Let's talk about top-down view camera system for a racing game

Today I would like to talk about the camera system that we implemented in Fuel Overdose.

Why choosing a top-down view camera?

Nowadays, the first camera system that comes to everybody’s mind when it comes to racing games is the 3D camera (from behind the vehicle). Why? Simply because it makes the games more immersive as you more or less see what the driver is seeing and because it’s the best and easiest system when you try to optimize the speed feeling. When it comes to action-racing games, the 3D camera is also often used, probably because the references of the genre (Mario Kart, Burnout,…) that are using that camera system as well.

But immersion and speed feeling aren’t the aspects we wanted to focus on for our game. On the other hand we wanted to avoid making another (bad) copy of Mario Kart. Mario Kart offers a very strong game system and we couldn’t see how to improve it and we thought that it would have been suicidal to try to work on a Mario Kart base. What we wanted to do, was to propose something different and innovative by trying to define game mechanics that go beyond the “shoot and drop” system.

Shoot and drop

What  I call the “shoot and drop” system is a system based exclusively on projectiles and weapons that you throw (missiles, shells…) and items that you drop (banana peels, mines…). 90% of the action-racing / car-combat games are based on this game system: from RC Pro-AM to Blur, the action sequences consist in targeting your enemies by whether sending them bombs and other projectiles or dropping mines and other items. Sure, starting from that point, you can imagine various effects for these weapons (freezing mine, exploding mine, a mine that cover your enemy’s screen…) but the ways you use them and more or less always the same. Actually this is a very good system, very intuitive and fun, but we felt that if we wanted to offer something really innovative, we had to go beyond that.

These past years few action racing games we really innovative in their action aspect and the 2 games that come to my mind are Split/Second and Burnout. Here are 2 games where action is not shooting and dropping stuff.

360°

Actually the other problem with the 3D camera is due to the fact that because of the angle of the camera, the player can only focus on what’s on front of him.  What’s behind and on the sides often requires the player to manually change the camera angle which is pretty constraining when you have other things to do during the game. This is very constraining in terms of game design since you find yourself more or less limited to propose game mechanics that the player can see, and in the case of a 3D camera perspective you are mostly limited to what can happen on front of you.

On the contrary, the top-down camera lets the player have a much wider playground, and thus gives the possibility to works at 360°.

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Which top-down view camera?

OK then, let’s go for a top-down view camera. But how high should the camera be?  What behavior?

We checked many games and studied their camera system.

First there is the “over the top” camera, used by games such as Spyhunter.

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Then you have the isometric camera that you can find in RC Pro-Am or Rock’n’Roll Racing and that introduces a new angle of vision. The camera is not exactly over the vehicle anymore.

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All these game as in 2D, but the 3D didn’t really change the positioning of the camera. Take a look at Scrap Metal for Xbla.

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Last, I would mention Chinatown Wars that has a camera system that always follows the vehicle so the vehicle is always pointing towards the top of the screen.

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So we created several prototypes and here are our observations:

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Starting from these observations we came to the following conclusions:

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So we identified new objectives:

So we created a camera system that takes all these requirements into account. Here are some examples of in-game situations:

In this case, there is a 90° to the right. Like in Death Rally the camera doesn’t need to rotate since there’s no problem for the player to drive with the car pointing to the right of the screen.

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Later in the track, here is another 90° turn to the right. But in this case, the level design requires the camera to rotate in order to avoid an uncomfortable 180° rotation for the next turn.

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Speaking of 180° here is a situation where the camera doesn’t need to rotate.

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Last, we have a situation with 2 consecutive 90° turns. First the camera zooms out to avoid having the vehicle hidden by the building, then the camera goes “over the top” while rotating. While taking the second turn the camera slightly zooms in and rotates once again.

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Our system is far from being perfect yet but and we are still optimizing it on all the tracks. What we tried to do here is to take into account the aspects of our gameplay and make sure that the player is not taken aback despite all the choices that the player can make anytime during the race. This system requires a lot of work because we have to optimize all the sections of the different tracks one by one, by considering different criteria such as the speed of the vehicle, the angle of the turn, the angle of the next turn…

The first tests show that it can be slightly baffling for the new players. But after playing 2 or 3 tracks one gets used to it pretty quickly.

Skander Djerbi