50 Game Camera Mistakes

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In this GDC 2014 talk, John Nesky, the dynamic camera designer for thatgamecompany's award-winning PSN title Journey, takes attendees on a tour of all the poor camera choices that he and other game developers have made, and most importantly, how to fix them.
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50 Game Camera Mistakes:
1: Using a dynamic camera when another approach would work.
2: Designing levels and camera behaviors that don't match.
3: Using global coordinates or quaternions to persist camera state.
4: Using a default camera distance that's likely to break line-of-sight.
5: Allowing obstacles to break line-of-sight from the side.
6: Pushing the camera away from an obstacle while the player is trying to swing the camera towards it.
7: Letting the player push the camera inside an obstacle.
8: Letting independent forces compete to push the camera.
9: Excessively moving the camera to prevent unimportant items from breaking line-of-sight.
10: Letting the camera intersect narrow columns.
11: Interpreting a hill as a wall to be avoided.
12: Swinging the camera sideways when occluders come from behind.
13: Letting the camera's near-clipping-plane intersect the avatar.
14: Using the same camera distance for all angles.
15: Using the same field-of-view for worm's eye angles and standard angles.
16: Shifting pitch, distance, and field-of-view independently.
17: Not cutting when the avatar passes through opaque objects.
18: Letting cuts remap directional controls.
19: Breaking the player's sense of direction.
20: Violating the 180 degree rule.
21: Focusing only on the avatar.
22: Relying on players to control the camera all the time.
23: Leaving the camera yaw alone while the player is running.
24: Making it hard to judge distances,
25: Looking straight ahead as the avatar approaches a cliff.
26. Keeping the camera level when the avatar is running on a slope.
27. Misusing the "Rule of thirds".
28. Using the same logic for ground and air motion.
29. Relying entirely on procedural camera behaviors.
30. Letting players make themselves lost and confused.
31. Rotating excessively to look at nearby targets.
32. Translating to look at distance targets.
33. Letting the avatar's own body occlude targets ahead.
34. Giving the player control over the camera, and then taking it away.
35. Immediately applying a camera hint after the player finished turning the camera to look at something.
36. Not letting experts explore.
37. Not providing inverted controls.
38. Responding to accidental controller input.
39. Using linear sensitivity.
40. Letting the camera pivot drift too far.
41. Using a too small field-of-view.
42. Rapidly shifting field-of-view.
43. Excessively shaking the camera.
44. Bouncing the camera with the avatar's walk cycle.
45. Translating or rotating up and down when the avatar jumps.
46. Rapidly transitioning to a new camera position.
47. Maintaining pitch speed until hitting the pitch limit.
48. Developing for the Oculus Rift as the primary camera method.
49. Testing with a narrow demographic.
50. Writing a general "constraint solver" that optimizes for the camera.

imbw
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It's funny he says "We only notice cameras when they're bad" but I literally remember moments of Journey's camera where I was like "Look how it zooms behind the player when they go into a small space!" and "Oh my gosh it zoomed out to show me so much of the environment this is so pretty."

So good.

leseanpayne
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This guy: makes a presentation giving game developers tips on how to approach 3D game design.

Me, who studies psychology, at 3:10 A.M. on a tuesday: interesting.

enzoc-xo
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Rewatching this again, just got to number 23. It seems too many people have taken this advice - it’s one of the most annoying camera features! I understand that it has a reason, but I actually like looking around while I’m running places, and many cameras can’t just go “oh, this guy’s holding the camera, let’s stop moving it” they just force it behind my character and I have to hold it in place. Which sucks and is often incredibly jerky (see the previous number about preventing jerky camera).

Two games that I play a lot, ffxiv and the Witcher iii, both have this feature. It’s drastically worse in the Witcher. In xiv, if you hold the camera consistently, even as it tries to reset itself, it will hold steady and be a smooth camera to watch, and even as it does trail behind, it still doesn’t force an angle on you. In the Witcher, the camera constantly bounces if you try this. It’s a massive shame, cause I’d really love to look at the sunset as I’m galloping over some hills, instead of just the ground in front of me. The ground is a pile of dirt. Please let me look at your gorgeous game.

