Pacing in Games



My groups current third year project titled Introspect is a boss rush game where the player quickly traverses an environment to fight a very powerful boss and relies heavily on movement mechanics. When starting out, tension is very little as the player exits the starting zone (Lab Area), then climbs as the player has to figure out the movement of our game. Once that has happened the player then finds themselves facing an overwhelmingly large structure inside of which rests the first boss they have to face. This all happens in the space of around 5 – 10 minutes depending on the skill level of the player. Once the fight has begun the tension rises dramatically as the boss is very difficult and the player must utilise all of the learnt mechanics to defeat it. There is a checkpoint before the boss so if the player dies in battle, they can simply respawn at the start of the boss arena and try again without having to traverse the environment again.

As in the graph above, the tension scale is quite dramatic, with a low and slow increase from the start to a dramatic increase when the first boss is encountered. I was in the ‘zone’ when fighting the boss and once I had mastered the mechanics traversing the environment and boss arena were simple and fun. Something we do have to watch out for is to not make the environments too empty or bland as that can also effect pacing and players ability to enter the ‘zone’.

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