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Crystal Towers 2 XL Progress update 2
Jun. 26th, 2015 11:18 amThere was another big issue that a lot of Crystal Towers 2 players raised - either directly asking me about it or just when talking about the game on forums and so on - and that was the absolutely godawful camera. As difficult as it might be to believe for those who were made nauseous by its intense swinging around, I spent a lot of time adjusting it for the original release. Even when working in just two dimensions, getting the camera right for a game is deceptively difficult - the simplest approach, just nailing the player to the centre of the screen feels unnatural, like you're moving the game around your player instead of the other way around, and you have to make the camera feel like it's natural while not hindering the player's sight of what's around them. There are a number of great articles around that go over this, such as this one.
The idea in the original game was to make the camera always give the player a view of where they were heading, speeding up when you turned around so that you could instantly see a large part of the level ahead of you again. The thing that I failed to notice was that you don't actually need this feature - progress in a platform game is usually in one direction, and the vast majority of times you'll turn around are for briefly going back to collect a pickup or dispatch an enemy, so you don't want a sudden swing of the camera to break your stride. Of course, there are also the two vertical levels to worry about, where you'll often change direction - Luminous Tower and Azure Cliffs - so the camera still needs to be aware of where the player is heading.
This time around, the camera still has its directional awareness but it adjusts much more slowly - it checks to see where the player is looking, and moves a little over up to a certain distance away from the player's position in the window to give them more of a view ahead, rather than suddenly trying to catch up to a point ahead of the player. The experience, I hope, is a much more comfortable one that doesn't lose the advantages of what I was trying to do in the first release.
Vertical scrolling is a different beast entirely - taking cues from games like Commander Keen 4 and Bio Menace, the camera generally stays where it is (within limits) so that when you jump up from a platform you don't suddenly scroll up and lose sight of it. It's only once you land on another platform that the game readjusts to the new height. Perhaps I'll make adjustments to this as well - but through all of this, having more screen size like I described in the last post is a vast help in itself.
The idea in the original game was to make the camera always give the player a view of where they were heading, speeding up when you turned around so that you could instantly see a large part of the level ahead of you again. The thing that I failed to notice was that you don't actually need this feature - progress in a platform game is usually in one direction, and the vast majority of times you'll turn around are for briefly going back to collect a pickup or dispatch an enemy, so you don't want a sudden swing of the camera to break your stride. Of course, there are also the two vertical levels to worry about, where you'll often change direction - Luminous Tower and Azure Cliffs - so the camera still needs to be aware of where the player is heading.
This time around, the camera still has its directional awareness but it adjusts much more slowly - it checks to see where the player is looking, and moves a little over up to a certain distance away from the player's position in the window to give them more of a view ahead, rather than suddenly trying to catch up to a point ahead of the player. The experience, I hope, is a much more comfortable one that doesn't lose the advantages of what I was trying to do in the first release.
Vertical scrolling is a different beast entirely - taking cues from games like Commander Keen 4 and Bio Menace, the camera generally stays where it is (within limits) so that when you jump up from a platform you don't suddenly scroll up and lose sight of it. It's only once you land on another platform that the game readjusts to the new height. Perhaps I'll make adjustments to this as well - but through all of this, having more screen size like I described in the last post is a vast help in itself.
