
Scroll Back: The Theory and Practice of Cameras in Side-Scrollers - sp332
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1iNSQIyNpVGHeak6isbP6AHdHD50gs8MNXF1GCf08efg/pub
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dcre
This is so much more interesting than it should be. The GIFs must have been a
ton of work to put together. Fantastic.

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danneu

        > This is so much more interesting than it should be.
    

Is this a sibling expression to "I laughed harder at this than I should have"?
It's okay to find things funny and interesting, even superlatively so.

Like zombo.com says, the only limit is yourself.

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rkuykendall-com
They probably mean "This is so much more interesting than somebody would
expect based on a description."

If someone asked me "Do you want to watch a 52 minute talk on how they move
the window on side-scrollers?" I would say no. That doesn't sound like it
would even be worth talking about.

But it is, and I'm really psyched to watch this video.

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bbx
If you prefer, here's the 52 min video of the talk:
[http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1022243/Scroll-Back-The-
Theory-...](http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1022243/Scroll-Back-The-Theory-and)

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0942v8653
Great article. (Unfortunately I had to finish it in w3m because the gifs were
so huge.)

I remember doing lerp and projected-focus before I knew what they were called.
It definitely has more depth than it seems, and as I was reading I was
surprised at how much thought went into some of these decisions, especially
Super Mario World where I had never noticed it. I suppose it's like UX design
-- you only notice it if it's bad.

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listic
How does w3m compare to lynx?

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0942v8653
I use it mainly because it defaults to http; I never took the time to actually
compare the two.

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listic
What's good in defaulting to http?

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0942v8653
I suppose it wasn't as bad as I thought. If you type

    
    
        lynx news.ycombinator.com
    

it tries to "intelligently" choose the news:// protocol, which I have never
used and probably never will. With w3m, it just goes to http no matter what
the subdomain is.

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babuskov
I wish every game developer read this. Some really popular games have bad
camera movement. For example, Limbo has poor vertical camera and you have to
make "leap of faith" often. Trine has problem with scene transition with
multiple players so you often play off-screen. And Vlambeer games have too
much shaking ;)

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emsy
Sreenshake can be turned off, but they have a problem with their offscreen
action. That is, enemies that are 2 screens away from you can shoot you
mercilessly which is even worse than a leap of faith because it's purely
random and can't be prevented with skill or knowledge.

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babuskov
Yes. I've had such moments in Nuclear Throne very often.

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panic
It would be neat to have an interactive demo where you could explore the space
of possible cameras.

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Donzo
Platform snapping... That's a really good idea that I've never noticed. I'm
going to experiment with this.

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wiradikusuma
Awesome work!

Unfortunately, some game engines just give you the Camera and basic stuff, and
you must implement scrolling yourself while wondering, "Am I doing this
right?" (mostly I use LibGDX). Would be great to see this codified as a
library. I think it's not game engine dependent.

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cjdrake
Great essay. Content is interesting, and the composition style is innovative.

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corysama
Has this been seen by
[http://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/](http://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/) ? If not,
it definitely should be :)

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mrspeaker
Strangely, it didn't do that well on /r/gamedev - I get the feeling that this
talk, coupled with the article
([https://docs.google.com/document/d/1iNSQIyNpVGHeak6isbP6AHdH...](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1iNSQIyNpVGHeak6isbP6AHdHD50gs8MNXF1GCf08efg/pub?embedded=true))
this will become the "definitive" article on 2D camera boxes. Great work!

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toolchainz
I took a game programming class back in college and ended up coming with a
scheme very similar to the lerp smoothed box shown there. Interesting to see
all the history of this.

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brainpool
The vision and neurology section at the start was all messed up, but the
review of approaches used in different games was great! Oh nostalgia :)

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1wd
Abuse (1996) had some kind of (inverted) target focus I think. Or is that a
snappy lerp-smooth?

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Sainth
Thank you so much for this!

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2Xheadpalm
awesome work!

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benihana
This is so phenomenal. Just being aware of the different ways camera systems
are used is incredible when playing and making games.

