Underground exploration and Camera

One of the big world exploration features is when you go into a cave and start making your own way through it, literally. Nowadays its not so innovative to have digging in a survival game, but it doesn't mean it has to be just a carbon copy of what other games did.

We're not going to go down the rabbit hole of voxel-based games, instead the caves are going to be fully hand-made along with tile-based, destroyable sections, where players can find materials and other randomized hidden things.

To make it clear for players what is destructible and what isn't, walls are going to have slightly different colors, warmer tones for all the destroyable stuff.

The tile based approach to dungeon sections allows the destruction of the walls, but floors and ceilings are going to stay at the same place generally. A good example would be old timey games like Dungeon Keeper, or Mine Bombers, that did chewing your way through the soil similarly.

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However, while it's a cool gameplay idea, it created a big design challenge: 

Since players are literally going to find themselves inside simple flat mazes and corridors they made - it all looks bland, flat, boring, claustrophobic, almost like Windows95 3D Maze screensaver but with fancier walls.

This is all matter of perspective - equal distance to floor and ceiling, plus some boring repeating visuals due to it's grid-tile nature..

But what if the camera was positioned at the top, it would look more like a good old RPG, which also always used tiles as well, right? 

This is where I had an idea of making a completely different camera for the interiors, it would make it look better fast and require much less time to design, because there wouldn't be any ceilings to worry about.

But that wasn't a good idea, since it created so much complications and headaches on how to make the combat work for both exterior and interior modes and stay consistent... I gotta say that so much prototypes wend down the drain on this one, dam I don't feel proud about this one at all...

After that we've firmly decided that there has to be one camera and combat system for both, so there wouldn't be basically two game modes to keep track of depending on location.

I looked at Smite game just to research how they handled combat on a flat-plane without making it boring, so this idea came up - what if its similar to 3d view, but still with ceiling hidden, and camera pitch locked so it can't look up too much? Its 3d and still has less things to model

But in the end - it was also too limiting. It was restricting your shooting to a plane even for the outside world, which just wasn't in the spirit of this game at all... 

Even though the ground isn't flat in the overworld and the terrain still has various elevations, the aiming system would just depend on it and "slide" along the surface, preventing you from shooting where you want essentially.

We toyed with automatic targeting and aim assists, but meh. No freedom = no fun.

So throwing all those ideas out, We came back back to where we started, the "3D-Maze" effect for dungeons, harder to design interiors, but freedom for the overworld.

It just happened that Guild Wars 2 released an open beta of their new expansion, and I went in and gave it a try after a long long break. 

If you are familiar with relatively new (but well hidden) action-camera system they did for it - this is basically my preferred way of playing the game, I was reminded that it exists (here is a video of it if you don't know what I'm talking about: https://youtu.be/AHiwNmKwRPg ). 

And then it struck me - this is exactly what we needed! Nothing wrong with being inspired by other games, especially when it comes to comfortable user input and controls.

This is basically an elevated version of the third-person view that we already have. Character always stays at the bottom of the camera, no matter at what zoom level you are. It just becomes smaller relatively to the screen, allowing you to see into the distance, while still having an option to zoom in and look at your character freely.

Since the camera is positioned not just behind, but also above the character, it just flat out removed the 3d-maze effect inside the dungeons because now it looks from top to bottom while still being inside of the dungeon, giving a feel similar to the 2d idea, while providing all the freedom of 3d camera.

The only difference the level designers will have to keep track of is make ceilings higher so the camera would fit and not collide with anything there.

It also made it much more comfortable to use for the overworld at the same time.

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So that's it! You probably haven't thought much about camera and user input in games, but this is a very important part - it has a major factor in making it enjoyable to play. Camera is literally our window into the world of the game, it simply must be good.