Why a drone camera.

The first time I saw a drone camera in a practice session on TV, it really hit me what a cool experience that would be. It’s floaty and it moves, and you get this real sense of following the car, and of speed. I knew then it would be one of the defining things about PocketGP.

I always wanted PocketGP to feel like a miniature world, and the drone camera really works for that. From up there, with the top and bottom of the picture gone soft, the track looks almost like a model. I think it suits a casual game too. PocketGP isn’t trying to be anything more than that.

The hard part was actually getting it right. If you go full drone, the realistic way, it whips round pretty hard and it can be really disorienting. It took a lot of tweaking so you could still judge the corners, while keeping that smooth, bouncy momentum.

I got it wrong a few times along the way. The first version just sat dead behind the car, no sway at all. I wanted the drone to be alive, fighting for its life to keep up. Then it went too far the other way. It saw corners coming too early and snapped round, and that lazy drone feel was gone. A drone should overshoot a little and then catch up.

Later I tried one that sat tighter behind the car, because sometimes it showed a bit too much of the side. When I drove it, it was just too jarring, so the old one stayed.

The tight corners fought me the most. On Samba’s infield it would sometimes whip round to the front of the car, which made turning pretty much impossible. At Ardennes it kind of got stuck in a tree. Now on the tight ones it stays round the outside of the corner. For the trees, I wondered if they could just go see-through, like I’d seen in some other games. So now when a tree gets in the way, it fades out.

It was such a joy to see it all come together. I still love the swaying, that feeling of movement in the camera. It’s probably my favourite part of the game.

KA