Development Skill
3Cs
Character, Camera & Controls
Players rarely notice good 3Cs. They only notice bad ones. When movement feels wrong, players blame themselves first, then the game, and eventually stop playing. Getting Character, Camera, and Controls right is one of the hardest and most important parts of game design, and one of my favorite problems to solve.
Character
Character movement defines how a game feels before any mechanic fires. I have worked on character controllers across multiple projects: the weight of a horde shooter's soldier, the lawnmower's turning inertia, the ship's constant-velocity movement in an XR space.
In Oh, Bugger!, I had full ownership over player character feel. The goal was heavy and powerful, something that reinforced the "Push Forward" design pillar. Acceleration curves, jump arc, camera response, and animation timing were tuned together until the character felt satisfying under pressure.
In Mowdown, character movement was built around a single physical constraint: lawnmowers do not turn instantly. A smooth interpolation between current and desired orientation gave the movement a realistic inertia that players could learn to exploit for tactical positioning.
Camera
Good camera work should go unnoticed. Every movement needs a reason: input, an event, or something worth showing. Anything else is noise. I have worked on follow cams, third-person setups, top-down views, and the comfort design required for extended XR sessions.
In Rivertale, camera comfort was a safety requirement, not just a design preference. The ship moves constantly, the play space is physical, and motion sickness is a real risk. I designed camera behavior that smoothed the experience without sacrificing responsiveness, testing interpolation speeds and correction timing until the range felt natural and safe for extended play.
Controls
I have worked with controllers, keyboard, touch input, and custom physical hardware. Each input method changes what interactions feel natural, and I find those translation challenges genuinely interesting: the gap between what the player's hand does and what the game needs to understand is a design space worth taking seriously.
For Rivertale, I designed the input layer between custom Arduino hardware and Unreal Engine. Physical props including a capstan, a steering wheel, and cannon controls had to map reliably to in-game actions while remaining intuitive for players who had never touched them before. Calibration and input sensitivity were tuned iteratively through playtesting, adjusting response curves until the physical and digital felt unified rather than disconnected.
Why this matters
When physical props become the controls, the stakes are higher. If the input feels arbitrary, the illusion breaks immediately. Every curve, dead zone, and response delay is a design decision that either deepens or destroys the experience.