Scrolling Camera Tweaks

One of the subtle things that can really impact how a scrolling platformer feels is how the camera works. Does the character stay centered, or does the camera feel a bit looser? If it's loose, when does it scroll, and how quickly?  There are tons of articles out there about this, and they can describe it much better than I can, but it's a decision you have to make when designing a scrolling game.


In Halcyon, when moving horizontally, the camera tries to "stay ahead" of the player, by scrolling quickly until most of the screen is ahead of the direction the player is facing. That gives you plenty of time to think about upcoming obstacles and enemies.

This works really nicely for most of the game.

Until it doesn't.

One scenario that happens in Halcyon is that you will get out of the tank, use your grenades to destroy some walls, then get back into the tank. To work around limitations of the NES, destroyable walls regenerate when they go off the screen. This leads to situations like this, where you turn around to get back into your tank, and the destroyed wall immediately goes offscreen as the camera hurries to move ahead of you.

This is a tricky situation. Basically, I want my scrolling to work differently in this subjective situation. But how to define that and codify it into something that actually does what I want?

Tonight's attempt is some simple hackery:  Add a 4-second timer after destroying any block. During those 4 seconds, the camera won't scroll horizontally unless you get a lot closer to the screen edge in the direction you're wanting to scroll. 

This works great for the scenario in question:

The real question will be whether it causes annoying behavior in other parts of gameplay. That will remain to be seen....