Warren Spector, the legendary game developer behind classic games like "Deus Ex" and "System Shock," and his team at Junction Point Studios are the masterminds behind "Epic Mickey," the first Disney game to get both grown men and their toddlers psyched. The game's a bit darker than most Disney games and that's something people are happy about. There's something people aren't so happy about though: a pesky in-game camera issue that's driving some folks, including Spector, absolutely crazy.
We spoke to the man himself to get his take on the issue. Check it out below.
"There are a couple of responses to the camera question. First, there has never been a game that I couldn't break if you give it to me for 30 seconds. I mean, I will break a camera in any game ever made. And if I learned one thing on this project, it's an immense amount of respect for people who have been making third person action and platforming games. Third person camera is way harder than I even imagined it could be. It is the hardest problem in video game development. Everybody gets it wrong. It's just a question of how close to right do you get it.
"Second, cameras are different in different game styles. So in a platform game you want the camera up higher in a steeper angle because the important thing for the platform player is to be able to see the next jump clearly. In an action adventure game, like 'Zelda' for example, you want the camera down lower so you have more tactical awareness because there are enemies out there. There are traversal problems that require a tactical awareness that a high camera does not provide. So platformers and action adventure games have different camera requirements.
"But here's the deal, what I try to be completely clear about is that this is not a platforming game. This is a game that takes platforming elements and adventure game elements and role-playing elements and merges them. So we couldn't tune the camera perfectly for platforming or for action adventure. It’s a very different camera style. What we did is try to find the best compromise in the moment and give the player as much manual control as we could. So we took the hardest problem in third-person gaming and made it harder by trying to accommodate two different playing styles.
"The bottom line is that we did the best we could given that we were not trying to make a platform game or an action adventure game, but a game where you get to decide what the game felt like moment to moment.
"And I will go to my grave, imperfect as it is, proud as hell of my camera team. If reviewers want to give us a hard time about it because they're misunderstanding the game we made, it's not for me to tell them that they're wrong, absolutely not. But I wish people would get it out of their head that we made a 'Mario' competitor, because we didn't."
Read more from Spector on the next page.
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