Practical Game Design

Event intensity and player burndown

Grind-fueled totalizers and tight leaderboard showdowns might be your most effective event formats, but they come at a price…

Our communities operate with finite reserves of time, money, and stamina. Running the game at high intensity for too long can exhaust even the most dedicated players, making them feel like they cannot keep up, and are better off leaving the competition (or the game) altogether. We have to do our best to be respectful of the time and effort our players put in our games.

At Space Ape Games, we tend to rank event intensity on a scale from 1 to 5, where 1 is assigned to casual and relaxed individual events (in which participation is often seen as optional), and 5 represents group-based ...