Paper: Geheeb, J., Dyrda, D., and Geheeb, S. (2024). PaceMaker: A Practical Tool for Pacing Video Games. IEEE Conference on Games 2024.

Abstract: Designing pacing for video games presents a unique set of challenges. Due to their interactivity, non-linearity, and storytelling 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 above challenges. 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 intensity and gameplay category diagrams. 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 demonstrate the expressiveness of the toolkit and support the need for such a tool.