Development Skill
3Cs
Character, Camera & Controls
Players rarely notice good 3Cs, but they immediately notice bad ones. When movement feels wrong, players blame themselves or the game, and eventually stop playing. Getting the Character, Camera, and Controls right is one of the hardest and most important parts of game design, and one of my favorite parts to iterate on.
Character
Character movement defines how a game will feel. I have worked on character controllers across multiple projects: the weight of a horde shooter's mech-suit, the lawnmower's turning inertia, the ship's locomotion in an XR space.
In Oh, Bugger!, I had a big part of the ownership over player character feel. The goal was heavy and powerful, something that reinforced the "Push Forward" design pillar. Acceleration, jump arc, camera response, and animation timing were tuned together until the character felt heavy but fluid in all situations.
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, first-person setups, and the camera design required for extended XR sessions.
In Rivertale, camera comfort was a safety requirement, not just a design decision. The ship moves constantly, the play space is physical, and motion sickness was 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, Vive trackers, and custom physical hardware. Each controller changes what interactions feel like, and I find those translation challenges super interesting: the gap between what the player's hand does and what the game needs to understand creates the design space that ties everything together.
For Rivertale, I itarated on the input between the custom Arduino 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 was tuned through playtesting, making adjustments until the physical and digital felt fluent to any new player.
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.