At first I wasn’t quite sure on what to do as I wasn’t present for the tutorial for this assignment. I started to create a regular building at first but I was later told that was the completely wrong approach. This is what I came up with, its meant to be representation of old mining refineries. One structure that came to mind was the building in the level Rust in Modern Warfare 2 and the mechs in NieR Automata. I was also playing around with the scene setups of unreal.
At a time when gaming market was being filled with the newest first person action game, a game that managed to redefine the gaming development culture as we knew it snuck its way onto the PSN store in March of 2012; that game was Journey. Made by and indie company called thatgamecompany(2006), Journey is a 3rd person adventure game that surprised the whole entire gaming industry but stripping back the controls to a bare minimum with an unforgettable setting and environment. There are many more aspects that make up the games notoriety but there is one really important feature that is looked over vastly, the camera. Having a typical camera for this game would not do for Journey as this game relies on special moments of game play in combination of the amazing aesthetic.
Some of the main points they wanted keep was that fact that this game was to be as immersive as possible. Having a first person camera would be a good fix for this issue as that would be the most realistic camera to use. But this wouldn’t do as they wouldn’t be able to capture the cinematic beauty that they have in the game today. Some problems in today’s indie games show that there isn’t much to learn from in terms of camera design and games often end up messing the games camera. Journey solves this problem by having a dynamic camera that allows the player to see in all directions and moves around the screen in a fashion that represents real camera holding. The director of the games feel, John Netsky, says that the problems that he sees in games are that the camera breaks lines of sight when an obstacle comes in front of the player by the camera either going around the outside of the object or going around on the inside of the object bringing the camera to close the player[1]. This usually breaks in immersion within the game which would have been detrimental to Journey’s cinematic experience. The fix that the team came up with, is that the camera just goes around the object that it needs to pass by ray casting. In some cases of the game, the camera does go around small columns which doesn’t necessarily break the characters silhouette but actually adds to the gracefulness of the movement of the character as it slides into some spots. One of the more interesting scenes of the game involves the games camera to break from its 3rd person aspect. This involves the character you play in Journey sliding down a sand dune in some ruins as the camera shifts from the 3rd person element to a very cinematic and beautiful camera angle that displays the games interesting camera design. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7307qRmlMI |
World design theory (WDT)DevelopersThe goal of this blog is to relate current and past attempts at world design to further improve our understanding. Archives
October 2017
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