Implementing Game Cinematography: Technical Challenges and Solutions for Automatic Camera Control in Games

Cinematographic games are a rising genre in the computer games industry and an increasing number of titles published include some aspects of cinematography in the gameplay or the storytelling. At present state, camera handling in computer games is managed primarily through custom scripts and animations and there is an inverse relationship between player freedom and cinematographic quality. In this paper, we present a description of a series of technical challenges connected with the development of an automatic camera control library for computer games and we showcase a set of algorithmic and engineering solutions.