Moving On: Side Scrollers, Cameras & Player Experience

Indie game designer Itay Keren recently posted a fascinating in-depth essay on his Gamasutra blog based on a talk he gave all about side-scrolling platformers, how the "camera" or game view works in a few different types of platformers, and what that means for both game design and the player experience. In addition he creates a very useful glossary for platforming and side scrollers out of whole cloth! An excerpt:

Working on my game Mushroom 11, I was faced with many different design and technology challenges. I wasn’t expecting to find references to issues like dynamically changing shapes or vertex animation, but I was quite surprised that camera work, a subject with more than 30 years of history in games, was hardly discussed. I decided to start a journey through the history of 2D gaming, documenting their challenges, approaches and how the evolution of their solutions. Also, since there’s a lack of proper terminology for the many different solutions, I started gathering and categorizing them into groups, providing my own glossary, if only for my personal reference.

For example, here's a breakdown of how the arcade game Shinobi handles tracking the player's movements:

Maybe my favorite classic game, Shinobi, has some very high jumps between multiple platforms. The designers came up with a unique camera system: vertically, due to the many platforms the character jumps between, Shinobi uses a very wide vertical camera window. As always, the window pulls the camera with it immediately. The problem with a wide (or tall) window is that after a small jump, the character could be stuck at the top of the window with very little top-view, as we’ve seen in Rastan Saga. Shinobi simply continuously aligns the camera, slowly, to the Ninja, keeping the focus on the action and in most cases keeping rapid camera motion to the minimum.

Shinobi © 1987 Sega

position-snapping (vert.) -constantly reduce window drift by focusing the camera back on the player camera-window (vert.) position-locking (horiz.) static-forward-focus

He follows that up with a really neat look at how Super Mario World handles snapping focus to both the player AND the platform. As Itay shows:

One of the many features that Super Mario World introduced was platform-snapping. As with any camera-window, the camera would stay stationary until the character hits the edge. But since mario inevitably lands on a platform, as soon as he does, the camera would immediately snap to its position.

Super Mario World © 1990 Nintendo

region-based-anchors platform-snapping* - camera snaps to the player only as it lands on a platform camera-window* (vert.) * Where applicable dual-forward-focus* * Threshold triggered manual-control* (horiz.) * Controller provides extra panning

The entire post is a fascinating read. It explains many different gaming concepts in an easy to understand way, is thoroughly documented and has TONS of classic gaming nostalgia, too. GO read the whole thing!

Jump Up And Get Down: 5 Critical Moments in Platform Game History

Jeremy Parish has a long history of insightful writing and analysis of video games, especially action-platformers. His work as editor at USGamer.net's continues this tradition with a fascinating article examining five of what he calls "Critical Moments In Platform Game History". For example, here is an excerpt from that article talking about Pitfall! and what it brought to the genre:

Pitfall! feels admittedly primitive compared to latter-day platformers, with flip-screen scrolling and simple two-level world design, yet it marked an important moment not only for the genre but for the medium at large. It introduced the idea that fast-paced action games could take place in settings rather than simply exist as isolated scenarios. Pitfall!'s quest dropped players into a jungle maze, one whose simple visuals belied structural complexity (traveling underground took you along a different route than going overland) and required both twitch skill and mental discipline to master.

The entire article is a fascinating read and traces the crucial moments of the platform genre of video games, from Donkey Kong to the debt that Super Mario Brothers owes Pac-Land! Check it out!