Game Design Exercise: Addressing camera issues in Soulstice

This project is a game design exercise I decided to make after reading the Steam reviews of Soulstice from Reply Game Studio. I obviously played the game as well, so that I could personally experience the issues mentioned in the feedback from the players.

Project goal

I imagined that the Steam reviews were the feedback resulting from a playtesting session and I, a game designer working for Reply Game Studio, was the one in charge of proposing solutions to a specific issue which the majority of the feedbacks mentioned: the camera in the exploration sections.
The goal of all this process is to present some solutions to the lead designer which can eventually decide to refine further one of the solution proposed, and then playtest it again to see if the players like it, or to stick with the current camera system.

Soulstice camera analysis

The type of the camera Reply Game Studio decided to adopt with Soulstice is a fixed one (actually to be even more precise, a guided camera), in which the camera can only move along rails (these ones are fixed) manually and carefully placed by the level designers (I guess) and can rotate with a small freedom along a vertical axis passing directly through the camera itself. I know there’s a lot more than that, but for this work we’ll stick only to this description.
There are many reasons behind this choice rather than an extremely more popular third person free-look camera, the one used in the vast majority of Action-RPG games like Dark Souls, Horizon Zero Dawn and so on, and I’ll try to summarize them here in a short list:

Devil May Cry, the most successful Hack ‘n’ Slash game of all time, set the standard for all other games created for a similar target audience;
Having a camera facing the direction the player must go to reach his goal is beneficial for many reasons:
- It helps the player navigate the level more easily without getting lost;
- In every moment in reminds the player that he has a mission to complete and there is no time to lose, also generating less ludo-narrative dissonance. This is enforced by the evaluation system which also takes into account the time spent to complete the level;
It gives the developers the possibility to create stunning camera sequence, just like the long take in filmmaking;
It helps the developers by lightening the workload on the environment: if the player can look really close to everything then all the environment have to be at the same quality level, while with a fixed camera the developers can decide on which parts to focus more on;

However, the biggest downside of a fixed camera system is the feeling of lack of freedom: the player is fascinated by the game world and wants to look all around himself to admire it, but this possibility gets negated by the constraints on the camera rotation.
This is exactly what the majority of the critiques were about: not being able to look around more to dwell deeper into the amazing dark-fantasy world created by Reply Game Studio.
Noting this, I imagined 2 different solutions that I prototyped using Unreal Engine 5.

Prototyping phase

First of all I recreated a small section of the first chapter of Soulstice, roughly blocking it out using the character size as comparison metric, then I used UE5 Blueprint system to quickly create these 2 different camera solutions, both being variations of the same guided camera system, with the goal of giving the players a sense of increased freedom.
The level section chosen is the one shown in the following pictures (the second image is the really rough blockout I made):

First camera solution: Crane

The first proposed solution is a camera system that uses a crane, like the one used in filmmaking, with the camera mounted on. The crane moves along the same rails as the original solution used in Soulstice, but it rotates the camera in a different way by having the rotation axis on the mount, which slides on the rail, rather than having it directly through the camera itself.
Here’s a visual representation:

The feeling you get by trying it is of an increased freedom given by the agency to have different angles from which you can observe the environment around you.

Second camera solution: Secondary rail

The second solution uses a secondary rail mounted on the primary rail, on top of which the camera can move along. The yaw is given by the camera moving along this secondary rail, while the pitch is obtained my raising the Z-axis coordinate of the entire secondary rail, including the camera. Here’s the visual representation:

The experience is not far from the one you get with the crane, but it can be easier to use and it gives more freedom to create different secondary rails for specific sections of the game levels.

Here’s the video showing both solutions and Soulstice original camera as well:

Conclusion

In my opinion both the solutions increase the sense of freedom for the players, in fact they allow the players to have a glimpse of the third person free-look camera while still having a guided camera, keeping the best of both worlds.
The downside of these solutions is that they are not suitable for really small, indoor environment: tight corridors, small rooms and so on. This is the direct consequence of having a broader range of motion of the camera, for this reason both the solutions are better used for larger environment like big rooms or even better for outdoor environment.

Personal considerations

The project was really fun and I learned a lot about Unreal Engine 5, both the blueprint system and how to rapidly blockout inside the engine.
I also realized how much more work is required to have a fixed camera system rather than a free-look one, at least from this point of view, in fact in addition to having to setup all the rails in every section of the level and the transition between them, each camera has also to carry its own “direction axis”.
What I mean by that is that for every different camera in the game, the forward movement direction will be different, and consequently the other directions as well, while with a free-look camera the directions are always related to the current orientation of the camera in that specific moment.
Oh and go play Soulstice, it’s a really good game.

Game Design Exercise: Addressing camera issues in Soulstice

This project is a game design exercise I decided to make after reading the Steam reviews of Soulstice from Reply Game Studio. I obviously played the game as well, so that I could personally experience the issues mentioned in the feedback from the players.

Project goal

Soulstice camera analysis

Devil May Cry, the most successful Hack ‘n’ Slash game of all time, set the standard for all other games created for a similar target audience;

Having a camera facing the direction the player must go to reach his goal is beneficial for many reasons:

It helps the player navigate the level more easily without getting lost;

In every moment in reminds the player that he has a mission to complete and there is no time to lose, also generating less ludo-narrative dissonance. This is enforced by the evaluation system which also takes into account the time spent to complete the level;

It gives the developers the possibility to create stunning camera sequence, just like the long take in filmmaking;

It helps the developers by lightening the workload on the environment: if the player can look really close to everything then all the environment have to be at the same quality level, while with a fixed camera the developers can decide on which parts to focus more on;

Prototyping phase

First camera solution: Crane

The feeling you get by trying it is of an increased freedom given by the agency to have different angles from which you can observe the environment around you.

Second camera solution: Secondary rail

The experience is not far from the one you get with the crane, but it can be easier to use and it gives more freedom to create different secondary rails for specific sections of the game levels.

Conclusion

Personal considerations