Abstract

Designing pacing for video games presents a number of unique challenges. Due to their interactivity, non-linearity, and storytelling nature, many aspects have to be coordinated and considered simultaneously. Furthermore, games are often developed in an iterative workflow, making revisions of previous designs challenging and time-consuming. In this work, we present PaceMaker, a toolkit built to enable common design workflows for pacing while managing the challenges above. We conducted a systematic review about pacing and related workflows to guide the design process of the toolkit. Afterwards, we implemented our findings in a platform-independent toolkit, which allows the user to define nodes to represent gameplay beats and edges to represent non-linear temporal dependencies between beats on a directed graph. The user can select paths on the directed graph to visualize the data of the beats in various charts and settings, like intensity line charts or gameplay type timelines. Following the implementation, we created a demonstration of the tool, compared the pacing charts with a real-world example, and conducted qualitative interviews. While some concerns about PaceMaker's efficiency arose during the interviews, the results demonstrate the expressiveness of the toolkit, show that the output data is comparable to what designers use, and support the claim for the need for such a tool.

Results/Implementation/Project Description

Conclusion

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