So… you’re controlling a pinball in third person, bouncing around and you can rapidly change direction or speed with spinning, powersliding, dashing – how is this not barf simulator 8000? Let’s talk about the camera.
Camera Design Pillar
A very important topic for us has always been the camera. Most third person games have it as a common enemy, it’s a lot of work to get right. The camera can also influence a player's wellbeing, some people are more easily jarred by camera movement than others, but there are games that can be nauseating. Because our game is so frantic, we took extra care to develop the camera system until we stopped hearing or noticing complaints of discomfort.
We felt it was incredibly important that you didn’t need to control the camera. We designed a smart system that would react to most situations and give you the necessary overview; however, if needed you can take back control from the automated system at any time.
While covering all the exact details is a much too extensive topic, in essence our camera system checks a for a range of elements: your distance from the ground, speed, input, what you hit, your turn rate, and your proximity to objects amongst things.
Default & Bumper Camera
The default camera follows the player as they move with a slight delay and spring – making it feel more dynamic. Additionally, a bumper camera state becomes active for a split second when you hit a bumper, it ensures that multiple consecutive hits don’t actually make your brain feel that you’re just gone trough a pinball machine… Without this, we noticed it wasn’t very comfortable to look at!
Air Camera
To keep combat and platforming options in mind, the camera adjusts when you go high/vertical in Kabounce. The primary necessity at this point is to give players more overview, therefore the camera zooms out and slightly pitches downwards. This happens very gradually, and isn’t that noticeable until you compare rolling on the ground to being in the air.
Camera Control
If needed, players can change the camera orientation at any point – this also helps tremendously with targeting your abilities.
Player Targeting Camera
Sometimes you just want to focus on the movement, but still focus a target, for this purpose we have a ‘Player Targeting Camera’ selecting a player closest in view; however, you can cycle through targets or disable it at any time.
Feedback
We try to make sure all our camera feedback is complimentary and subtle - but it is a fantastic tool to give feedback to players, whether it is camera shakes, field of view changes on speed, particles or a blur. All this feedback can of course be disabled from the settings menu.
Special Cases
Some cases are special, and no smart system really felt good enough for it. For these specific cases we added a custom camera to take over whenever the situation arises. For example, when going through half pipes or finishing a challenge.
Thanks for reading! Share your thoughts in the comment section below. We’ll be back next weekend with more Kabounce features!
-Tim
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http://discord.gg/Kabounce
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