FirelighttheKing
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The quality of education available online these days is through the roof

DanielSternCode
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49:00 FOV related motion sickness in first person perspective games, is dependant on how much of your actual vision is taken up by the screen, hence why console games where the TV is usually further than a monitor often go below 90° but PC games where the screen takes up more of your field of view can go above 140°.

uoodSJW
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The best camera is the one the player doesn't notice... brilliant talk on something that's so easy to get wrong.

glizzdawiz
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Regarding LOS: some games just show a transparent/dithered character if they're blocked by an object, so you could argue this isn't super-important.

Lordgenome
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I remember being mind blown as a child when I realised the characters in my Harry Potter game always were in the middle of the screen.

I tried so hard to get them away from the middle.

rkrokberg
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I agree with some of these and really disagree with others. Just as a player of games, I feel like the player should be 90% in control of the camera. There's been a few times in third-person games where I've really wanted to look closely at a terrain detail or get close to something, but the automatic camera says "no" and so I can't.

I actually thought Ocarina of Time's camera was fine, not even remotely comparable to SM64's. I first played it as an adult, so no nostalgia.

gassnake
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the number of people here that are saying 'i prefer having 100% control of my camera' are either A) only thinking about certain genres where what he is saying is less applicable (e.g. first person games) or B) have no idea how much the games where they THINK they have full control actually involves carefully crafted work to stop them from screwing up the camera.

xandermacleod
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The question at the end about a "master setting" for attempting to eliminate simulation sickness has a pretty simple answer; Just put individual options underneath one master option. That way you could turn "Simulation Sickness Reduction" on, and then turn back on any option that you think you can deal with.

theolaa
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I really like how this talk is structured. He walks you through it layer above layer of complexity that should go into consideration while designing a camera in a game with similar mechanics.

RealRushinRussian
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Also, this has kind of highlighted some things I always knew were wrong with classic games but could never define. Things I felt were somehow off, were failings in the camera dynamics.

BatteryExhausted
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Frist of all, this video is extremely insightful and I actually like the simple presentation style. but just funny that I feel Journey is one of the most frustrating games I have ever tried in terms of camera control. I have to fight the camera constantly.

zxlonginus
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A master class on 3rd person game camera design.

mortenbrodersen
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# 9 is the # 1 reason why Minecraft's third-person camera absolutely reeks.

And I watched this whole video, even though it was an hour. :D

BologneyT
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This man would later go on to design a music program that’d change the life of many people :) Thank you Mr. Nesky

okayxairen
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There needs to be an FPS/Keyboard+Mouse edition of this, although it might be a bit shorter.
Things that come to my mind are:
- Never touch the player's camera angles: Unlike #22 suggests, K+M players are perfectly capable of rubbing their belly and patting their head at the same time. Imagine you walk on the streets while looking to the side at some show windows, and there's someone walking behind you who constantly grabs you head and slowly turns it into walking direction or some point-of-non-interest.
- Don't overdo fancy shader effects: Chromatic abberation is a pest: In the real world, you don't notice with your eyes, only through cheap or distorting lenses of a camera, binoculars etc., likewise overemphasizing fog, rain, blur, bloom and hdr to a "show off"-level looks cool the first few minutes but tends to be pretty distracting or annoying once it wears off.
- Have a user-configurable FOV setting! It's 2020, and there's still games who don't have it. If you port a console game to PC, remember that PC-gamers sitting much closer to their screens. Fixed Vertical-FOV is not a solution, and if you need to restrict a player's vision then you're doing it wrong.
- Have an option to invert Y-axis.

Radonatos
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I think the Sonic games make all of these mistakes

Teflora