One of the most common problems that we’re seeing in many action games today is how to make them fun for a long time. A majority of the action games on the market can have a tendency to become very repetitive or boring after only a few hours of game play. This problem usually is the fault of the game design.

There are many different kinds of action games. Some games like Devil May Cry or Buffy: the Vampire Slayer, could be classified as just a pure action game, while a game like Halo or Medal of Honor would be considered a first person shooter. Games like Tomb Raider and Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver 2 would be considered an action-adventure game, while a game like Diablo II or Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance would be considered an Action-RPG. Another form of action game are the platform games like Jak and Daxter, Crash Bandicoot and Rayman 2. Another type of action game are the beat-em-ups, like Dynasty Warriors and Bruce Lee: Quest of the Dragon. Fighting games like DOA3 and Tekken also can be considered a type of action game, even though their rules are slightly different. You can also get hybrid games like Oddworld: Munch’s Oddysee, which has many different elements in it and is hard to classify. Many action games also are predominantly focused on one kind of game play, but have elements of other kinds of play. As you can see, there are many different kinds of action games, but a majority of them can suffer from the same problems.

Every game starts with an idea. Every game usually has a hook. In Soul Reaver, you could go to another similar plane of existence, in Medal of Honor you are reliving a historical event, in Munch’s Oddysee you can possess and talk to characters (amongst other things), in Dynasty Warriors you can fight in huge epic battles and kill thousands of people and in the Mark of Kri you can fight several enemies at once in new ways. The hook is the thing which sets the game apart from the competition. It might revolve around some new innovative game play idea, or it might revolve around a new story, visuals or other aspect of the game which hasn’t been done in the same way before.

The problem with a hook is that many designers assume that all they need is a hook. They often feel that the hook alone is enough. I’ve seen a ton of game designs which took one simple idea and tried to make an entire 10-15 hour game out of it. Some of this is symptomatic of our heritage. A lot of where our action game design has evolved from is from arcade games, which have a very different design philosophy. The other part of our heritage was early consoles, which had small cartridges and simple games due to many different limitations. Because of this, I think we often still think in this very limited manner when it comes to our game ideas.

For a game to be great and rewarding for a long period of time there is a lot that must come together. A game with overall high production values throughout the game will be much better accepted than a game which is strong in some areas, but weak in others. Therefore, the most important thing you can do is to just make a great game. It will be pointless to try and keep the game from getting repetitive if the overall game sucks. Having a bad camera, bad controls, horrible graphics, bad framerate or other very noticeable problems will keep any game from reaching its full potential. People can forgive weak stories, bad music and other flaws, as long as the rest of the game is great.

            Keeping a game rewarding for a long period of time is more than just adding some replay incentives or ability. If the game isn’t extremely rewarding the first time around, then most people won’t bother to play it again. Most people also rarely finish a game, so adding lots of replay ability also isn’t seen or used by most people. If push comes to shove, just making a great game is much better than having a good and highly re-playable game. Keeping your game from being repetitive and adding replayabilty however are two different things, which are often lumped together. You need to make sure that the game is first and foremost not repetitive and then if you toss in some replayability it’s icing on the cake.

There are two main types of games when it comes to their ease of use. There is simple and there is complex. There are a lot of advantages to making a game that is simple. Simple does not mean simplistic however. A simplistic game might be something like an old Atari game remake or Tetris. A simple game will help the player pick it up and figure it out quickly, it is intuitive, it’s easy to play, doesn’t require a ton of time to play and can be enjoyed by a wide range of people. Devil May Cry is a good example of a fairly simple action game. Whereas a game that requires you to read a manual, go through a long tutorial or is constantly making you figure out new things can be considered a complex game. A lot of games have some complexity in them. What a lot of games are missing however is their understanding of what deep game play is.

A deep game doesn’t have to be complex. Deep game play relies on the use of rules. Rules in games allow people to know what they are supposed to do in a game. These rules are often based on real world rules or laws, like Physics. In a game like Mario Sunshine you can fall from very high and not hurt yourself, whereas in a game like Tomb Raider you know that if the fall looks too high, then you probably can’t survive it. The same rules can apply to weapons. A person playing Medal of Honor expects all of the weapons to act realistically and can predict their behavior, whereas in a game like Halo where there is science fiction weapons, the player must learn a new set of rules.

