I feel my last blog was missing an important feature to their camera system and that was their weighted camera component. There is so much to talk about for this topic but I just want to talk about my experience with them so far. If you are interested in reading about this system which I highly recommend because it will really make your game stand out from the rest when you're developing your own, I will be posting a link to my references on the topic. So I was in the lab the other day working and a fourth year was coming up with the design for their game next to me. I got distracted from my work and looked at the video of Smite he was watching and heard him saying that he likes the camera style in the game and thinks it should be put into their game. As I was watching I mentioned to him that the static third person camera is very dry.
I noticed after learning about cameras in class that anything less than God of War cameras is not a very immerse camera system. Now I recognize that High Rez Studios, the company that made Smite, is about 60 staff and that God of War 3 had over 120 people work on it. I'm not looking to criticize Smite or their development team. I'm saying that the GOW team did an amazing job on the game's camera system and Smite is still in beta development of their game. You never know, they might secretly release crazy camera dynamics in the end.
Anyways, back to my story. I was telling the fourth year about the dynamic camera system I learned in my engines class. I explained to him that it is important to have more than just a static camera in your game. The use of the camera can really improve the gameplay as well as the feeling and mood for the setting of the scene. The easiest way it improves gameplay is how it brings the player in and keeps them immersed into their game mechanic.
The main thing I explained to them for how they could make their game with more dynamic cameras is how they did it in God of War. From what I learned in class, they made their camera follow the player like a normal third person camera and added features to it such as the dolly which I talked about last blog. Then they added weights to key elements in the scene like objectives and enemies. These weights would pull the cameras focus towards the weighted object. The main character would have the most weight which would focus the camera mostly towards him. Then the camera would move on the dolly to fit most of the weights in the scene.
So I looked at Smite's gameplay, and showed them that if the camera panned out and to the side where the most enemies were it would give the gameplay more cinematic feeling to it. The camera would then dynamically move as the player moved and the enemies started to die. I thought it would be a really good idea for their game if there were enemy players and enemy Ai since you can weight the enemy players a lot and with the panning cameras it would really engage the player to face the enemy player. This idea would work great for any arena style game such as League of Legends or Dota.
Then they said we want our game to have players be able to sneak up on each other, we don't want the camera to ruin this mechanic if the camera is based on a weight. Well I thought maybe take the camera system a step further and apply negative weights to certain objects in the scene that would push the camera away from the object. This would give the player's the mechanic of being able to sneak up on them. To counter this, the player being sneaked up on would have there camera pan up to more of a bird's eye view so they can see behind them more when standing still. As they ran more the camera would pan down and look towards where they were going leaving them more open for a sneak attack.Well this was my experience with dynamic cameras. Maybe later I will talk about how I noticed the dynamic cameras in the new Assassins Creed 4 Black Flag.
Oh yeah, and here are those links I was talking about.
The not so long but still long version = http://web.cs.wpi.edu/~rich/courses/imgd4000-d10/lectures/camera.pdf
The long version = http://twvideo01.ubm-us.net/o1/vault/gdc2011/slides/Phil_Wilkins_IteratingDynamicCamera.pdf
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