As the level I’m currently building has gotten larger, it’s become obvious that I need a way to control the behavior of the camera – simply centering it on the player isn’t sufficient. While I already had some usable support for panning the camera to show points of interest, and locking it in place while the player performs an action like climbing onto a surface, I didn’t have anything in place for more advanced control of the camera, like constraining it to a region of the level.
So, the first approach I took was simple: I placed a rectangle around the entire level to constrain the camera. For smaller, rectangular levels, this worked good enough – all I had to do was place the rectangle so that you could see all the important parts of the level, and make sure I filled the entire space with tiles so the player didn’t see any ugly empty space while the camera panned around.
But to be honest, that kind of sucks. It means I have to waste time filling in the entire rectangle with tiles, and the camera doesn’t do anything to help give the player a sense of the layout of the environment. Ideally, the camera should be able to automatically position itself so that you can see the important parts of the area around you, and not show you unimportant sections of the level that you might have already passed through, or might be encountering later. Furthermore, it should avoid showing you empty/boring space whenever possible – no point in showing boring repeated tiles to the player when we could be showing interesting parts of the level instead.
The first approach I tried was a relatively simple one: I placed points of interest throughout the level, and then drew lines to connect them using the editor. After that, I assigned a radius to each point, controlling how far the camera would be allowed to ‘drift’ away from the point. The end result was that I had a series of ‘rails’ the camera could follow through the level, of varying thickness depending on the radius of each point.
