Designing The Ice Hiker's Camera & Animation System

Camera & Character Facing

I wanted players to be able to see the character's face and build more of an emotional connection with him without restricting camera control. To achieve this, I separated the camera's facing direction from the character's facing direction. The player can freely look around, but the actual character will only turn toward the camera when the player performs an action.

I verified the design through A/B testing, where every player preferred my system over Unity's default Cinemachine setup.

Looking back, the camera occasionally clips through terrain in a distracting way. I believe the collision raycast I implemented should have been a "spherecast", which would've allowed me to make the camera more sensitive.

Animation System

I also designed and implemented a custom animation system for The Ice Hiker because Unity's Animator Controller felt limited and difficult to scale for our use cases.

This system supports custom transition times between animations. I implemented this because some animations feel better when they play immediately, such as throwing the pickaxe, while others look better when they happen more gradually, like falling.