Pacing and intensity

Pacing is "the general order and rhythm of activities and events in a level" (The Level Design Book: Pacing). Intensity is how charged a given moment feels to the player; Pete Ellis, a level designer on Killzone: Mercenary and Killzone: Shadow Fall, describes pacing both as "the tempo and rhythm of the level" and as "the overall intensity of a situation or encounter" (World of Level Design: Level Design Pacing and Gameplay Beats, Part 2).

Pacing belongs to level design, but environment artists shape it too. The size of a room, the light at the end of a corridor and the calm of a safe area all change how fast and how tense a level feels. This page covers both sides; layout and flow and critical path cover the routes players take.

#Intensity and rest

Every source on pacing agrees on one point: intensity needs contrast. Ellis writes that "the troughs (or lulls) are as important as the peaks (or spikes)" and that "repetition equals boredom" (World of Level Design: Level Design Pacing and Gameplay Beats, Part 2). The Level Design Book warns that "players adjust to prolonged periods of high intensity" and recommends "occasional downtime as a contrast and palette cleanser, otherwise the player will simply go numb" (The Level Design Book: Pacing).

Valve's Michael Booth put the same idea into two lines on a slide about Left 4 Dead: "Constant, unchanging combat is fatiguing" and "Long periods of inactivity are boring" (Valve: The AI Systems of Left 4 Dead).

A rest area is the space where intensity drops on purpose: a safe room, a quiet street after a fight, a vista before the next encounter. It gives players time to recover, explore, read the story in the environment and prepare. The Level Design Book's term for this in its musical vocabulary is rest: "periods of weaker beats or silence" that "sensitize audience to accents again" (The Level Design Book: Pacing).

#Beats, set pieces and rhythm

The Level Design Book breaks a level into beats, each "a small self-contained chunk of a level", and borrows terms from music to describe how beats vary: pulse, accent, rest, motif and syncopation (The Level Design Book: Pacing). A set piece is "an especially elaborate beat with a unique concept or memorable activity"; set pieces are expensive and heavily scripted, and the book recommends planning at least one per project (The Level Design Book: Pacing). See choreography and scripted sequences.

A common beat pattern is teach, test, twist: introduce a mechanic safely, test it, then change it. The book recommends spacing the twist out rather than placing it straight after the test (The Level Design Book: Pacing). Portal's test chambers are its example of teach and test beats (The Level Design Book: Pacing).

#Combat and exploration rhythm

In action games, pacing is mostly the alternation between fighting and everything else: traversal, exploration, puzzles and story. Ellis points to Uncharted, where traversal, stealth, puzzle and combat mechanics are layered for variety (World of Level Design: Level Design Pacing and Gameplay Beats, Part 2).

Players also control pace in ways a film audience cannot. Ellis notes that a stealth approach takes longer and builds tension, while an all-out fight resolves quickly; a backup enemy wave can keep the tempo consistent across both (World of Level Design: Level Design Pacing and Gameplay Beats, Part 2).

In multiplayer and open-world games, The Level Design Book notes that pacing comes more from layout, flow and metrics than from authored events (The Level Design Book: Pacing). Travel time between objectives, and how often routes cross, sets the rhythm. Its open-world example is Philippe Bergeron's GDC 2016 talk on mission design for Assassin's Creed (The Level Design Book: Pacing).

Combat designers also pace inside a single encounter. In his talk on God of War Ragnarök, Rob Meyer discusses early encounter planning, which The Level Design Book cites in its pacing chapter (The Level Design Book: Pacing; YouTube: Combat Design of 'God of War: Ragnarök' - Rob…). id Software's GDC 2018 talk describes DOOM's "push forward combat", built by removing health regeneration, reloading and cover so that players keep moving and take what they need from enemies (Game Developer: Video: The combat design of DOOM).

