Super Mario Galaxy and Camera Control

Thanksgiving was a busy weekend, with lots of friends and family at our house. I played a bunch of Super Mario Galaxy, too. I like the bite-size gameplay pieces, and the live orchestral soundtrack.

On the downside, the camera is even crazier than in other third-person action games, which reduces the game's appeal for non-hardcore gamers. There are a couple of reasons for this. One is that there is almost no manual control over the camera. Sometimes you can press the D-pad to reorient the camera, but due to the controller geometry this is not something you can do easily. The other reason the camera is squirrelly is because the worlds have unusual geometries. As a result there is a lot of camera hinting (at my day job we call them camera volumes). This is where designers mark a region of space and give a preferred direction for the camera for that region. Due to the crazy gravity it's necessary to swing the camera direction wildly from region to region.

As anyone who's worked on 3D action games knows, there is a fundamental conflict between character control and camera control. You've got two basic choices for character control: character-relative and screen-relative. Character-relative is characterized by the Tomb Raider series (at least the early games; I'm not familiar with the more recent efforts). I call this “radio-control car” control because it has the familiar problem that if the character is moving toward the camera, you have to push right on the stick to get them to go left on-screen, and vice versa. As a result of this, virtually all third-person games (including Super Mario) use screen-relative control. The joystick deflection is projected to the screen and the character moves directly in that direction. Right is always right and left is always left.

Screen-relative control is great, until you need to rotate the camera. Suddenly the frame of reference that the player is using to control their character has shifted. If they're trying to run along a narrow beam, say, and you rotate the camera, suddenly their character will veer off and plunge to her death. If the player manually rotated the camera then they're expecting it and can adjust their movement to compensate, but if the game is controlling the camera the problem is much worse.

There are various tricks that we've tried to get around this. For instance, if the movement joystick is deflected and then the camera rotates, you can continue the character on their previous course until the player lets up on the joystick, after which any subsequent deflection will be projected to the current camera frame. This has mixed results, and probably works best when you're outright cutting the camera from one view to another.

Super Mario Galaxy has an additional problem with screen-relative control that most other games don't. I mentioned above that you project the joystick deflection onto the screen. There are various ways to do this, but usually they involve projecting the controller deflection onto a ground plane, so that pushing up on the stick moves the character further away on the ground (upstage), and pushing down moves the character nearer (downstage). In Mario, the player is sometimes running around on the ceiling, which introduces a new problem: should pushing up on the stick move Mario further away, or toward the top of the screen (which means running closer to the camera)?

In order to make screen-relative character movement work as well as possible, you basically want to make smooth, slow adjustments to the camera so the player has ample time to correct for the change in their character movement. On top of that you can add a manual control to snap the camera quickly to a better direction. That way, the player can stand still when they adjust the camera.

Unfortunately Super Mario Galaxy's environments don't lend themselves well to smooth camera adjustments. Gravity changes directions suddenly, or worlds will be tight and twisty, necessitating rapid camera movements to keep Mario in view. I'm having fun with the game, but it makes my wife really dizzy just to watch it.