State of Decay 3
Since 2023 I've worked as a games programmer at Wushu Studios on a long-running contract with Undead Labs, building the vehicle camera system for State of Decay 3. This is ongoing work under NDA, so this page stays deliberately high-level: the goals and behaviours of the system rather than any implementation detail.
Tracking & Framing
The camera follows the vehicle intelligently rather than sitting on a fixed rig, blending between free-look and an auto-aligning follow mode, and adjusting which end of the vehicle it frames when driving forward versus reversing. Getting the hand-off between those states to feel natural, rather than snapping or fighting the player's own camera input, was one of the trickier parts of the system.
Gameplay footage courtesy of GameSpot.
Reactive Feel
A lot of the camera's character comes from how it reacts to what's happening to the vehicle: field of view shifting with speed and airtime, camera shake layered from terrain, impacts and other damage sources, and positional response to jumps, landings, suspension and drifting. Each of those contributors is tuned and blended independently so they read clearly without piling on top of each other.
Gameplay footage courtesy of GameSpot.
Collision & Occlusion Handling
In an open world, the camera has to stay out of geometry without constantly fighting the player for control. I built handling that keeps the camera clear of the world around it, easing in and out smoothly rather than popping, with fallback behaviour for the tighter spaces a naive push-in can't resolve on its own.
Data-Driven Tuning
Most of the camera's behaviour is exposed to designers through data rather than hardcoded in C++, so the feel of the camera can be iterated on without engineering involvement. Alongside that, I built debug tooling to visualise and tune the camera live, which made tracking down exactly which part of the system was causing an unwanted feel far faster than guesswork.
References
This is active, confidential contract work for Undead Labs, so I can't share source, footage of my own, or go much deeper than what's above, but I'm happy to talk through the camera system's design at a high level if you're curious.