Camera controls

Devblog

September 12, 2020

Camera controls

I wanted the game camera to have the following features:

Follow the player character
Isometric look
Mouse wheel zoom
Mouse drag for looking around
Focus on character on level

For the scripting in the game I am using an amazing Unity addon called Adventure Creator. It has a pretty amazing built in camera controller, but it failed me on few features: Focusing on player character, mouse wheel zoom and dragging for looking around. Luckily programming these features was pretty easy.

Camera controls overview screen recording. (Video has audio.)

For the minimum and maximum zoom ranges I went big. I wanted to allow the player to come down really tight and look at the artwork up-close. I also wanted the player to get a really wide view of the level. More than making the usability better, I feel that generous camera zoom allows the player to enjoy the scenery more.

The game camera view could have been anything, but I was really really inspired by this painting my brother Antti did years and years ago and I have been thinking of the game in ”isometric thoughts” ever since.
Picture © Antti Kemppainen

Ultimately I did not use a real orthographic camera, but went with a perspective camera just placed really far away, The reasoning for this was simply to allow me to add in a depth of field or a fog effect later in the game. The technical price I would have paid for real orthographic rendering was too steep!

The camera feels right at the moment and thus I may not touch it again for a long time.

Post Scriptum

As you can see the character is a blocky mannequin, walks the stairs like a maniac and the boat railings are missing posts and everything is beige! This is normal at this stage of production. The art will be broken and look funny for a long time!