Pacing Mechanics

I'm going to write a little about pacing mechanics, although to be honest I'll probably make a video on this topic once I've worked out the kinks.

Pacing mechanics are gameplay that exists only to keep the game flowing at the right rate, and with the right traction. In theory you could argue that all gameplay is like that, but pacing mechanics are specifically for that purpose rather than to be entertaining, challenging, thought-provoking, etc.

An example of this would be in an Animal Crossing game, where you can only harvest things once per real-world day. This gives the player a specific amount of that rewarding task each day: enough to call the player back (traction), but only a small amount, so they're encouraged to do other things once they're engaged (flow).

There are three basic kinds of pacing mechanic, as far as I can tell.

The physical play mechanic, like in the Animal Crossing games.

It lures people to log in each day, or on specific days, or in specific places. For example, Pokemon Go rewards players for going to new real-world locations, or physically meeting up with friends.

This is a bit different from the kinds of energy play you often see in mobile games. Rather than providing traction and flow, most energy mechanics simply let you play until you suddenly can't play any more... unless you pay money. The traction and flow elements may still exist, but they're weak, because they're not the point.

The structured play mechanic, where players are given specific, rewarding in-world tasks to be performed on an in-world schedule.

For example, watering the plants every morning in Stardew Valley, or having to return to town to recover mana in an RPG. These tasks give you specific things you are strongly pressured to do (traction), but also can only be done for a short while before pushing you to go do other things (flow). Typically, these mechanics adjust over the course of the game and to the preferences of the player - some players love visiting towns and talking to people, others just want to shop and get back out on the field.

Something like a hunger meter in a survival crafting game is not a structured play mechanic, despite appearances. The goal of a hunger mechanic is to push new players into growing food and engaging with a core construction loop, but the actual task (eating) is not a mechanic with any traction or flow. It's simply a mechanic to guide the player into engaging in the first place - more of a tutorial mechanic rather than a pacing mechanic.

This becomes extremely clear as you reach mid/late game and eating just becomes an annoyance rather than an opportunity.

The tiered play mechanic, where players can accomplish a certain amount with the setup they have now, and then need to find new resources.

For example, in Minecraft you can do only so much with materials in your starting biome. You are pushed to dig deeper, search further for newer resources. This contains a number of staggered resource tiers, culminating in things like creating a portal to Hell so you can mine it.

This is a very common mechanic, and can be seen in every crafting game.

However, there are a lot of other ways to do it. For example, in an RPG, you need to move onto the next town to get new equipment, new story. In Skyrim, you'll eventually need to either leave the woods for the towns or leave the towns for the woods, because you'll run out of interesting things to do.

The idea behind all these tiered mechanics is that the player chooses when to leave. Usually, it happens just before they consciously realize they're bored of the current options. Players build their cool wooden Minecraft mansions, and when they start to run out of steam they naturally consider going abroad for new materials, or digging down to find some redstone or something.

A counterexample would be a game where you have 1000 gold to spend, and then have to go earn more. This is, again, just a tutorial mechanic rather than a pacing mechanic. A pacing mechanic would be "no matter how much gold you earn, there are things which cannot be bought with gold."

How you earn gold could also be a pacing mechanic.

Also, it's worth noting that tiered play mechanics can easily go wrong if you give any hint that there are a certain number of things to accomplish. This is common in RPGs: sidequests are intended for players that enjoy faffing about and moving slowly. But they accidentally sidetrack a lot of players that don't particularly enjoy that, but see them as tasks to do rather than optional crap for more relaxed players.



Let's go into detail.

Now that you understand the intent of a pacing mechanic, what makes a pacing mechanic good, or bad?

A good example of bad pacing mechanics would be No Man's Sky, even after their most recent update. It's clear that the mechanics are built around the same concepts as things like Minecraft. There's tiered materials, unlockable research, different biomes, etc. Why does No Man's Sky only charm a few of its players?

It's because the traction and flow system isn't properly set up. It's got the same basic mechanics, but they're not engaged properly.

Their version of traction is to require the player to keep topping up their tools and engines and stuff. However, this is a stick rather than a carrot.

It doesn't pull the player in by offering them rewards if they do it, it punishes the player by grinding the game to a halt if they don't do it. It's got more in common with a cash shop energy system than a pacing mechanic, even though there's no cash shop!

The traction system of other games? Well, watering crops results in incremental progress towards harvesting crops. Also, it doesn't require you to wander across a new hellscape in search of water - water is right there, you just have to do the grunt work. Returning to town to restore your MP? That gives you dozens of opportunities to power up your characters, get new quests, and so on. Also, you can adjust your battle strategies to minimize the need to do it.

