One of the most common requests from our playtesting and the Demo release is the desire to rotate the camera. This is totally expected, it's a common thing in the genre to rotate the view! Why didn't we have it?

You can also read this on our website! Read the dev log

Evoking feelings with design

With the game we're making, we were being intentional about the lack of rotation initially, because we want the game to create a certain friction and feeling for the player, as they approach early mid game. Not only this, but we were leaning on the lack of camera rotation as part of the feeling of ... tightness. Of space feeling small. It was intentional that the game felt a little pressure so that you notice the narrative and mechanics intertwine, and in our play testing this was coming through well.

Many players remarked on how, once you get to a certain research level, things felt really cramped and they had a strong desire to expand or explore the space more.

But if it feels bad is it always good?

This was kind of an interesting question to explore from a designer perspective. I don't think the game ever felt bad because of the lack of rotation, but it does become a point of friction that we can question whether it's helping or hurting the experience.

Or, rather, if we can rotate the camera, does the space feel small still? Does the feeling still land? Given how the rest of the mechanics work, rotating the view doesn't really make it feel bigger... so why not allow it?

Content reasons...

A lot of the buildings just don't have any detail in the back, as I was originally working on the premise that we'd never see em. This is easy to fix and many buildings have already been updated.

Technical reasons...

Curiously, the game code has always supported rotation for the longest time, it's just disabled... why?

There's was a somewhat funny reason: Bloom.

This is what it looks like when you rotate the camera, and the sun hits the water (or anything else shiny enough)...

[img src="https://clan.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/images/41584394/1a108ad617d663ace0d4ccd81cf51f5becacd2c1.jpg"][/img]

This is not a hard problem to solve, we can clamp the brightness going into the bloom and we have a much nicer experience.

Camera rotation!

You can see the rotation + the clamped lighting, it looks a lot nicer when it isn't so bright In the next build, you can rotate the camera and let us know how it feels. You can view it below or on our dev log here.