Introducing cinematics

Cinematics were developed largely for motion pictures, films, and movies. Today, we apply cinematic techniques to non-interactive game sequences, known as cut scenes, to enhance the gaming experience. The overall gaming experience has to be designed with cut scenes in mind as they usually fulfil certain game design objectives. These objectives are often slotted in between gameplay to enrich the storytelling experience in games.

Very much like shooting a movie, we would need to decide what kind of shots need to be taken, which angles to shoot from, how much zooming is needed, how many cameras to use, and what path the camera needs to take in order to develop a motion picture sequence of our object/objects of focus. The techniques employed to create this clip are known as cinematic techniques.

So, in this chapter, we will first go through a few key objectives that explain why cinematics are needed in games, and you learn a couple of simple cinematic techniques that we...