   Top-down racing game too hard on the eyes?
  I guess this is the best forum for this post. I've been working on a top-down 2D racing game, in which the camera tracks the player and zooms out or in depending on speed. My question is: is this kind of viewpoint just too hard to watch for long periods of time, considering that I want the vehicles to travel at very high speeds around the track?Here's a video:>It's a bit hard to see as YouTube compression is crap.Would this bugger your eyes up/give you a headache after a while of playing it? Should I consider using the same engine for a different style of game (wandering around in a tank, blowing things up, perhaps?) or continue along this line? I implemented the zooming in order to try to allow the player to see what's ahead when travelling at speed, but maybe it makes the player feel too detached from the action when the camera is very high up?Any thoughts on the matter would be appreciated. Thanks.   
  yes it gets annoying. The rotating of the cam is to firm. Overall the constant rotating and zooming is to hysterical. Maybe the cam doesnt need to rotate at all? Look at this classic:When it comes to arcade style games, the user want simplicity and smoothness:)The game itself looks very nice though!Erik   ;  I agree with suliman, the rotation is too firm.  It gets disorienting when spinning about.  The zooming itself isn't bad, though.Take a look at how the GTA2 did it, they had speed based zoom but didn't rotate the camera.  It worked well.Perhaps having the camera follow a rolling average of the position and orientation of the car would be easier on the eyes, although I'm just guessing since I haven't tried it.   ;  Not only is the rotation much too hard, the environment is highly distracting.  The yellow streetlights contrast too much, and take up too much space compared to the relatively small and hard-to-see car.  Give your car some bright headlights, so that I can focus on my headlights (which should contrast much better against the dark background).  Also consider lightening the background in general, and toning down the contrast of your streetlights.Smoothing the rotation is, in my opinion, a secondary concern to reducing the extreme contrast of the level.;  Have you ever played Micro-Machines (NES) or RC Pro-Am (NES)? Those were awesome. Not dissorienting at all.   ;  Thank you all for the replies. I certainly take the point that the rotation is too 'hard'. If the car spins off it can make you feel a bit sick - I'll try limiting the maximum rotation rate of the screen, the same way the zoom works.The trouble I've always had with top-down racers (and any top-down viewpoint game in which the main sprite rotates and moves fowards), that fix the orientation of the viewpoint, is that when the car/player/spaceship moves down the screen the controls are 'reversed' - i.e. you have to press left to rotate right in screen coordinates and vice versa. I could never get used to that in the early GTA games, for example - I kept swerving the wrong way into parked cars. This was an attempt to make the controls feel more natural at any angle. I could use an eight-way directional control scheme, but that just doesn't feel right to me for a racer. I have actually implemented the option to fix the screen orientation, so perhaps I'll just give the player the choice as to whether to rotate the screen or not.Quote:Smoothing the rotation is, in my opinion, a secondary concern to reducing the extreme contrast of the level.kru: I think you're right; the contrast isn't right yet. Although it's supposed to be a night-time track, I will raise the background lighting level and make the streetlights more diffuse. The car does have switchable headlights, but they're a bit crap-looking so I left them switched off in the video.The size of the car is a more difficult problem - of course in full-screen high-res it's a little bigger and easier to see, but the car is still rather small at maximum zoom. I could limit the zoom, but that makes it very difficult to see and react to the track ahead. I could make the car (and then all the objects proportionally) a bit bigger, but that might reduce the sense of speed. I did consider tilting the 'camera' back a bit, to allow the player to see the track ahead at speed, but the game isn't really meant to be in 3D, and all the objects are currently just created with layers of sprites. I'd have to find another way to create the objects, and I'm not sure my skills are up to moving into 3D just yet. It's food for thought anyway.Thanks once again for the comments and constructive criticism. I might post a demo at some point, when I've had the time to work on it some more.   ;  Reminds me of Death Rally. Good game!In any case. I think the zoom is good, just the rotation that's making me a little bit sick.   