There is a hint of what it would be like with the right traction mechanic, since building your bases requires quite a lot of specific kinds of materials. It would be an opportunity for me to build a giant wooden castle, steadily exhaust everything I can do with wood, then begin building a metal underwater base or something. In this way we would get a nice, tiered setup.

In addition, the upgrades are not properly integrated into the pacing mechanic. In order to buy upgrades you need to wander the world looking for buried treasure, which magically turn into treasure points which your machines magically turn into new blueprints. This isn't necessarily bad, but it's not a good pacing mechanic. There's not much traction or flow involved, and it interferes with my ability to explore the nature of having a wooden castle. If I dig up more treasures, I should probably spend them on unlocking more advanced base equipment in the next base tier, rather than wasting them unlocking the ability to build a window.

If the traction side is flubbed, the flow side is just as bad.

I think the theory was that the limited inventory space would keep you from wanting to stockpile specific resources, meaning that you would be pushed into moving forward. That could have been a good flow, but it doesn't work in practice because the universe doesn't really support that kind of motion. If the game environment doesn't support your pacing mechanic, then your mechanic won't work.

There's some promise to the idea of compressing resources down into denser, more high-quality variations of themselves. This could theoretically produce a nice loop where you harvest a lot of a given planetary resource, spend some time condensing it into an easy-to-carry variant, and then move on once you have a complete stack of ultra-dense stuff.

I think a game could be built around that pacing mechanic really easily... but NMS is not that game. Instead, it features a smattering of annoying, slightly rare materials that take up way too much of your limited inventory space and can't be meaningfully compressed. Trying to hunt down rare materials would be fine in a game with different pacing mechanics, but these mechanics actually make that task extremely annoying.

This isn't to say NMS is "bad". It does hit the sweet spot for a fair number of people. It's simply that the pacing mechanics aren't really doing their job.



Conversely, there are games with spectacular interlocking pacing mechanics, and those are well worth studying.

Stardew Valley is probably the current king of this. With at least half a dozen interlocking, adaptive pacing mechanics, it appeals to a surprisingly broad player base.

Daily energy is the most basic mechanic. High-intensity tasks like harvesting, chopping wood, and adventuring can only be done sparingly, which pushes the player to then do low-intensity tasks such as exploring, charming the townsfolk, cooking, and so on. The low-intensity tasks show the player how to unlock more efficient high-efficiency tasks, which makes a nice circle.

Daily hours is another basic pacing mechanic. You can only get so much done in a day, even if you short circuit the energy mechanic with expensive foods. This pushes you to do at least some high-intensity tasks, rather than just doing a bajillion low-intensity tasks, to make the most of your daily energy.

Tending the farm (watering, milking, etc) is a structured play pacing mechanic. It gives you a mostly-reliable task to do, and each time you do it you get a little bit of gain - whether in the form of direct goods or moving towards a harvest.

Crop management (planting, harvesting) is another pacing mechanic, and allows you to determine how much farm tending you want to live with while also juggling your daily energy.

Tiered tools (sprinklers, better axes) is a tiered pacing mechanic that pushes you to do things besides simply farm, because they making farming more efficient.

Processing (jams, ores, etc) is another structured play mechanic where it takes time to refine things and you're rewarded for efficiently returning on schedule to set up the next batch. But, like all these mechanics, it's largely player-driven: players can simply invest in more hardware if they want to get all their refining done without needing to tend it too much... or they can slack off and only process a few things, because there's not that much of a need to minmax it.

All of these systems interlock, and are supported by the structure of the game's world. Each time the player engages with one, they are rewarded (traction), but only to a certain extent, then they are pushed to do other things (flow). It's an interlocking matrix of pacing mechanics, where the player can invest in a number of different ways to change the dynamics.

It's just a spreadsheet, sure. But the pacing mechanics make it a damn fun spreadsheet.

Plus there are some minigames if you need a change of pace.

...

Those are my thoughts on pacing mechanics.

What are yours?

Wondrous Random

One of the problems with generating content for games is that it always feels prosaic and dull.

So generative games are seeded with wondrous details. The generative content is used as endless filler.

Let's talk about wonder.

It's certainly possible to generate wondrous things. Here's a twitter bot that generates endlessly wondrous planets.

But these aren't suitable to put in video games. The biggest issue is the lack of interaction: a video game's strength is interactivity, right?

Let's consider sci fi, since I'm a sci fi nerd. So let's talk about a few wondrous moments, whether they're interactive, and whether these moments could be generative.

