 Poor Luigi. While Mario gets to travel the universe, possessing a dinosaur and relaxing in his swimming trunks, his younger brother is yet again forced to endure a nightmarish haunted house, filled with existential terror. Oh well. At least he's got Luigi to keep him company this time. Yet while ghostbusting definitely doesn't make Luigi feel good, there's nothing horrific about the working conditions that made his latest supernatural misadventure. Next level games, the developers behind Luigi's Mansion 3, pride themselves on having something that's depressingly rare within the modern games industry. A healthy work-life balance. This is the story of how a small team of Canadian developers got handed the reins to a forgotten Nintendo franchise, and how they managed to turn it into one of the most exciting Switch releases of 2019. Long before Luigi's Mansion 3, or even before Luigi's Mansion Dark Moon, there was a little game called Sega Soccer Slam. This is not a traditional sports game. While the basic premise of football is there, kick the ball, get it in the goal, players on the field are allowed to punch and hit each other to gain an advantage. While not the biggest deal in the history of gaming, Sega Soccer Slam won a cult following, including, clearly, some fans at Nintendo. The company decided to reach out to the developers of the game, Black Box, to ask if they'd like to make a Mario-themed spiritual successor to their original work. There was just one problem. Less than one month after Black Box had released Sega Soccer Slam, the company had been purchased by EA. Indeed, faced with the prospect of working for the infamous gaming monolith, many of the team that actually had worked on Sega Soccer Slam had jumped ship. So it was that Nintendo instead reached out to next level games, where many former Black Box employees had made themselves a new home. Next level had already enjoyed success working with a few different publishers, but they quickly found they really enjoyed teaming up with Nintendo. The resulting game, Mario Strikers, was the beginning of a beautiful friendship. Next came a second Strikers game, followed by a punch-out remake, before the team were granted a special video conference with Nintendo's higher-ups. Nobody at next level knew what the meeting was really meant to be about. Executive Officer Kensuke Itonabe started a drumroll of sorts before announcing, you're going to make Luigi's Mansion, too! Bryce Holliday, who served as the game's director, was so surprised that he couldn't even respond. This new project involved next level working with a slightly different team within Nintendo, and that meant greater scrutiny from Shigeru Miyamoto, who served as a producer on the game. While not heavily involved with the project, Shigeru described his role as being like a shepherd. He didn't tell the team what to do, but he did tell them what not to do if he felt like they were getting off track. Kensuke served as the liaison between Nintendo and next level, and he would meet with Shigeru every two weeks to discuss the game. He would lay out all of the work the team had been doing, and how things were shaping up. Then Shigeru would tell Kensuke about what he'd been watching on television recently. Kensuke was confused. At first he thought this was an attempt at breaking the ice, as he and his team were a little nervous. Instead, he realised that Shigeru was trying to passively teach them about the importance of narrative structure within the game. As part of development, Shigeru even flew to visit next level in Vancouver, Canada. Everyone was on their best behaviour, ditching their usual office attire of shorts and casual clothes for fancy suits to try and make a good impression. Shigeru was mostly impressed by what he saw, but whenever he was presented with anything, he kept asking, is this really fun? At his insistence, the team scrapped all of their planned boss fights, because apparently they didn't feel Luigi's mansion enough. Next level's finished game. Luigi's mansion, Dark Moon, won the hearts of players. It was inevitable that the company would begin eventually to work on Luigi's mansion 3. By this point, next level was working exclusively with Nintendo. They felt that this relationship simply fitted their preferred work style. They could trust Nintendo to be professional, and it meant producing games of a high calibre that sold well. If there's one company that next level tries to avoid emulating, it's EA. Where EA offers its employees free food and a gym and massages, next level provides its employees with none of those perks. According to next level founder Jason Carr, these perks are often used as a trap. Studios will say, here's some free food and more pop, stay here forever, eat the magical fruit. Instead, next level provides something far more important to its employees, a work-life balance. Developers aren't expected to put in long hours day after day. While the occasional long night is inevitable, crunch periods are avoided wherever possible so that employees can spend more time with their families. Says Jason, the big thing for a lot of us, especially with guys getting older and having families, we thought we could build an environment where we could build games and not kill guys. We realised that there's a whole life outside of making video games. Other employees within the company agree with this philosophy. As it is very clear from the studio's anonymous glass door reviews, it's rare to see anyone in the games industry describe their workplace as a healthy working environment. There's no arguing with the results. At the time of making this video, Luigi's Mansion 3 is enjoying an overwhelmingly popular review score on Metacritic, proving that treating employees with respect, working professionally, and doing your best to have fun, can help to make an enjoyable game. Perhaps the moral of this story is best summed up with Shigeru Miyamoto's unofficial motto for Next Level's Luigi's Mansion games. When he visited Next Level's office, Shigeru made a wise statement, make something better today than you made yesterday. It's okay if you don't create your magnum opus straight away. Life is about learning, developing, and making slow improvements. Next Level succeeds as an indie studio primarily because it knows the value of patience, of taking the right amount of time to achieve a goal, and of not pushing too far ahead in too short a time. Have patience with yourself. Don't worry about being perfect, simply focus on being better today than you were yesterday, and you'll be satisfied with your achievements.