So how does knowing the rules of a game add to the minimization of repetitive game play? Very simple rules, or what we can also call game mechanics, can be combines together in order to form more complex or deeper game play rules or mechanics. Say for instance you have a gun, and you know that the gun shoots. You then figure out that barrels explode when shot, so it’s now logical that you can shoot at barrels next to enemies to kill them. However, later on, maybe there are some barrels next to a door which you can’t open, so you find that shooting the barrels will blow open the door. Later on in the game you might then get a force field, which protects you from explosions, and you find that if you shoot a barrel it will explode and send you flying, which if you have your force field on could actually propel you somewhere you were unable to reach before. While this is also a kind of puzzle, what you have done is take several rules which the player knows: guns shoot and barrels explode when shot and combined then together in some different ways to add some new twists to the game play. The player still has only had to learn two rules.

            The best way to understand these rules is to look at some games and see how they used their rules to either create a fun long term experience for the player or how they accidentally created some long term problems in their game which made the game unfulfilling for players. Every rule or mechanic in the game therefore has relationships with other rules, and it is these relationships which can add a tremendous amount of depth to your game, without adding a lot of additional complexity.

Emergent Game Play

There is another reason for establishing rules and relationships in games. Another kind of game play rules is called Emergent Behavior. Emergence is defined as something new: appearing, arising, occurring, or developing, especially for the first time. Therefore Emergent game play is basically when you have a global set of rules, but these rules can interact with each other in a wide variety of different ways. Grand Theft Auto 3 is the best example of a game which is primarily based around emergent game play. Some people also talk about emergent game play as building a sandbox. It follows that if you give the person (player) a bunch of tools (mechanics) and a big area to play in (the game) then they will figure out what they want to build (how they are going to play the game). Emergent game play has a lot of benefits, many challenges and some disadvantages. If you are trying to build a game using this kind of a system, you really have to take a close look at what you’re building and what kinds of rules are appropriate. Not every game can benefit from this type of rules structure.

Emergent play can be continually rewarding for the player and help minimize repetition because you’re able to do so many different things. In GTA3, you can follow the story and do exactly what you are told, or if you get bored or stuck you can go off on your own and just play in the world for awhile. GTA3 is successful because it lets you live in the world, steal cars, beat up people, break the law and get into all kinds of trouble yet it still allows you to follow a linear adventure. A good example of emergent game play in GTA3 can be found in a situation I encountered while playing. Some thugs jumped out of an alley and started mugging some old lady. I had the choice of helping them, helping the old lady, beating them off and then mugging her myself, or just ignoring the situation and walking on. While none of these solutions directly affected my game, I was still allowed to do anything I wanted, and the game would react accordingly.

Emergent game play has the disadvantage of not being able to easily tell a cohesive story. You can tell parts of stories, but it’s hard to tell a very well timed and precise story, since you don’t know where the player is going to go or what he is going to do. There may be some solution, but it’s not going to be an easy problem to solve.

You will probably start to find a lot of people talking about emergent game play and how to do it correctly. No matter what you do, trying to create a very open world, with lots of different possibilities is extremely challenging, and needs to be properly evaluated before you jump too far into it.

Problem Areas and Solutions in Repetition

            There are many different areas in games which can make them repetitive, tedious, frustrating, annoying and boring. Most of the problems listed in this section would seem to be obvious, but it’s surprising how often we still see them in games. A good usability tester or playtest should help you find and solve many of these problems before you ship your game. Just remember that you need to perform deep gameplay tests, to make sure that the game stays fun for everyone after the first few hours of play. I have seen many games pass the first hour or two of testing with flying colors, only to get a sharp dropoff after the first few hours of play.

Moves & Actions

Every character has a certain number of moves they can do. Sometimes all of the moves are given to the player and taught to them at the beginning of the game, while other games spread out the moves. Most first person shooters have little real moves, mostly forward, backwards, strafe, jump, duck type moves. Platform games typically have the most moves, with the player being able to often run, jump, attack in many different ways and more. Fighting games are almost nothing but a series of moves.

The problem with moves is complicated by the need to keep the game simple and easy to play and with the difficulty of actually controlling a character in 3D through a wide variety of moves. You can see this problem most easily in fighting games. When fighting games transitioned from 2D to 3D (and I’m talking about fighting games which allow for a full range of 3D movement, not just a 3D engine), there were a lot of problems. It was difficult enough to have to have players memorize 50-100 different moves and then try and fit them all onto a console controller, but when you added the need for 3D movement and often camera control, things got a lot trickier. Fighting games had an easier time transitioning though, since they take place in smaller arenas and had less complexity than action adventure games.

