Mapping  engaging gameplay, player attention and level pacing

Pacing maps are breakdowns of the player experience over time for a specific game segment - a mission , a level or just an in-game area.

They make for very versatile design and analysis tools to either design gameplay flow and environments from scratch, or breaking down existing games and levels to identify problems or patterns.

The core of a pacing map are the "grains" - cells on a spread sheet representing a fraction of gameplay time.  In the examples here a single grain represent either 60(top) or 30(bottom) seconds of gameplay.

The formatting and fill of the cells can then serve to visualize variety of information, a few examples being:

- Colors can represent the dominant type of player activity.
Red for combat,blue for exploration, purple for puzzles etc.
- Hue saturations can indicate intensity or prominence of activity, such as difficulty of combat encounters, complexity of puzzles.
- Symbols can designate events of note or moments intended to draw player attention. 

- Characters present and notable events.
- Color pallete of environments and light intensity.

The surrounding cells above or bellow can be "attached" to a grain and hold abbreviations or numerical information, such as  number NPCs at the time, resource distribution, unique assets or even emotional intensity a segment can be mapped.

For non-linear environments the grains indicate areas of certain size(sqr.m.) and thus the proper balancing of more open or sand-box areas can be ensured.  

In the process of play testing the pacing map serves to guide the team members until the desired flow is achieved.
 

References

Coulianos, F.  [2008] "Pacing And Gameplay Analysis In Theory And Practice"  at Gamasutra: http://tinyurl.com/n7b7w8g

Lemarchand, R [2012] "Attention,Not Immersion:Making your games better with psychology and playtesting"
 At GDC Vault : http://tinyurl.com/GDCAttention