How to Create Tension in Games.

hey guys this Jonah's making video games with you man today I want to talk with you about tension in video games this is actually based on one of your comments and couldn't find the comment anymore unfortunately think about the lead tension is a massive factor in video games so let's talk about it and excuse my game over Snover as a case study and one of my recent versions it was absolutely lacking tension do you want 100% tension all the time no of course not you want attention to vary you want to have some high tension moments and you want to have some low tension moments if you have only low tension moments then your game super boring this is currently the case with over Slover because you can pause the game as often as you want and then on the other hand if you have high tension all of the time 100% of the time that can be really exhausting as well so kind of need to contrast those two components one really interesting question is how do you create tension and I haven't really thought about that all that much if you have any ideas leave your thoughts down below in the

comments I'm really interested in hearing your opinion I think everything that builds an expectation creates tension so for example if you fire a shot and it doesn't fire immediately but it needs some time to charge like that can create some out short tension curve because while the shot is charging is the oh I wonder if it will hit what will happen when the shot is fired buildups like this can create tension that's number one number two is uncertainty kept right if you don't know what's going to happen if everything super predictable tension goes down if you don't know what's gonna happen tensions probably gonna rise and then the third factor that comes into my mind is obviously difficulty so if you're really struggling to get through if you don't know if you can make it the tension rises as well but only if you think it's still possible if you think it's impossible then it's more probably more frustration than tension so those are the three factors that come to my mind if you have any additional ideas on

how to create tension yeah please leave them in the comments now let's use always Nova as an example how could we create more tension in over Sonoma a better tension curve so it doesn't feel so boring at the moment it has only one of those three components that is difficulty and some levels are kind of difficult so what we could do to fix that is firstly changing the pacing a little bit not allowing the player to pause every time because every time you pause tension drops you have some time to think you have some time to relax and I think a good way to do this is just don't allow the player to pause the game infinitely or not infinitely but as often as they want I think it's pretty cool that when you pause you have a down time you have as much time to think as you want so I don't want to add a timer to the pause factor or anything like that but I want to limit the use of the pause function so let's just say you can use the pause five to three times in every level once you've used it three

times you cannot use it anymore firstly that adds a little bit of strategy to the game when you want to use the pause and secondly it creates a nice tension curve because every time you're playing you're in real-time mode and you have to react quickly to everything that's happening that's basically a high tension moment and then every time you pass the game that's some time you have to relax that's a lot of tension moment and this way I think we contrast high tension and low tension moments quite nicely obviously I want to write rice tension over time by making more and more difficult than something that also helps rise the tension is incentive because the longer you play the more you feel like oh no I hope I don't die no I hope I don't die no I make it this far I can't die no no please now love instant death it's called permanent permanent death is probably a good way to create some tension so maybe that's another reason to try to change my game to a roguelike system I'll definitely try the randomly

generated levels that are not longer I think that might feel kind of cool yeah one of the factors was also unpredictability at the moment over summers pretty predictable you see the entire map so there are different methods we could create some unpredictability that keeps the player on the sauce maybe spawning enemies on different positions just having random events asteroids that fly through the playing field stuff like that random bosses power-ups whatever just random stuff that makes it up a little bit without hopefully without making it unfair hope that Rises the tension why it's tensions of apartment firstly it makes more entertaining to play and secondly which seems more important it makes it way more entertaining to watch and watch ability nowadays is such a big deal if your game has good watch ability and a lot of youtubers play it and a lot of streamers play it and their viewers enjoy watching it your games gonna do a lot better is one of the most important features you need to have for watch ability there's more to it

obviously attention is a big one tension and relief the contrast actually what do you think what creates tension in video games how do you play tension in video games which games do you think do this really well in my opinion pop G is probably a good example it has a really good balance between tension and relief while other games do you know that we would jump at that very curious very opinion because I can always learn so much from your comments you're pretty smart people so let me know thank you very much for watching have an amazing day make the road of playing around and see you in the next one [Music]