In an action adventure game, you have the possibility of needing a stupid number of different moves and abilities in the game. If you offer too few moves, like if you take away jumping, players can get very frustrated. If you offer too many moves, players can’t control their character very well, especially if they’re fighting a bad camera and other quirks in the controls.

Mario Sunshine is a good example of a game that has a ton of different moves on one hand, but they can only be used in a few ways. The problem however is that many of the moves are so difficult to pull off, that you end up having to repeat the same thing over and over, because you just can’t physically do the move, even though you know what you’re suppose to do. This is complicated by a very manual camera that hinders you as much as it helps you, so that pulling off the move can be a challenge since you can’t see what you’re doing. Devil May Cry also suffers from a similar problem occasionally because of it’s fixed cameras, which make it so that you occasionally can’t see what you’re doing, or you’re trying to attack enemies off camera or something, making it impossible to know which moves you need to pull off.

The best solution overall I’ve found however is to allow the player to either learn new moves, discover new moves, buy new moves or somehow learn new moves for at least the first half of the game. If you combine this with the introduction of new weapons, abilities and items throughout the game, you can provide the player with a lot of depth in the game.

Weapons & Abilities

            In the majority of action games these days, you’re bound to have some kind of a weapon. Whether it is a hand to hand weapon, shoots projectiles, launches missiles, fires a laser, drops a bomb or does any one of a million different possible attacks, the problem is often the same. Many games have weapons which are either too few, too limited in their use, too similar or too realistic to add a lot of depth to the game. If you’re making a realistic game like Medal of Honor, then you may not have too many choices in your selection of weapons and your job is going to be a lot harder. Weapons can also take the form of magic and other kinds of abilities.

            The extra abilities that a player has also have the same problem as the weapons and moves in the game. Whether you’re giving your character night vision goggles, a jet pack or some other gadget, they all have the same long term problem. No matter what the player uses, it will get old after awhile. If he has to continually keep solving the same puzzle, or doing the same thing in the same way with the same item, it will get old. The idea here is to limit repetition and add depth to the game.

Just adding more weapons, items and abilities isn’t always the right choice however. Some games like Diablo have a tremendous number of weapons and items that you can collect. Granted, this is part of the addiction of the game, but it also reaches a point where you stop caring. You find your favorite weapon and just stick with it, only occasionally getting enough money or lucky enough to get something really cool. So while variety is important, it is more important to introduce new things which add game play value and variety to the game, not just some different art and a few stat changes.

Every weapon and ability in a game should be carefully chosen, and add something new to it. What does it achieve to have a ton of different weapons, if they all function basically the same? Would the average player know the difference between an M-16 and an AK-47, or between a long sword and a bastard sword? If you have the choice on what kinds of weapons you are giving the player, it is therefore most useful if you think about adding classes of weapons. Each class of weapon should serve a different purpose. There are many possible types of weapons classes: Handguns might have plentiful ammo, but only be good at close range and are fairly weak, rifles shoot long range, bazookas and rocket launchers blow things up, grenades are thrown by hand, etc. So instead of giving the player 8 different weapons (or whatever the number is), you should think about giving the player classes of weapons throughout the game which will effect the way he plays the game. A sniper rifle is a good example of a different class of weapon, which can drastically alter the way someone could play a game.

Something else to consider when creating more interesting weapons, which don’t add a ton of complexity to the game is to add new weapon powerups or modifications. In Diablo II you can add gems to some weapons to make them more powerful, in other games you might be able to add a grenade launcher to the machine gun you’re using. The player early on might learn that there is two ways to attack with each weapon, and then when they get a modification and they choose to equip it, they don’t have to learn anything new.

You want to be careful though and make sure that the new weapon, item, ability or powerup you give the player is rewarding however. If the player doesn’t see an obvious improvement in the way they can fight, or get some other kind of reward, it can lead to a lack of satisfaction on the part of the player. In Devil May Cry each weapon and move you get is visually cooler and better than the last, and each new weapon you get can do different and flashier stuff. Getting new things in the game feel very rewarding and satisfying to the player, so that you’re driven to want to do better and buy the next thing.

