Level Up.pdf

130 LEVEL 6 The Three Cs, Part 2—Camera
Third Person Camera
Another good way to avoid turning your game into a puke - a - rama is to pull
the view back into the third person view. Now remember, this isn ’ t a
solve - all solution, but I have found that when the player has something to
focus on, the effects of DIMS seems to reduce. A third person camera also
lets the player get a better view of the world, the action, and what ’ s coming
up behind you. Watch out War! That skeleton ’ s got a sword!
Pulling the camera back behind the player offers many advantages over the
first person view. First off, you get a clear view of your character … ’ s butt 5 .
Well, that can be fixed by allowing the character to turn around and run
towards the camera. But then you have to make sure the camera can track
backwards with the player. Does that mean the controls become camera
relative or player relative? And how does the player restore the camera back
to its original position? Hmmm. This may be more complicated than I first
thought.
Getting a third person camera to work correctly may be the biggest
challenge a team has to face. While there are many things that can go
wrong with your camera, let ’ s try to work through them to get them right.
Camera movement. When I was in high school, I had an after- school job
of videotaping sporting events. As I concentrated on filming the game, I lost
track of everything else that was going on around me. As a result, I tended
to back into the coaches and trip over the gear lying on the sidelines, which
5 The story goes that Toby Gard, one of the designers of Tomb Raider (Eidos Interactive,
1996), made his lead character a woman because he didn ’ t want to spend the entire game ’ s
production staring at a guy ’ s ass.