Down to crouch and charge vs. Down to look down

I'm the programmer for an action platformer with 8-directional scrolling, trying to design its vertical camera motion. Excess motion causes nausea and increases the likelihood of slowdown. For this reason, the game uses platform snapping to limit excess motion during a jump:

• When the player is on the ground, doing a double jump, or on a ladder-like structure (such as a Mega Man X-style wall slide), move the focal point to the player.
• When the player is in the air, move the focal point to the lower of the focal point and the player.

It also lets the player look up and down by holding Up or Down on the Control Pad to start changing a bias value added to the focal point to form the camera target.

• When the player is on the ground, holding Up for a second starts to shift the bias toward up, and holding Down for a second starts to shift the bias toward down.
• When the player releases Up or Down, start to shift the bias back toward center.

I'm aware that Sonic games have similar look up/down behavior, as does Pinocchio for Super NES.

A coworker tells me that holding Down to crouch or charge a special move (think Super Mario Bros. 2 (U) charged jump) conflicts with Down to look down and wants me to get rid of the look up/down functionality for this reason. There are parts of some levels where removing ability to look down results in leaps of faith. (They could probably be fixed, but I'm only the programmer, not the level designer.) Is there a better way to resolve this, other than giving an option to enable or disable look up/down in the game's options menu?

Statistics: Posted by tepples — Thu Sep 19, 2024 6:39 pm — Replies 8 — Views 459

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