Speech

            A small annoyance, which is sometimes easy to solve, is the repetitive audio in games. This can sometimes be the music, but is often the voice acting in the game. If your character says something after every kill they make, and you’re going to kill a ton of people, and what they say is always the same, people will often stop playing the game just because the audio has gotten too annoying. You need to make sure that you offer a variety of sounds in the game and that they don’t totally frustrate the player because they play too often.

Animation

            Looking at the same animation over and over again can get very boring as well. While this is a minor complaint by many people, you should think about ways to add lots of random animations in the game. In a fighting game, if you continually pressed high punch, and your character did the same move over and over, it would be bad. However, you as a designer know what the players intention is, so a high punch could translate into a jab, a hook, a spinning backfist, a chop, an elbow or any number of different moves and yet still accomplish the same results and not require any additional learning or thought from the player. In The Mark of Kri they did a wonderful job at giving your character over 20 different ways to stealth kill enemies, and not only is it cool to watch, but you never get bored watching it, since there is a lot of variety. Think about ways to add some variety into your animations to keep players interested.

Story

            A lot of action games have stories. Very few action games have good stories. Only a couple of games have anything close to a great story. If players are constantly being forced to watch long movies and are unable to skip through them, it can get very annoying. If this pattern continues throughout the game, players can get annoyed.

However, some games like Final Fantasy, Metal Gear Solid and The Bouncer are almost just large interactive movies. The difference is that the expectation for these games has been set so that players expect this and actually often look forward to it. So it’s not impossible to include a very long and deep story, but it has to be done well if the players are going to stay interested throughout the game. Games like Soul Reaver 2 have a tremendous amount of story, and while well done, it gets very tedious and is so complex and long that you tend to loose track of what is going on in the game and stop caring.

If you’re going to put a lot of story throughout your game, try to keep it’s length to a minimum and spread it out. It’s also critical that the player can bypass the story scenes and that nothing critical to the level or game is told in the story sequence that would keep the player from progressing in the game if they miss the information or skip the cutscenes.

Boring Levels

            Levels are boring for a lot of different reasons. It’s very hard to make levels which are well balanced, fun, challenging and interesting.

No Originality

            Levels which seem to be the same time and time again, either in look or layout will get very repetitive. It’s good to make sure that the objectives, goals, look, feel and game play of each level is as distinct as possible, especially if you’re reusing art or levels. You need to make sure that players want to keep going from one level to the next.

Repetition

It’s also possible for levels to become very repetitive. Mario Sunshine drives me crazy. You have to play through each level in many different ways, but often do the same kinds of tasks from one level to the next. While the levels have some interest in them, they also make you do the same thing over and over and over and over and …. Well you get the point. This is also compounded by the fact that you might be climbing up the side of a hill for a long time, and miss the final jump and then have to repeat it again and again. Some people like repetitive play, but it drives some of us mad.

Levels can also be repetitive if you’re fighting the same thing, in the same way for too long. You need to remember that it’s important to pace your levels and this will help ensure that they don’t get too repetitive. We fell into this trap in Munch’s Oddysee, where at times you needed to move something with a crane, which was fine, but you actually had to move 25 of them according to the story. It was very boring after five, but there was nothing we could do about it in the end. This kind of repetition has to be carefully controlled and monitored.

Dead Space

Another problem that many games have is large amounts of empty or dead space. This is really common in games where you have to travel through the same area many times. Some games simply leave the areas open, while other games respawn the same enemies at the same locations. This can be seen in games like Soul Reaver 2. While this is often unavoidable, you need to keep in mind that simply running through a level for 5 minutes isn’t fun, especially for the third or forth time.

