Game Design

[Altissimo]

there are times when i felt like you couldn't move it nearly enough in certain directions. free camera ftw

[E. Gadd Industries]

personal onion

^I'm trying to decide whether or not that was deliberate...

And true!

[mikey]

Wait what? You can easily change the camera in Galaxy using the D-pad. I very rarely had any problems when playing.

when I figured this out...

although the automatic camera for most Zelda games is amazing, there's a related reason for wind waker being the best :^)

[MaestroUGC]

Yes, and the game was released on both PS3 and Xbox 360 (people say that the Xbox controller is the best for the game, but I wouldn't know personally).

As you can probably imagine there's a world of difference between controllers and a mouse/keyboard, one most games will run into problems when trying to convert from one to the other. If you're designing for a specific console, or at least expect a controller to be a primary controller, you know exactly what the player can use and reasonably do while playing. With a controller you can reasonably expect the player to actively use 4-6 finger while playing; thumbs, indexes, and middle, with the left thumb almost always being on the joystick. Depending on the ergonomic design of the controller, you'll want to make the primary action buttons whichever one your fingers will rest at. This is why the GC and XB360 controllers are commonly regarded as the best designed. Their layouts are different, but they are well optimized for movement and action with each thumb on the main joystick and over the four face buttons. To a degree this can come down to a matter of preference, but this goes a long way to how game design is even approached.

In contrast take a look at the Wii Remote, which harkens back to an earlier NES-inspired simplicity (when it's not being used for point-and-click motion control), and its tethered combo with the Nunchuck is a loose hybrid of modern controller design and motion control.

Altissimo brought up a good point with Super Mario Galaxy, and I think it'd be good to compare its control scheme against Super Mario 64 and how they chose to adapt the basic Mario action to their wildly different set-ups:

At the core they both have shared set-ups for basic actions; Left thumb stick to move, A to jump, both performed with the thumbs. Z is pressed with the left index to perform crouches; the camera is adjusted by directional buttons just above the thumb; with the left shoulder button ("C" on the nunchuck) being used to center the camera behind Mario. Beyond this the control schemes differ as the two games employ two different move-sets; but the central button layout across both games is exactly the same.

In SM64 you can perform secondary combat actions with the B-button, which is right next to the A-button on the controller. The allows for easy combos of the two buttons to perform jump kicks, and this ease of control allowed you to combine several different moves with well timed presses of the A, B, and Z button all while still being able to move freely.

SMG lacks any sort of combat button, but instead allows you to aim and fire Star Bits to stun/kill enemies in your way, and shaking the remote performed a spin that could damage enemies and give Mario a slight boost in his jump height. In spite of this you could still perform many of the combos from SM64 as the control layout is exactly the same.

This leaves us with the camera control, which given the vastly different platforming experience in the two games results in totally different designs. In SM64 the camera is more or less fixed behind and above Mario, angled downward slightly, giving the player a view ahead of Mario to see oncoming enemies and obstacles. You could toggle this view with one more closely fixed behind Mario (right shoulder button), in an almost over-the-shoulder view, but still giving enough depth to see things ahead of you. The C-buttons would allow to change the relative position of the camera (shifting left and right with C-left and C-right, respectively) or zoom in/out (c-up/c-down) with the most zoomed-in being a look through Mario's eyes, allowing you to survey the area while standing still. This design gave complete control of the Camera to the player, allowing them to adjust it how they needed, as this would be vital for such a high-movement game. Before this you had either fixed camera positions or badly designed tracking, which would often lead to the camera either getting stuck or obscure the player's view.

SMG would largely preserve this, but given the nature of the gameplay some things had to be adjusted. For the most part the camera is positioned in the same way as SM64, and you are given control to adjust it similarly with the D-pad, right above the A-button. However the game relies heavily on free, 3-dimensional movement and will often have you playing at odd angles against the bottom ground. However, the camera still moves freely through space as before, albeit staying parallel to the starting ground. Because of this there was a trade-off on player pose-ability, while you could still move and angle it however you needed, there were certain areas where the camera by necessity would have to more or less be locked in a certain position to better facilitate the action.

The relative preference of the camera in either game is largely subjective, however they both work perfectly well for the games they were designed for. Granted SMG does take quite a bit of adjustment to get used to, especially if you're playing more standard games, but you're still granted freedom of control of the camera, making the real challenge in visualizing movement in a true 3-dimensional space. Sure, they could've designed it to have the camera stay loyal to Mario's relative position, but that would've severely uncut not only a lot of the challenge, but also ruin one of the larger aspects of the game.