Crystal Towers 2 XL Progress update 2

[davidn]

There was another big issue that a lot of Crystal Towers 2 players raised - either directly asking me about it or just when talking about the game on forums and so on - and that was the absolutely godawful camera. As difficult as it might be to believe for those who were made nauseous by its intense swinging around, I spent a lot of time adjusting

Comments

[kjorteo]

It's definitely a hard balance to be struck between the whiplash-inducing immediate tuarnaround versus wanting to see where you're going when you really do want to change direction! Two thoughts, I know nothing about camera design so these could both be terrible ideas but... they're wild guesses, anyway!

1) Making the resting position somewhat closer to center would alleviate the burden of just how far the camera has to travel when it's changing direction in the first place. I'm not saying keep the player character directly centered at all times, of course--you're right about that looking artificial, plus you'll generally need to see more of where you're going than of what's behind you anyway. But he could perhaps be at least a little closer than that! (Maybe

[xaq]

I would also consider trying out what Super Mario World did on the SNES and allow manual camera-panning.

In any case, this is definitely looking better and better all the time.

[davidn]

It's worth mentioning that the second GIF doesn't show the entire game screen, so you've got much more of a look-ahead distance than it appears there - you get 200 pixels, which is the same amount as you ever had in the original version! I'm definitely open to adjusting it if people feel it's still wrong, but I'm pretty confident that this gives a good balance between look-ahead and look-behind.