Hey, everyone!
In this post we want to talk about some of the tricks we use to get that cinematic feeling in Dark Queen of Samobor. If you caught our last dev blog, you already know how much we rely on triggers to make the world feel alive and reactive. Today we'll take a look at the role they play in our camera work. Our camera is fully manually directed, and every angle, zoom, and perspective shift is intentional and placed by hand.
Perspective shifts
This is one of our favourite tricks. The game is a sidescroller by default, but nothing stops us from swinging the camera into a completely different perspective when the moment calls for it. For example, in the scene where you're running across a frozen lake, everything seems fine until the moment you run through a trigger, and the camera pulls up and rotates to a top-down view, revealing something you couldn't see before: something enormous sleeping just below the surface. It recontextualises the whole scene in an instant.
Perspective shift: in-game
And here is how the same moment looks from inside the engine. Also, pay attention to how the camera shakes at the end, to add more drama to the moment.
Perspective shift: in-engine
And here is one more scene in which we shake the camera in a similar way. In this sequence, you run to avoid spikes closing in on you from the ceiling, and we shake the camera to achieve the effect of impact:
Shaking the camera for impact
Locking the camera in place
At certain moments, we lock the camera to a fixed point of view, letting it stay still while you move freely, and allowing it to switch to the next position only once you reach the next trigger. This gives you a wider view of the environment and lets you focus on what matters, like solving the puzzle at hand.
Camera with a fixed POV
Zooming out
Another thing we lean into is zoom. Pulling the camera out at the right moment makes the world feel huge and the player feel small, which is exactly the vibe we're going for in a lot of scenes. You might remember the dragon skull we mentioned in the last blog post or you might have seen it in our trailer, the one that snaps shut behind you. Well, the skull moment has a camera trick to it too. As you run through it, the camera zooms out, and suddenly you get the full scale of the thing. It's enormous. And the zoom allows you to actually feel that.
Zoom out: in-game
Here is how that same moment looks from inside the engine, you can see the camera repositioning as you enter the skull:
Zoom out: behind the scene
Zooming in
Zoom doesn't only work for big dramatic scenes. Sometimes pulling the camera in slightly also does the trick. When you're standing still in idle, we use a slow zoom in on the character. It's subtle, but it shifts the energy slightly and adds a moment of tension before whatever comes next. Then, the moment you start to aim, the camera slowly pulls back out, giving you a better view of your target. It's one of those small details you might not consciously notice, but you'd notice if it wasn't there.
Zoom in & out for tension and visibility
Conclusion
All of this sounds elegant in theory. In practice, it involves a lot of "why is the camera doing that" and tweaking values by tiny increments until it feels right. Getting a perspective shift to land cleanly, especially one as dramatic as side-view to top-down, means thinking about what the player sees at every frame of the transition. It's fiddly, careful work, but when it clicks, it really clicks.
And that's all for this one! Hope you enjoyed another peek behind the curtain.
More dev blogs are coming, so stay tuned.
And as always, thanks for following along! 🖤
Downtown Game Studio team