The Joys of Idle Cameras | Weekly Update #38

Ok, I meant to make the next update about the prototypes of some inspiration gathering I have been doing on my recent Austria trip… however, they are not quite ready yet.

So instead, I am going to show you a feature that has been around for a bit now, but is one of my favorites: The Idle Camera.

What the heck is an Idle Camera?

Dont’ wanna read? Just scroll down for some images and videos 😁

Imagine you played a game for a while, but now you really fancy a coffee and a snack and walk off, 5-10 mins later you come back and see what?
The same screen that you left?

Now that would be rather boring, wouldn’t it 😉

Instead, wouldn’t it be much more interesting to have your game camera focus on different parts of the environment or NPCs and give you unique viewpoints that otherwise you might have missed?

And that’s exactly what an idle camera does. After a certain amount of inactivity from the player’s side (aka when the player is idling), it will activate and ‘take control’ over your camera, so to speak, and focus on various things around the game world instead.

This allows you not only to see things you might have otherwise missed, from viewpoints that might otherwise be impossible to reach, but also to make some really fun or cool screenshots.

And once the player moves around or in some other way provides input, the camera just goes back to the regular game view, of course.

Now, I obviously did not come up with this concept. That a game does something or other when the player has been idle for a while has been around for ages – anyone remember Crash Bandicoot getting up to all kinds of shenanigans if you didn’t get on with things?

And the idle camera itself is greatly inspired by a game, that I might have played once or twice in my life, and does something quite similar – Final Fantasy XIV (FF14).

Mine works a little bit differently; for example, it follows moving targets around, but the base concept is pretty much the same.
So much of my ever-growing screenshot folder is filled with shots that I happened upon because their idle camera kicked in.

So it was really a no-brainer to implement something similar myself 😄.

Current Results

While the feature is still a work in progress, here are some of the shots I took while the idle cam was doing its thing.

And here is even a short video.

It can even go quite crazy – do we think yay!! for following a flying object or just pure motion sickness in the making? 🤢😆

The idle cam can also be very helpful in showing you some bugs that you might otherwise have missed more easily 🙀

Future Development

There are still a couple of things I want to add, for example, an integration with a planned photo mode to give the player more control over how they can modify any shots they want to take.

As well as giving the player some control over the camera’s movement while the idle cam is active.

And now I better actually get back to working on those prototypes. 😄 Have a lovely week out there! 🌈👋