Level pacing and guidance
Plans routes, learning moments and recovery around the character's real movement and camera. Checks that required abilities, checkpoints and readable landmarks support a playable rhythm.
game-level-pacing
Agents using this skill
When is it useful?
Use when a level's layout looks promising but players become lost, trapped or overwhelmed.
What does it help you do?
- Maps critical and optional routes against obtainable abilities and consumable keys.
- Balances learning, challenge and recovery using observed traversal time.
- Checks landmarks, checkpoints and recoverable falls without relying on one sensory cue.
Try asking this
Block out a level that teaches a dash before a timed escape. Introduce the move safely, offer an optional challenge and place a checkpoint before the escape. Test actual jump gaps and camera visibility; a missed jump should allow recovery, and the route must remain understandable without color cues alone.
Detailed documentation
Read the skill’s original instructions, examples and checks in their authored language.
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Level Pacing and Player Guidance
Read the core loop and derive level dimensions from actual character/camera metrics: speed, body size, jump, slope, reach and viewing constraints. Preserve those contracts while evaluating a blockout.
- Author the critical path, optional routes, rewards and gates as explicit connections. Check reachability in the order abilities/keys are obtainable; consumable gates require quantity-aware state.
- Plan beats with intended tension, learning, mastery, rest and surprise. Compare how long each beat takes in play rather than treating a room count as a duration.
- Introduce a mechanic with readable feedback, allow a low-pressure attempt, then vary the context before combining demands. Avoid assuming text instructions were understood.
- Guide with layout, landmarks, lighting, sound and affordances; coordinate visual/audio implementation without making a required route depend on one sensory channel.
- Check camera obstruction, navigation, recoverable falls, return paths and checkpoints at actual movement speeds. A pretty aerial layout is not proof that traversal works.
- Keep a playable blockout until the essential choices and metrics are supported. Record placement recipes and preserve authored prefab/scene references as content evolves.
Deliver a beat/path map, metrics, intended observations and edge cases. Verify by actual traversal or label the remaining play check explicitly.
Reference: the adapted upstream level-design skill; optional terrain/art tools are separate capabilities and are not assumed installed.
Included files 2
LICENSE.txtSKILL.md