Level Up!: The Guide to Great Video Game Design

Chapter 6. THE THREE CS, PART 2—CAMERA

Do you hear that crashing sound? That is the sound of a video game controller being thrown through a 50" 1080p HDTV plasma panel with a 600Hz subfield drive. And why was this fine piece of technology utterly pulverized? Because your game has a really bad camera.

Did you know that over 1 billion TVs are destroyed a year because of really bad game cameras^[69]? Nothing will cause a player to stop playing your game faster than a poor camera. This is why it is so important to get it right.

GET IT RIGHT: CAMERA VIEWS

Choosing the right camera for your game is not only very important for determining how to program the camera, but it also impacts how you design your game, map your controls, and create your artwork. It's pretty common for a game to have more than one style of camera, but you should stick with one "main" camera style for the majority of your gameplay and only use other camera views for specific gameplay situations.

Static camera. A static camera does not move position and stays fixed onto a single screen, location, and image. The earliest video games used static cameras because (a) they hadn't invented the scrolling camera yet (duh!), (b) it allowed the player to keep their eyes on several game elements at once and, in the case of early 3-D ...