Camera Devlog #3

Welcome back guys to another devlog. I'm finally going to discuss my implementation of my 'dynamic camera'. Before I go into detail though I'm just going to say that this has been the most difficult feature I've implemented and had to get my head around so far.

Initially I had difficulty deciding what camera I wanted, I couldn't even picture it In my own head. I wasn't sure if i wanted the camera to continuously follow the player, follow a rail or be completely static and give the player the whole picture (much like some levels in Super Meat Boy). I spent a lot of time thinking about it, play testing the game and tweaking my camera In Unity., unfortunately a lot of this time was wasted. After a lot of play testing I finally came up with what I have implemented so far.

I firstly drew it out on a piece of paper to really understand what I needed to program In Unity and to really visualise how it will look for the player. It sounds stupid, but I felt it was necessary due to the amount of time I had wasted and the frustration I was having before hand. The concept I came up with was that I always wanted the player to able to have a good view of what was coming ahead. This game is all about quick reactions, so it's unfair if the player can't see far enough ahead and the deaths will seem cheap.

Another conscious decision I made was that I wanted a 'dynamic camera', which would mean more work to begin with, but once implemented It would mean less work in the long run. You're probably wondering what I mean when I say dynamic, but essentially I wanted the camera to be smart enough to understand where it needs to be in certain situations or states in the game. Rather than hard coding, the use of a rail camera or using a static camera. 

To demonstrate what I implemented I will use a series of screen grabs and videos below.

Within Dream Drop I have a series of bools/states which determine which direction the player will be going next. When one of these bools is true the camera will move to the appropriate object.  So in the image below you can see I've highlighted 4 areas, these are the 4 different positions the camera can be. If the player is falling down it move to the bottom position if he were to change direction lets say left the camera will move to the left position. 

The video below demonstrates how it looks whilst you're playing, pay close attention to the camera.

This is how my camera is currently working, but I've still got more work to do on it because I'm not 100% happy with it. I'll probably make a update log about changes to the camera in the future. 

Thanks for reading and ill catch you in the next one!

Cheers!

Ed