Try to minimize dead space in your games. While a game can’t be one solid battle, you need to be aware of large areas which have nothing to do in them, or force you to do the same thing over and over again. Try to avoid having the same enemies just reappear over and over in the game, in the same places, in order to make it less obvious that the player is going through the same area. If the player has to go through the same area twice, think about adding a script that triggers a whole new set of people or enemies once the player accomplishes a goal, but before he has to go back through the area. This will keep the players at least thinking that the world responded to them. If you killed a bunch of people in one area (and if you have enough memory to keep their dead bodies around), maybe you could do something like have another group of soldiers there, along with some doctors, running through some kind of a script which makes it look like they are trying to figure out what happened. This might even become a gameplay device, since you may want to then hide bodies or make sure everyone is dead before you move on. Otherwise you may have to deal with the consequences. You could even do something like, if they find someone still  alive, that person tells the new group that you attacked them and they’re looking for you, but if you kill everyone, they may be looking for someone and questioning people, but they don’t know it’s you and you can actually get past them. If you hid the bodies of the dead, the group may just be moving through the area and not stopped, and you might be able to bypass them, sneak around them, hide from them or just kill them. You can see how a simple mechanic like being able to hide the bodies in an area could add a ton of different game play possibilities. The same action of say dragging a body, could also be used to drag other things or move things in the game. Or, maybe you could pickup branches and cover the bodies, but picking up those same branches and placing them over a hole could create a pitfall trap.

Having dead space in a game, and having new areas to explore are different things. First of all, you must know your audience and what they’re going to want. Someone who’s expecting a fast paced action game may not want to do lots of exploring. Exploration can be fun however as long as it is kept interesting. This can be done by providing new things to look at, enemies to fight and other stuff to do while you explore. Most importantly, exploration should be rewarded with some kind of rewards, whether it is items or something else. In strategy games, if you do lots of exploration, you can often find random stuff worth money, special items, you discover where the enemy is hiding, where piles of resources are at, and gain other benefits. This keeps exploration interesting on each level. Exploration early in strategy games also fills dead time when you’re waiting to build your base and army, so it fills a secondary need.

Movement

How you move about in a level is related to the dead space issue above.

Games like Dynasty Warriors, have a lot of problems with running around a level for a long time looking for the person you need to fight. You also have the problem when you run low on health, since you’re given health randomly by enemies after you defeat them, or you can find it in sparsely placed boxes. You can’t afford to fight people when your health is low, so you have to go look for it, which can take forever, especially when you’re avoiding a fight. Other games can suffer from a similar problem when you have to obtain health or healing from a far away place. Diablo 2 and Neverwinter Nights solved this by giving you a teleport spell, which allows you to return and heal whenever. While this may seem too easy, there is a cost, but it keeps the game moving forward with only a short pause to get healed before returning to battle or exploration.

Enemy Introductions

            Something else which gets very old in games is moving through a level and just having a bunch of static enemies that come to life and charge at you when you get close. Not only does a bunch of static or simply animated enemies visually look bad, but fighting them over and over gets boring very quickly. Likewise a bunch of enemies that just keep teleporting in or appearing randomly also get old. Fighter Force did a great job at having enemies enter the level in a wide variety of ways. Why can’t you have the player enter an are and then have enemies come at you from different places. If you’re walking down a street, and you want the player to fight a dozen enemies, they all don’t need to be standing there looking stupid. Maybe you could have a lookout that blows an alarm if you get close, or a few guys standing around a fire warming their hands who jump you first. Other enemies could then stream out of a door, a van could pull up and guys could jump out of it, guys could rappel down from a helicopter, jump in off the roofs, come up through a sewer cover, break through a window and jump out of it, or just open a door and come out it at you. Constantly introducing new enemies in new ways will keep the player guessing and on his toes.

Also, think about ways to use these entry or exit points as an enemy spawner. This point may continue to generate X# of enemies unless it is stopped or blocked. Maybe you could blowup a car and have it land against the wall, blocking the door, or use your flamethrower on a manhole cover to melt it shut. Players can then even more be able to use the skills they have and the few rules they know to do different things which actually affect the game, how it plays and how difficult it is. However you choose to do it, a little attention to detail in this area will keep the players much more interested in the game as it goes on.

Enemy Variety

Having a wide enough variety of enemies is a problem that most games face. It is still very difficult to create good enemy characters. There are a lot of gating factors in design, art and programming which stop you from creating a lot of enemies in the game. Some games create variations on enemies, which are alright, but the game needs to have more than the same enemy with a different weapon and a different outfit on. A lack of enemy variety may also occur in games which are trying to be historically accurate and only want the correct types of enemies in the game.

So, if you only have a limited number of enemies, there are some important things you should do. First of all, you need to make sure that a variety of enemies are delivered throughout the game, with new enemies still appearing at least half way to three quarters of the way through the game.

