How We Designed Arkheron’s Free-Aim Isometric Camera
[p]When people first play Arkheron, the first thing they often comment on is the camera. That comment usually goes something like, ‘hey - what the fuck?’ And we’re glad you asked![/p][p][/p][p]While people often find the controls comfortable after a bit of practice, some are still curious how we landed here. Arkheron’s control scheme deviates from the industry’s norms and it’s natural for that to prompt some questions. We’d love to share a bit of that backstory and what role the controls play in Arkheron’s combat ecosystem.
[/p][p]To explain where we are, first we have to go back to where we were. From the outset, our team meant to make a game that was in essence a ‘dungeon royale’. We wanted to combine visceral combat with battle royale mechanics inside a dark fantasy world. Arkheron today captures this dream with its high-stakes close quarters combat that centers around creating your own build through items in an Ascension royale mode. [/p][p][/p][p]However, if you had logged into our internal servers several years ago you would have played a vastly different game. It took several iterations to find the fun and then expand on it. In a previous iteration, we had combat that revolved around fixed character classes, varied terrain levels and a locked isometric camera.
[/p][p]PvP was still the core focus but combat was much slower and gameplay focused much more on navigating through choke points and other hazards in the Tower. It was a design that required spatial awareness which is where the fixed isometric viewpoint added friction. You couldn’t peek around corners. You couldn’t tell if someone was sneaking up behind you. It was an experience with hard limits. [/p][p][/p][p]With fixed character classes, your first dozen or so matches had options to explore. But after a certain point, there was minimal replayability. Your only options were which class to pick and then what strategy you’d use within that pre-determined framework. You couldn’t make meaningful choices to determine your gameplay experience from match to match.
[/p][p]The existence of high and low terrain areas usually meant that whoever had the high ground would win. The combination of these three elements meant that players had minimal agency over their gameplay experience which subsequently meant that we had less design room to explore. [/p][p][/p][p]This version of Arkheron was okay! Good enough that we were still enthusiastic about working on it. But games have to be fun and it didn’t quite spark the joy we were looking for. So we put our heads down and made a series of changes that meaningfully changed what we were working on. [/p][p] [/p][p]First, we put the camera on a swivel to provide a 360° view of your surroundings. This immediately made the combat more dynamic and high stakes by requiring precise aiming of your abilities to land shots and prompting you to use the space around you more effectively. Situational awareness and sound cues both suddenly became important.
[/p][p]Secondly, we broke the character class abilities out into item sets. This meant that you could technically play those previous classes if you collected each item in the set, but unlocked a plethora of new combinations through mixing and matching. It meant that every match, there were choices to make and potential synergies to uncover. [/p][p][/p][p]These two changes in concert were larger than the sum of their parts. They multiplied each other to create countless new options for what we could create and how combat felt. All of a sudden, it all clicked. We collectively felt we had tapped into something new and real that we could confidently bring to more players. We were thrilled!
[/p][p]Once we found the fun, we committed! This commitment meant we would have to take a year to rewrite our netcode to support faster combat. It also meant we could take the leap to reshape the Tower. We removed high and low terrain to flatten the environmental advantage and recrafted our environmental assets to look good from these angles.
[/p][p]While it took multiple changes in concert to find the fun of Arkheron as you know it, the free-aim isometric camera was the turning point. Not only did moment-to-moment gameplay become more thrilling, it created more design room for us to explore. The close-quarters combat zone created by this perspective allows both melee and ranged abilities to stay within reach of each other from a balance perspective. We didn’t have to go all in on one or the other like some games do.
[/p][p]With all that said, the camera was never designed to be a core feature. It’s not some marvel of ingenuity. It’s not by itself, ‘the fun’. However, when we look at Arkheron’s combat as a whole, the free-aim isometric camera is what brings everything together and makes the fun possible. It’s also not perfect and we may still make some small tweaks to it in the future.
[/p][p]Some common queries we get from players are ‘Can you zoom it out a smidge?’ or ‘Can you tilt it up just slightly?’ These are valid thoughts and ones we’ve spent a fair bit of time considering.
[/p][p]The desire to zoom out usually stems from the desire to see enemies from farther away to help prepare for their arrival. This would mean that you could see enemies that are out of reach of your damage, and usually out of reach of your ability to chase them. This could create gameplay motivations that are less likely to have a fun pay-off. (I see you, I chase you, I can’t get you, I’m not fighting enough, I’m getting bored, I’m not having fun)
[/p][p]Additionally, if we zoomed the camera out so you could see enemies you can’t hit or chase, the natural follow-up request would be, ‘Can you make my abilities go farther so that it’s possible to hit the enemies I can see?’. This would essentially land us back where we are now. Enemies on your screen are enemies that you can meaningfully pursue - whether you’re ranged or melee.