#How level layout supports pacing

Layout sets the pace before any enemy is placed. Steve Lee, a level designer on Dishonored 2, lists eight common layout problems; several are pacing problems (80 Level: 8 Common Problems With Level Layouts…):

• Too big: large spaces "can force the player to sprint all the time". Lee suggests "leaning towards smaller spaces".
• Too open: "Super open layouts mean no corners to turn around, to reveal new things".
• Too empty: players spend "a lot of their time just running through your level"; make spaces "rich and dense, rather than empty and sparse".
• Too flat: verticality "can bring new layers of contrast and drama".
• Too similar: "You never want your level to feel like the same thing over and over again." Lee calls contrast "a really important, fundamental aspect of good level design" and asks that a level have "a beginning, a middle, and an end".

In practice this gives a set of spatial tools. Tight corridors slow players and build tension; wide arenas release it into combat. Corners and doors control reveals (see sightlines and vistas). A climb to a high point before a fight gives players a moment of prospect to plan. Ellis's Killzone example shows the same thing at encounter scale: arena size, cover and flanking routes set the difficulty (World of Level Design: Level Design Pacing and Gameplay Beats, Part 2).

#How art and lighting support pacing

The research on studio practice is thin here, but it is consistent. In Karlsson, Brusk and Engström's study of level design at a game studio, a level designer described the job as setting pacing: "when should the game move fast, when should it slow down?" (Karlsson et al. 2023). The sound designer helped "with tension design, already in white boxing", and a lighting artist noted that lighting provides "mood, affordances and to guide the player" (Karlsson et al. 2023).

The same lighting artist also said lighting is currently "one of the last things that are added", and proposed an earlier phase for preliminary lighting and key compositional elements (Karlsson et al. 2023). For pacing, this matters: a rest area reads as safe partly because of its light and colour, and that should be tested in the blockout, not discovered at the end.

Art supports pacing in a few concrete ways:

• Value and colour. Calm areas can use softer contrast and warmer colour; tense areas darker values and sharper contrast. See value, colour scripts and motivated lighting.
• Density of detail. Dense set dressing and art passes invites players to slow down and look; sparse, clean spaces read as places to move through. Too much detail everywhere causes art fatigue.
• Landmarks and vistas placed at the start of rest beats give players something to look at and a goal for the next section. See landmarks and skyboxes and background vistas.
• Signalling safety. A recognisable visual language for safe rooms (a light colour, a prop) tells players they can rest.

#How to make a pacing plan

1. List the beats. Build or sketch encounters, puzzles and moments separately; The Level Design Book calls this a "pile of beats" approach, from which you keep the best and arrange them (The Level Design Book: Pacing).
2. Order them on the critical path. Pacing assumes "that we can influence, predict, and constrain" what players do (The Level Design Book: Pacing), so start from the critical path.
3. Draw the intensity curve. Give each beat a rough score and plot it. Check for contrast: every peak should have a trough near it (World of Level Design: Level Design Pacing and Gameplay Beats, Part 2).
4. Place rest areas and set pieces. Put at least one set piece, usually near the end, and a rest after every major peak (The Level Design Book: Pacing).
5. Translate into layout. Size spaces, control reveals and add verticality to match the curve (80 Level: 8 Common Problems With Level Layouts…).
6. Brief art and lighting early. Mark rest areas and tense sections so lighting and sound can support them during white boxing (Karlsson et al. 2023).
7. Playtest and redraw. Replace your guessed scores with what testers felt (The Level Design Book: Pacing).

The Level Design Book shows several real planning documents: a pacing chart from the "Designing Journey" talk (GDC 2013), thatgamecompany's Journey spreadsheet, Naughty Dog's The Last of Us planning board (shown at the V&A's Videogames exhibition, 2018), Dana Nightingale's flowchart for a Dishonored boss, and Valve's intensity graph for the White Forest Inn section of Half-Life 2: Episode Two (GDC China 2014) (The Level Design Book: Pacing). Open the chapter to see them.

#Video tutorials

#Examples in shipped games

#Further reading and watching

Related pages: layout and flow, critical path, sightlines and vistas, playtesting spaces, choreography and scripted sequences, environmental storytelling.