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The Bourne Conspiracy Dev Diary 3 Feature
Jon Wilcox
30/05/2008
High Moon's Lead Designer talks exclusively to TVG about the importance of pace in the third of four developer diaries...
Having spent a week traveling through Europe in order to help with the environments of The Bourne Conspiracy, and mastered the techniques behind the cinematic shaky-cam, High Moon this week explains to TVG about the importance of pacing the gameplay.
Don't forget to check out this week's exclusive screenshot of Bourne in action either - this time, he's facing a rather menacing helicopter.
Over to you, Rory...
Rory McGuire, lead designer
Pacing blog
High Moon's first title was a little FPS called "Darkwatch", a game that for many of us proved to be one of the most action packed games we'd ever work on. In "Darkwatch" you start out as an outlaw in the Old West who is bitten by a vampire, and then spend the length of the game slaying relentless hordes of undead. Our fateful outlaw, Jericho, wasn't just killing his enemies. He was dismembering them limb from limb, blowing heads off, shredding bodies, trampling them from horseback and more. In many ways, high octane action at a constant pace was the hallmark of the game.
As we were developing "Darkwatch", we quickly learned how to deliver the action once the mechanics and the pieces were there. In one sense all we had to do was drop the player into an area with a bunch of enemies and weapons. Soon enough, the action level would be off the chart as the player used our robust environment physics, enemy ragdolls and location specific damage to blow things up and send heads flying through the air. But from that arose a dilemma for some of us on the design team, once best summarized by a particularly poignant quote from French novelist Antoine de Saint Exupéry, "A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away."
What the quote sums up is something we learned as we played and tested the game. If we held the action at "11" the entire time, it would just stop resonating with players as they became numb to the constant over the top experience. It would be like listening to really loud music holding the same rhythm, rather than using breaks and lows to give the real highs their value. To put what we learned into practice, we had to unlearn one traditional approach most game designers take when creating a level. In the past, what the design team at the studio would do was create a level by first blocking out the geometry layout. Our thinking would essentially go along the lines of, "The player roams down this alley, then goes into this building that is 20x40, then goes into this warehouse." That changed, as the most important first question for us became not one of space layout but instead, "What is the player's experience?"
The lessons learned from "Darkwatch" put the designers ahead out of the gate with "The Bourne Conspiracy". With Bourne, our attention quickly turned to pacing. We planned our levels not just around where they were set or what the player would do, but how the action within was going to be paced. This was expressed through "Pacing Charts" where we demonstrated the experience. We charted the experience as it progressed through the level and focused on when, not where, the player would hit pockets of action highs and lows. This was an important divergence from traditional design, and it helped align our goals at the earliest parts of the design phase.
As our Bourne game evolved, the concept of a well-paced out level began to influence the direction of the game. Initially the game we had in mind was much slower-paced, but as time went on our levels became more and more action packed. One defining goal became to recreate a true movie feel, one inspired by the classic action film treatment given to the Bourne films. Yet all along we preserved the notion of putting the player's experience first. The key to delivering this, we quickly realized, was not only setting higher bars for the big moments. It also meant making sure we were punctuating our highest moments with a "breather" immediately afterwards. By offering story beats, interesting vignettes, or other elements of the world that served as momentary breaks, a player would feel they were 'earned reprieves' from the frenetic pace of action.
Don't forget the final part in TVG's exclusive Robert Ludlum's The Bourne Conspiracy developer diaries next Friday; our hands on look at the upcoming title is also now available.
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