[/p][p]We committed to this camera perspective because of the fun it unlocks and then built the game to optimize around that view in a variety of ways. This means that altering the view even slightly would have a cascading effect on other game systems. For example, the current point-of-view means less overhead on the game client trying to render everything which is beneficial for managing performance. We are still working on getting Arkheron’s performance to where we want it to be at launch but zooming the camera out further would undermine these efforts. [/p][p]This would also change the way our environmental assets are viewed. They aren’t designed to be seen from other perspectives and committing to changing the view would mean changing all of our assets so that they looked good again. There may be some wiggle room there but with both technical and environmental costs, it’s a deceptively large change to make. [/p][p][/p][p]If you made it this far, thank you so much for taking the time to hear a little bit of our Bonfire Studios lore. All of our biggest commitments in our journey so far have been in service to fun. We are just people and we figure that as long as we’re having fun, at least a few other people will find it fun too. If that’s you, welcome! We are excited to have you here for the journey ahead.[/p][p]
[/p]
[/p][p]To explain where we are, first we have to go back to where we were. From the outset, our team meant to make a game that was in essence a ‘dungeon royale’. We wanted to combine visceral combat with battle royale mechanics inside a dark fantasy world. Arkheron today captures this dream with its high-stakes close quarters combat that centers around creating your own build through items in an Ascension royale mode. [/p][p][/p][p]However, if you had logged into our internal servers several years ago you would have played a vastly different game. It took several iterations to find the fun and then expand on it. In a previous iteration, we had combat that revolved around fixed character classes, varied terrain levels and a locked isometric camera.
[/p][p]PvP was still the core focus but combat was much slower and gameplay focused much more on navigating through choke points and other hazards in the Tower. It was a design that required spatial awareness which is where the fixed isometric viewpoint added friction. You couldn’t peek around corners. You couldn’t tell if someone was sneaking up behind you. It was an experience with hard limits. [/p][p][/p][p]With fixed character classes, your first dozen or so matches had options to explore. But after a certain point, there was minimal replayability. Your only options were which class to pick and then what strategy you’d use within that pre-determined framework. You couldn’t make meaningful choices to determine your gameplay experience from match to match.
[/p][p]The existence of high and low terrain areas usually meant that whoever had the high ground would win. The combination of these three elements meant that players had minimal agency over their gameplay experience which subsequently meant that we had less design room to explore. [/p][p][/p][p]This version of Arkheron was okay! Good enough that we were still enthusiastic about working on it. But games have to be fun and it didn’t quite spark the joy we were looking for. So we put our heads down and made a series of changes that meaningfully changed what we were working on. [/p][p] [/p][p]First, we put the camera on a swivel to provide a 360° view of your surroundings. This immediately made the combat more dynamic and high stakes by requiring precise aiming of your abilities to land shots and prompting you to use the space around you more effectively. Situational awareness and sound cues both suddenly became important.
[/p][p]Secondly, we broke the character class abilities out into item sets. This meant that you could technically play those previous classes if you collected each item in the set, but unlocked a plethora of new combinations through mixing and matching. It meant that every match, there were choices to make and potential synergies to uncover. [/p][p][/p][p]These two changes in concert were larger than the sum of their parts. They multiplied each other to create countless new options for what we could create and how combat felt. All of a sudden, it all clicked. We collectively felt we had tapped into something new and real that we could confidently bring to more players. We were thrilled!
[/p][p]Once we found the fun, we committed! This commitment meant we would have to take a year to rewrite our netcode to support faster combat. It also meant we could take the leap to reshape the Tower. We removed high and low terrain to flatten the environmental advantage and recrafted our environmental assets to look good from these angles.
[/p][p]While it took multiple changes in concert to find the fun of Arkheron as you know it, the free-aim isometric camera was the turning point. Not only did moment-to-moment gameplay become more thrilling, it created more design room for us to explore. The close-quarters combat zone created by this perspective allows both melee and ranged abilities to stay within reach of each other from a balance perspective. We didn’t have to go all in on one or the other like some games do.
[/p][p]With all that said, the camera was never designed to be a core feature. It’s not some marvel of ingenuity. It’s not by itself, ‘the fun’. However, when we look at Arkheron’s combat as a whole, the free-aim isometric camera is what brings everything together and makes the fun possible. It’s also not perfect and we may still make some small tweaks to it in the future.
[/p][p]Some common queries we get from players are ‘Can you zoom it out a smidge?’ or ‘Can you tilt it up just slightly?’ These are valid thoughts and ones we’ve spent a fair bit of time considering.
[/p][p]The desire to zoom out usually stems from the desire to see enemies from farther away to help prepare for their arrival. This would mean that you could see enemies that are out of reach of your damage, and usually out of reach of your ability to chase them. This could create gameplay motivations that are less likely to have a fun pay-off. (I see you, I chase you, I can’t get you, I’m not fighting enough, I’m getting bored, I’m not having fun)
[/p][p]Additionally, if we zoomed the camera out so you could see enemies you can’t hit or chase, the natural follow-up request would be, ‘Can you make my abilities go farther so that it’s possible to hit the enemies I can see?’. This would essentially land us back where we are now. Enemies on your screen are enemies that you can meaningfully pursue - whether you’re ranged or melee.
[/p][p]We committed to this camera perspective because of the fun it unlocks and then built the game to optimize around that view in a variety of ways. This means that altering the view even slightly would have a cascading effect on other game systems. For example, the current point-of-view means less overhead on the game client trying to render everything which is beneficial for managing performance. We are still working on getting Arkheron’s performance to where we want it to be at launch but zooming the camera out further would undermine these efforts. [/p][p]This would also change the way our environmental assets are viewed. They aren’t designed to be seen from other perspectives and committing to changing the view would mean changing all of our assets so that they looked good again. There may be some wiggle room there but with both technical and environmental costs, it’s a deceptively large change to make. [/p][p][/p][p]If you made it this far, thank you so much for taking the time to hear a little bit of our Bonfire Studios lore. All of our biggest commitments in our journey so far have been in service to fun. We are just people and we figure that as long as we’re having fun, at least a few other people will find it fun too. If that’s you, welcome! We are excited to have you here for the journey ahead.[/p][p]
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