Confusion regarding Points of View

#1

Been quite a while since I last posted here.

I’ll try and keep this simple. We all know that there are going to be first person and third person camera modes when playing as a creature. However, what I’m stumped on is whether or not we would see the world the same way as our creatures obviously do during gameplay. From what I’ve read so far, third person mode is going to be largely the same as first person, in the sense that, for example, I have a creature that can’t see color like humans can, but it can sense thermal radiation.

In first person, that logic makes perfect sense, seeing that I am supposed to see the world as my creature sees it. But would I still be colorblind, and be able to see thermal radiation in third person, which in most of these types of games you’d see your character’s body in regular human vision?

I’m sorry that I couldn’t find another topic like this.

#2

I think you should keep the vision wether 1p or 3p as it might be considered an unfair advantage to switch visions.

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#3

So we’ve talked about this issue quite a lot and basically there are two conflicting goals:

  1. It’s cool to show people other senses, like thermal radiation sense as pit vipers have, or echo location like bats, on the screen. It’s cool if animals can follow scent trails or have zoomable eyes or something.

  2. We want to make sure every creature is viable. If you want to play as a worm which doesn’t have eyes you still need to be able to see well enough to actually play.

So personally my guess is (and it’s not decided) we’ll have a basic sensory package every creature has regardless of anatomy (where you can see on the screen and hear stuff through the speakers) which is augmented with extra cool senses on top only if you have those. So every creature can see and those with especially good eyes get some kind of bonus to that.

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#4

Ah, I see now. So it’s probably going to be kinda like Spore’s Cell/Creature stages, where if you have a creature that’s blind, you’d only see the area around your creature, as opposed to if it has eyes, you’ll see everything full screen?

#5

Yeah, I would say so. The tiny area around you that would be visible to you might be regarded as being perceived with touch for example. I would not give the player sound unless they have ears of some sorts (there would still be the soundtrack, just no environmental sounds lol). It has to be possible to play without certain senses we human persons take for granted, but it cannot feel cheaty. You have to develop a sense to utilize it. The only exception would be the sight, which would be granted in a tiny amount even to blind animals and we can simply say “oh yeah that’s touch”, even though the creature would not be able to really touch everything in their entire radius at the same time. Also, the tiny visible area the blind creatures would “see” would be gray, as… yeah, they don’t have eyes, so they do not deserve to see colors. And speaking of scent trails, I think I figured what colors they should have. Just base it on the color of the thingy that emitted the smell. Was it a red fruit? Red trail of “clouds”. Was it a biege animal? Biege trail. You get the point. Thanks to this, the player would be even able to tell which trails represent whose smell to an extend, which should be a thing since that’s a thing sniffy animals can do. Also, that would not feel as unnatural and out of place as let’s say purple cloud for a brown animal.