/games/ - Games

Hi everyone, I’ve been working on a web game directly coded through JavaScript than relying on an engine to get anything to learn how to make games, so I can start getting back to making even better mods. In that time I learned a bit more about camera movement but what I found fascinating is how much of a role visibility plays into the accessibility and quality of gameplay in any title.

I’ve made complaints before about cluttered MMO UI design that makes it impossible for any newcomer or casual player understand wtf is happening if they’re seeing gameplay they’re not responsible for. I learned something from this and it’s also the role auras and camera placements play into this as well. Auras are often a bigger visual distraction to players more than a useful indicator over the status of a player if they’re overused. Take the resin buffs you’d get in the souls trilogy compared to the effects you’d get off an enchanted piece of gear in wow or Minecraft, the former effect tells you directly what to expect from the weapon you’re using while the ladder can quickly be confused with any other buff. The purpose of an Aura is to temporarily provide information to players about the state their avatar, tool or gear is in. If it’s constantly glowing it becomes a distraction more than an indicator because it fails to serve its temporary function and becomes a passive element of gameplay, one whose nature impairs player vision.

Another major way games can harm the players vision is through how they place their cameras. Most third person games place their cameras an offset away from the player character, however games focused primarily on combat like for honour and GOWR or large worlds like in WoW, rain world and la noire keep the camera centred and the reason is pretty smart. A shoulder offset is great for keeping gameplay cinematic and great for shooters since it provides space for the player to see any incoming targets, however a centred camera is much better in general for third person gameplay because it provides clear context to the player characters position relative to their surroundings at all time. This also allows for traversal through larger set pieces or even fights with large enemies in combat oriented games.

However it’s important for the sake of accessibility to keep cameras a maximum distance away from the player avatar at all times, and preferably not let the player have full control over the cameras displacement from their avatar. If it were, players could often be introduced to too much information that wasn’t intended by players to see(see RuneScape 2 with the draw distance extended) or completely irrelevant to a moment gameplay where such visibility would be a bigger drawback than a benefit(1v1 duels in wow is a great example since the cameras far enough from each player that it can occasionally be harder to see what your opponent is doing or get distracted by something irrelevant in the background). Having the cameras view be manually adjusted by the player makes the problem worse as now they’d have to simultaneously manually adjust the camera to serve their needs while trying to preform potential multitudes of other tasks.