the stage is set and more of our characters are introduced.
We meet Luke, Luke meets Obi-Wan, Etc...
But then, we have a sudden spike in intensity, as Luke's aunt and uncle are killed,
and from there, the curve is a succession of peaks and valleys,
slowly building the tension higher and higher and higher,
and so we finally reached the most intense scene in the movie with Luke in the Death Star Trench,
and that whole "Use the Force" moment
Luke fires the torpedoes, the Death Star is destroyed, and the intensity settles down, as the story resolves itself.
Great example of pacing.
Ask anyone who entertains, be they a rock star, a writer, a casino owner, or a sketch comedian
and they'll tell you that almost all good entertainment has a pacing curve that looks just like that.
You want to hit it big in the beginning, get everybody tuned in and excited about what's going on,
and the, you want to give your audience a breather so you can set the right baseline for the experience.
Your opener has to be short,
otherwise the audience will expect too much and they'll take your big intro as the baseline of excitement for your piece,
creating an unreasonable expectation about the trajectory of your work.
The first God of war is a great example
The opening Hydra fight grabbed you and made [sure] you weren't put in that game down anytime soon
But then they ramped back the epicness for a bit so they [could] choose their moments and weren't forced to take everything to [11:00] halfway
Through the game just to keep your attention [once] you've got your opener in place
Then you need to oscillate [that] engagement level in a steadily
Increasing Manner many young designers make the mistake of thinking that each moment in the game has to be bigger and better than the last
They think their game has to plot a straight line constantly climbing higher when in reality that's actually kind of counterproductive
[the] thing is human beings get acclimated to stimuli think of entertainment like candy if you have candy every now and then it tastes awesome
[if] you have it all the time though it starts only tasting [okay]?
Before you know what you have to turn to even more potent sugary treats to get that level of satisfaction
the players overall enjoyment of your work will actually increase if you alternate between periods of intense
engagement and periods of rest if you want a crystal clear example of this simply turn to the survival horror Genre [in]
Survival horror games they use tension as the principal form of engagement [a] good survival horror game will build the tension
Scare you at the Crescendo and then release so they can build you up and scare you again bad survival horror games tend to do
one of two things they either a
Constantly maintain a high level [attention] so much that it becomes
Exhausting or be try to scare you all the time to the point that the [scares] end up becoming routine instead of shocking?
Finally you can't leave your audience at the most intense point of the experience you have to bring them back down so they feel some
Closure otherwise they'll feel is that the experience was truncated or ended abruptly this is the very rule
We break to create cliffhangers
But unless that's your objective a well-crafted
holistic piece should spend a little bit of time at the end bringing the audience back to where they engage with the piece as a
Whole if you get them hugely invested in what's going on in the final moments
And then just cut two credits you're only going to leave people frustrated at this point
It's probably worth mentioning that this graph measures engagement of all Sorts many games provide engagement through excitement or fun
but like I said with survival horror games tension
Satisfaction curiosity even Sorrow can foster that engagement as well and as a designer you need to know what combination of emotions
You're going to be using to understand how you're going to create this curve
Let's use the survival horror example again
Consider all the survival horror games that have been ruined because the designers didn't consider what type of engagement was appropriate for their game
instead because they were so used to delivering excitement and fun they turned their game into another guns blazing action fest and completely failed to
deliver on any of the tension that's the cornerstone [of] the genre leaving the game with a curve that looks nothing like the one we
Showed so yeah, that's basically how pacing works simple enough
But what a lot of designers tend to not realize is that this graph doesn't just apply to the experience as a whole it applies
To every moment when James is designing a game he splits it into Roughly three segments the ARc the scene and the action
the ARc represents the piece as a whole as we just discussed you want the overall game to follow this sort of engagement curve just
for an example
Bioshock pulls this off fairly well at least it does if you just [imagine] the game ends after that scene would enter orion after that
It just kind of yeah anyway
so that's the ARc the scene is a
Subsection of the game what we would often call a level though it can take other forms depending on the type of game
You're playing each level or building or encounter and again should follow the exact same engagement pattern
dungeons and Oblivion specific firefights in Halo bosses from the early final fantasies
Even the greatest levels in your favorite Mario game nine times out of ten when you examine those scenes you'll find you can plot them
almost perfectly on the graph above
But this universal style of pacing extends one more layer down down to the action the action [is] a specific moment to [player] experience
It's frequently an aspect of the mechanics often something as simple as a single player input
You ever play a shooter where the guns feel just right go back and you'll notice
Firing the gun fits on this curve that bit of excitement as you begin to raise the gun
Slight lull as you bring it to your mark then bang the shot
Followed by a drift off as you bring the gun back to its resting [position] it all happens in less than a second
But that second is divided up along those lines [that] is the action if the action doesn't share that curve the game tends to feel
Stilted and just off somehow this is one of the hardest things to achieve as a designer
But it's also the most important because the action is what the player experiences the most directly think of this graph as a giant
Tessellation and everywhere you zoom in you'll find the same graph repeated in miniature the three sections
I've given the arcs the scene in the action are just the three that James finds to be the most useful in creating a game
but if you go looking yourself
You should be able to find this graph everywhere
You want to make a well paced game try to make sure it conforms to this graph and as broad and as granular a sense
As possible anyway, hopefully that was interesting, thanks for watching we'll see you next week
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