When I considered wondrous moments, I realized they are all either introducing us or bidding us farewell. They are transitions. They are exclamation points. They are a hello or a goodbye.

For example, a rocket launch is amazing. It's wondrous to launch a rocket.

But if we show every rocket launch in a game, the player will get truly bored no matter how pretty it is. See Mass Effect: Andromeda for details.

Instead, we would focus on the rocket launches that take place during notable transitions. When we are saying goodbye to a beloved planet and hello to the stars, that's when we put in a loving shot of the rocket launch. Even though the player has undoubtedly seen a million rocket launches in their life, this moment is wondrous because it comes at the right moment. Just when we're saying goodbye, just when we're saying hello.

Obviously, there are also things that are rarer. Ancient obelisks. Forgotten planets. Derelict space ships. Strange aliens. The sight of your ship being split in half while you're inside it.

These also have the most impact if they happen when the player is saying hello or goodbye. Timed poorly, these amazing things will feel as mundane as having to shut off your alarm and get up for work.

As an example of this, in Mass Effect you spend a lot of time discovering new planets. It's incredibly boring. Discovering new planets is boring! ... because it's part of your daily tedium.

On the other hand, in Stellaris you inevitably discover another alien star nation. This feels surprisingly powerful, because the game leads up to it with popups about how there's no intelligent life even though you're searching for it. Things are just starting to slow down for your star nation, you're ready for a change, and then BAM - a new civilization calls. And then another and another!

There's not much fanfare in terms of selling the illusion. A few lines of text before, one extra line of text afterwards. But because it happens at the right time it feels thrilling. Say hello to a new era!

Well, half the time the pacing is off. It's not a perfect game. But when it works, it works - even without the majesty of long edits and low camera angles.

Later on, discovering a new species feels dull and pedestrian. You're already in that era, and there's no transition happening, so it's dull and pedestrian.

So... let's discuss some techniques we can use to make this stuff shine.

Understanding the Phases of your Game
Rather than discussing how to generate wondrous things, the critical thing is when to generate them. By guiding the player through distinct chunks of game, you create moments where wondrous things fit, and even mediocre wonders will play well in those moments.

The difficulty is in making the chunks feel sharp and clear. For example, in Mass Effect you might go visit the Citadel and spend three hours doing side quests. This is a phase. But there's no "punch" to the beginning or ending of the phase. Mass Effect does play a little video of you pulling out of space dock, but it's perfunctory. It has to be, because the staging isn't heavy enough for the player to put up with more.

How can we build up these phase as things that feel real and heavy?

There are two factors here: the construction of the phase and the transition moment.

Constructing the Phase
The biggest things that add weight are events and characters tied to the specific phase, with a focus on them being left behind when the phase changes.

For example, if it's a visit to The Citadel, you can have the player solve various problems... but have the characters wait on the way to the docks to wave goodbye and say thank you. This doesn't interfere with the player - the player can just run right past - but it does make the player realize they're leaving a place that they've affected.

There are plenty of other, heavier ways. For example, the player knowing they'll never return makes those goodbyes more intense. The player knowing the place is about to sink into a fiery magma pit also punches things up.

Adding play on the exit is also valid: in order to get off-world, the players have to fight through the local thugs and decouple the dock lock-down locks. When considering where to put these kinds of fights, the answer is "before the wondrous thing" - so if our wondrous thing is the launch, then we want the fight to happen before launch, not in space.

If you're creating a linear game, this can all be added in manually. If we're talking about generating content, it's clear we have to generate these heavy elements. The wondrous launch isn't the thing we have to generate: we have to generate the thugs and the teary children waving goodbye and the battered old robots throwing flowers.

We have to generate the context. The meaning.

This is something people talk about a lot, but I think they generally discuss how to create long chains of content. Our focus is different: we don't need complex, evolving narratives. We need short, punchy narratives that fit within this phase of the game and have a clear "goodbye" state.

You Say Goodbye, I Say Hello
Transition moments can be on the "goodbye" side or the "hello" side, and there can be scenes between those sides.

For example, when we leave The Citadel we can linger on our ship going through the relay and let the weight of our passing slowly roll through us. Orrrrr we can show an exciting shot of us approaching a new planet, slamming aside the purple clouds as we burn down on a re-entry.

But we can't show both.

I mean, we do show both. But only one will count as wondrous. The other will count as just a long shot.

Which one do we focus on? Well, which phase is heavier? Is the phase part of a longer chain of similar phases?

