5. LIMITATIONS AND FUTURE WORK
The usefulness of the visualization is highly dependent upon the chosen state distance metric.
This provides some flexibility because game designers can examine different aspects of a game by varying this metric.
However, poor metrics will not provide accurate visualizations, and some games are hard to design distance metrics for.
For example, in a first-person shooter, a player with a rocket launcher might have an advantage over a player with a pistol, but it is not clear exactly how far apart they are in the game's state space.
Another limitation of Playtracer is that the visualization tends to become cluttered as states and transitions increase.
In these cases, traditional methods and statistical tools may be more effective.
One area of future work is to make the visualization more manageable and robust by clustering similar states and paths and removing outliers.
A second area of future work is to evaluate when game designers would prefer the state projection approach and to classify the games for which it is the most effective.