Top-Down Bound Camera System
- Will Watson
- Feb 16
- 2 min read
Updated: Feb 17
Untitled Project | Self Project | UE5.2.1 | 18/11/23
In an effort to create a Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds (LoZ) inspired game, I needed to learn how the playable area camera works. Watching LoZ, you can see that when the main character, Link, navigates to the edge of the segment of the map, the camera transitions to the next segment. The camera can not leave the current segment unless the player has reached the access point to the next segment.
Initially, I had a static camera that was moved with the player onto the next segment. This only worked for maps that remained smaller than the viewport. While this has proven to work for games like the original Binding of Isaac, a rouge-like dungeon crawler, I wanted a sense of adventure for the project, which is something I feel you can't get with such a small area.
With the occasional assistance from Saul Bookey, a Technical Designer at Red Kite Games, I managed to figure out a follow camera system that had a boundary on where it can navigate to, with a transition to the next segment when the player reaches the access point. I also created a system to automatically calculate how close the camera is allowed to go to the edge of the segment with just a single value input.
As you can see in the 'New Camera System' GIF, there are two outlines. The red outline represents the extend of the floor, and the yellow represents how far the camera can follow the player before it must stop. You can also see this works on various sizes with the third segment being a lot larger. This is untested with floors that have more than four sides, but I have no plans of adding odd shapes.
Lastly, the transition is handled in it's own blueprint with it's own camera. Upon overlapping an invisible volume, the transition camera is blended to, before being blended to the next segment's camera which has automatically been repositioned to the nearest point it can get to the player without breaching the boundary. The player is also automatically navigated to the next area to ensure they don't get stuck between transitions.