For example, leaving The Citadel is usually not a huge deal, because it's a hub world and you visit it a lot. In general, goodbyes are going to be weak from places you're revisiting... unless it's the last time you'll ever visit them. The last goodbye from a hub world is extremely strong.

Similarly, if you are leaving a world exploration phase and immediately entering another world exploration phase, the goodbye is going to be weak and you'll want to play up the new elements with a strong hello.

In theory.

Either way, it's probably best to pad some time between the goodbye and the hello. In a video game, this usually consists of world map navigation, although that's less than ideal. Useful non-phase activities such as party chatter, inventory management, and so on are probably better.

Repeated Majesties
Whether you're generating them or seeding carefully-created content, you're going to have some kind of amazing thing in your universe. You'd like it to not get boring.

An example of this is the relays in Mass Effect. Ancient technology that lets the folks travel great distances without much effort! Amazing!

But in Mass Effect they quickly become so mundane you just want to skip any scene involving them.

Why? Because they are mundane. They are part of the ordinary play of the game. They are not at a start point or an end point. They do not say hello or goodbye. They just happen over the course of your day-to-day affairs.

That's fine, to an extent. Not every encounter with them has to feel magical. But we want the player to be aware that they're playing with something potent every day. So we should try to tie our transitions to them whenever we can. Rather than showing a rocket launch, we would show a relay launch.

They become a "staple wonder", used whenever we need a wonder but don't have any specific wonder in mind.

The issue is that you only have so much space for these. For example, our ship is, itself, a staple wonder. Loving shots of our ship are also a major repeated theme. But is there room for both the ship and the relay? It'd dilute the shots if you played up both the ship and the relay in the same scene: wonders need to be punchy.

There are plenty of times when the ship can be used and the relay can't... but are there any times when the relay can be used but the ship can't?

These are the questions I want writers and devs to ask themselves when they're designing their universe. Not "are relays cool/plot-important", but "when we show cool stuff with relays, are we getting in the way of showing other, more important cool stuff?"

Please note, generative elements can work here just fine. For example, the "deep monsters" in Dwarf Fortress could easily be re-used in different games rather than regenerated from scratch each time - until you defeat this one, you won't get a different one.

Epic Generation
OK, OK, what about actually generating epic, wondrous stuff?

Well, there's a few categories of epic stuff, and presumably they'd be generated with different systems.

For recurring touchstones such as "your awesome ship" or "the bloodthirst armies of Throckwoodle", those are likely to be specified by the dev, then slotted in as appropriate. As discussed, "generating" those is more like generating a reason for you to use them.

The idea of generating some amazing scenario is also appealing. How do you generate an amazing scenario?

Well, that's a book on its own, but in general you have to remember to make the "hello" connect to the play. The deeper the connection, the better.

In general: the hello needs to tell the player why they're here.

For example, let's say you roll the dice and come up with a pirate base on a mist-covered moon. The wonder is the mist-covered moon - it feels still and epic. But the players aren't here for a mist-covered moon. They're here to tangle with the pirates.

How do you set that up? Well, you can show a shot of the pirate base within the mist, or pirates on motorcycles in the mist, or whatever. You can have an event where the pirates burst out of the mist to capture or ground the players. There's a lot of options: a battered merchant ship half-lost in fog, for example.

These are not too hard to generate, because you can largely just use category matches. The fact that it's a foggy moon is not important to the algorithm: it's just considered "MASK category GRAVITY FIELD category", and so it would have the same set of options as if you were on a smokey volcanic planet, an acidic Venus, a snowy ice moon, even an artificial-gravity planetoid covered in silver clouds.

Besides making the hello introduce the play, it's also valuable to have the play reference the hello. For example, the pirates can explain that they set up base here because the mists are an excellent cover, or they can have tactics derived from the mists, or they can have problems and keep getting lost because of the mist, or maybe they have mutant winged wolves that the mist has created... again, these aspects don't have to make too much sense, as long as they're not actively nonsensical.

The other kind of wondrous event I tend to want to create are the action-packed transition scenes where things turn. For example, your ship takes direct laser fire from the megacannon and is ripped in half with you aboard, now you're staring over a spiraling debris field struggling to get to the megacannon before you run out of air. Or there's a chase in the jungle as speeder bikes race for safety. Or you have to trick the zorgblat to smash down the walls of the alien zoo so you can escape...

These moments are dangerously close to talking about "generative plots", so we'll leave them mostly in the background for now except for one important fact:

These are transition scenes.

This is a moment when you say goodbye to where you were and hello to someplace new.

And that's considerably more important than whether they are simulated correctly or whatever.

...

Anyway, them's my thoughts. Tell me what you think.