PaceMaker: A Practical Tool for Pacing Video Games

TL;DR

PaceMaker is a versatile toolkit designed to assist game designers in managing and visualizing pacing strategies through state diagrams, addressing the complex, iterative nature of game development.

Contribution

The paper introduces PaceMaker, a platform-independent tool that facilitates pacing design workflows with visualizations, filling a gap in existing game development tools.

Findings

Demonstrates the expressiveness of PaceMaker for pacing design.

Qualitative feedback supports the need for pacing tools in game development.

Initial research informs the toolkit's features.

Abstract

Designing pacing for video games presents a unique set of challenges. Due to their interactivity, non-linearity, and narrative nature, many aspects must be coordinated and considered simultaneously. In addition, games are often developed in an iterative workflow, making revisions to previous designs difficult and time-consuming. In this paper, we present PaceMaker, a toolkit designed to enable common design workflows for pacing while addressing the challenges above. We conducted initial research on pacing and then implemented our findings in a platform-independent application that allows the user to define simple state diagrams to deal with the possibility space of games. The user can select paths on the directed graph to visualize a node's data in diagrams dedicated to intensity and gameplay category. After implementation, we created a demonstration of the tool and conducted qualitative interviews. While the interviews raised some concerns about the efficiency of PaceMaker, the results https://info.arxiv.org/help/prep#commentsdemonstrate the expressiveness of the toolkit and support the need for such a tool.