@Fleexy:
I gotta give you alot fan cred for noticing something like that!
However, I think I will leave something like that out. As it is, compared to the original, the amount of sliding has been reduced, just to give things more precision. But if there is a fan outcry I can always put something like that to stay true to the original.
Either way, I appreciate that you played my game and that you raised awareness on something I would have never noticed!
@Plasma Captain:
Thanks for bringing this up. I took your advice and revisited Mario 64, so it seems the camera behavior works as follows:
- If Player jumps ==> move slightly up and rotate to follow the Player as it rises
- If Player jumps and land on ground ==> move to the new location behind the Player.
- If Player falls from ground ==> closely follow behind the Player
For release 7, I think I've replicated this as best as possible, within the confines of Keen-- one major difference is that Keen jumps way higher than Mario does. Which is needed, because Keen's levels has more random platforms that are higher up. Whereas Mario's levels have more stretches of terrain than random platforms.
Also, originally Mario 64 didn't really allow you to constantly adjust the camera-- it pretty much acted on its own. So having the camera merely move to where Mario has landed on a platform didn't give you a very accurate sense of depth. But one thing that really helped me was actually digging up the
Mario 64 demo someone made in Unity3D (I happened to download it before Nintendo shut it down).
Since the creator of the demo was adapting Mario 64 to modern standards, I was able to look at his work and get ideas. For instance, his demo makes the camera follow Mario a little more vertically (instead of just "looking up" when Mario jumps). Also, the transition to Mario's new location after he's landed on a platform is smoother.
I'll admit that I didn't try out Croc, but I can always dig it out, if this is still off the mark from what you were thinking.
Also, since I am eventually going to have more control schemes down the road and this new one is still highly experimental,
I made this new camera movement optional, and left the old control scheme as the default. So that I can always just tweak the new one, but let players still use the original (which I feel I've spent alot of time fine-tuning). This will be especially helpful if I need to go back to the drawing board on this new control scheme (which will depend on community feedback).
Just press "K" to see the new control scheme, and if you don't like the camera's "look motion", you can press L to disable it. Disabling it just makes the camera follow the player vertically, without any rotation.
Now pogoing is a completely different animal. While I may not always use the new control scheme, I do agree that stabilizing Pogo movement should be the status quo. So I made a new scheme, which was adapted from the new jumping camera movements: after enabling the pogo, and Keen is "pogo hopping" on his own, the camera stays in one location until you "pogo jump".
Then if you press and hold the jump button, the camera follows Keen as before-- I could also make the camera stationary for even pogo jumps, but that will take some work to figure out what we even want that
look like, since no platformer I've played allows you to jump as high (but hopefully zooming out will suffice for now).
Also, just like with the standard jumping,
this new pogo scheme is optional, and can be disabled to go back to the old scheme. But it is set as the default; just press "P" to go back to the old one.
Lastly, press "i" to see all of the new control options.
Anyways, I hope this is really close to what you were thinking of-- but by all means,
please let me know if you think something needs to be tweaked.