Bad or stupid AI

So what makes for good enemies that keep the game from getting repetitive? First of all you should try and make the enemies fit the game. They need to look, act and be as authentic to the game as possible – this goes for non-historical games as well. If the enemies are interesting, the player will enjoy fighting against them. This means that we have to learn how to script out custom AI behaviors and events better. Look at the kind of response games like Halflife got. Halflife didn’t have the best enemies ever, but it sure had some of the most interesting.

Making smart and somewhat realistic characters can really help propel your game forward. Players are always moaning about how dumb the enemies are in the game. We need to make better, smarter enemies that seem more realistic. This doesn’t mean that the enemies need to be more challenging or tougher to kill, be able to aim better or any of that. They need to be more interesting.

A good example of where AI hasn’t gone very far in action games, but is starting to show up in Strategy games, is in the use of formations and tactics. If you look at games like Dynasty Warriors 3 or the Mark of Kri, where you fight a lot of enemies at once, you will see that there is little to no coordination between enemies. In fact, you can often kill a guy right next to another guy and the other enemy will just keep standing there looking clueless. This kind of “stupid” behavior has the biggest criticism with gamers and needs to end.

Any kind of soldier you are fighting against would be trained to fight and know how to work as a team. Soldiers don’t often work alone. When was the last time you saw a group of 5 enemies really working well together, covering each other, fighting side by side? Metal Gear Solid 2 has some good use of this, but it is especially more noticeable in games where melee weapons, not guns are used primarily. Granted it can be tough for you as an individual soldier to fight against a well armed and disciplined group of guys working together, but there are ways to compensate. You don’t want to introduce impossible situations for the player early on, but this is where the rules come in. Instead of relying on AI which is intelligent, a lot of this behavior can be scripted and gives the player the illusion of intelligence. 

New AI and enemy tactics and behaviors can be slowly introduced throughout the game. The player may start off fighting only a few guys at a time and then slowly fight more and more enemies which gradually get smarter and smarter. This doesn’t mean harder, but just think more interesting. For instance, groups of soldiers may get together and fight in a group, with shield guys in the front, blocking you, a commander with a sword and an archer in the rear. The player then has the choice of how to fight the group, which might include trying to take out the archer first, the commander or dispatching of the shield guys. If the player takes out the archer however, the shield guys may pull their swords and attack, but if he can take out the commander the others will flee. These simple choices would not only look cool, but be interesting to the player. They can also subtly change with the types of units which are in the mix, but not require that the player really learn any new rules, but adapt the ones he already knows how to use.

Later on in the game, the AI could also change to make things more interesting for the player. Imagine that same group of 4 guys, but now you take out the commander and two of the guys go to flee, but the third guy hollers and keeps them together, taking command, making you realize that he was a corporal, not a private and therefore his rules changed slightly and made the player adapt. This would keep the player on his toes and more observant on whom he was fighting.

 Some of the changes in AI could also come from adaptive learning or pattern recognition. While you don’t need an intelligent AI to do this, it is very simple to track how many kills you have made and maybe categorize them. Imagine that you’ve killed 50 Orcs in the game, so now you’re known as the great Orc killer. If you encounter a few Orc’s in the game, they will flee from your might. This is fun for awhile, until you realize that now they’re coming back and bringing help in the way of reinforcements. The player will feel that the AI is adapting or learning, when it’s really just changing. This can also be used by enemies when you fight them, which can consist of the ability to detect when you’re using the same move over and over, and then provide a block to the move and force the player to adapt and change his patterns. Set play patterns are what makes the game boring. Rune: the Viking Warlord was criticized for being winnable with the use of only one button and a single move used throughout the entire game. People need reasons to do new things, and it starts with the use of better AI.

Wrapping it up

            As you can see, there are a lot of issues revolving around how to make games fun. You've seen that repetitive games come in many shapes and sizes. If there is one thing that makes a game repetitive, it’s our own lack of ability to see that a simple single idea, no matter how cool it is, doesn't always make for an exciting game in the long run.

I haven’t talked about all of the issues on how to make games less repetitive, but hopefully I’ve opened your eyes up to the seriousness of the problem we’re facing as an industry and an art. I can’t stress to you enough how often I see this problem occurring still in games being made today, and that if we expect to make the next hit title, we’re going to need to stop looking at other games as what the acceptable bar is, but look back into ourselves to first recognize that there is a problem and then come up with some easy solutions on how to solve them.

Check back soon for more articles!