Welcome to another Blightmare Dev Blog! Chris has spent some time talking about lighting, now I'll talk a bit about the camera we use for Blightmare.
To render the game, we need to tell the engine where the camera is located, and how big the field of view is that the camera can see. By default, we use a camera that fairly closely tracks the player's movement, so that Blissa remains mostly in the center of the frame. This gives the player the most visibility around the player, so they can easily see where they want to go.
There are times, however, when we want to focus the player's attention on certain aspects of the game. One such example is moving through a narrow part of the level. If we simply left the camera at the same zoom level, the screen would be filled with a bunch of uninteresting solid walls. So instead, we can zoom the camera in a bit, giving the player a better, more focused view on Blissa and her surroundings, while also giving a somewhat more claustrophobic feel to the enclosed area.
Another example is a place where we may have some items that we want to draw to the player's attention, like a platform or collectible. In those cases we can adjust the camera so that it slightly pans towards these points of interest, as we call them, to hint to the player that these points are important for some reason.
Of course there's also the classic "boss" camera, where we can fix the camera to a specific "arena" where a boss fight can take place. This gives the player a view of the entire battle arena all at once, without distracting camera movements taking away from the action of the boss fight.
These are just some of the different camera modes we implemented so far, and below is a quick video which shows these off in a simple test level.
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