Hey guys,
I t has been a while and sorry about that, I sadly broke my habit of blogging my work.
Anyway straight to business, I have been working on Chest Quest and decided that I wanted to take one of the levels up to Beta and use it as the bench mark for all my other levels. Yet something with the game still wasn’t right, testing was still coming back mainly positive but still it didn’t feel right, which was a common comment. After re-thinking things and speaking to people at work and friends I realised I hadn’t nailed down two of the three C’s!
(Brief overview of the three C’s in case you don’t know what they are. The 3 C’s are Camera, Character and Controls. These should be one of the first things that are mainly nailed down in the early stages of development, as they will just be tweaked later on. For more information visit sites like Gamasutra, develop and so on.)
I had completed the characters and taken them to final with the knight and dragon but as for the speed and jump distance these were still up in there and neither was the camera. So I started tweaking these values moving the level around to fit these new parameters. I had been talking to Simon Cooper (Lead Technical Level Designer at Ubisoft Reflections) and Andy Willians (Lead Game Designer at CCP) about game feel, how to a game should feel, the respond time, etc. So I kept messing around till I finally felt that the controls were correct. After this I then had it tested and the feedback was much better people perefered the challenge of the new speed and wanted to replay more often.
The next thing was Camera, I had messed around with it very briefly but needed to really give a lot of thought and attention as it is very important. I watched a few videos on cinematography and if you are looking for videos on this subject the check out ‘Every Frame A Painting’ (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCjFqcJQXGZ6T6sxyFB-5i6A ). I know camera’s in film are different to ours in games but I still feel that we are not doing enough with our cameras, I think the new Tomb Raider franchise uses them well so check out both examples.
This was my first camera space:
– You can see on the left there is a TON of dead space which the player doesn’t need to see as the player only constantly moves to the right. This give the player the illusion that they may be able to go to the left when they can not.
– The character is in the centre of the screen which I don’t think they should as the framing is wrong for this genre of game I making.
– Very little lines of attraction leading the players eyes to the right side of the screen to focus on what is coming.
My Second attempt:
– It has the player on the left so less dead space so players eyes focus more on the right side of the screen
– Zoomed too far out, the player looks to small (which is fine as I want to look down on the player and feel weak as you are not the strongest thing in the dungeon). This far out does not create much of a connection between player and character.
Final Camera:
I really like this camera as we have learn’t from the previous two,
– More focual lines which lead the players eyes to the right
– Zoomed closer to create a more intimate feel with the character and player
– Angled slightly down on the player so they don’t feel too small but also not looking up to feel strong.
Hope you guys have learnt a few things from my 3C’s. If you have any comments or examples of 3 C’s done well then please leave a comment or tweet me @MaxPears
Thanks guys and lets continue