Zoom in the game?

I’m trying to make it so when a character talks the camera is zoomed onto the character, then once the dialog is over the camera zooms back out. The camera behavior doesn’t seem to be able to do this.

Typically you would want to fake this “zoom” somehow. If you were to actually zoom the camera in, the sprites would all get super pixellated.

The only way I could think of faking it would be by manually making the sprites larger, but that’d make them pixellated anyway. I don’t need them to be zoomed in by a lot, I think it would work. Is there no behavior for this? or a feature in the camera?

Many games make a separate set of “Portrait” sprites for close ups and dialog, so that’s one way to do it.

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-5xNzoJ4tVVs/UQ9-Rh-6UHI/AAAAAAAACBc/f_rrvjqmI9Y/s1600/Fire+Emblem+Awakening+2.bmp

http://www.siliconera.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/persona_4_yosuke.jpg

Ill have to look into this. Thank you

Edit: I may just do that or try to fake a slight zoom in. I feel like thatd be a pain though.

Actual z axis on the camera would be amazing for larger boss battles. It isn’t common for 2D games to z cam, but I have seen it before, and have no issue with sprite distortion.

Tiny Wings is an excellent example.
https://youtu.be/W25BAba0oqc

Tiny wings (great game) can get away with this two ways:

  1. The bird sprites are really big, and they are just shrunk down most of the time until you zoom in.

  2. The hills and background are not sprites - they get rendered as procedural geometry on the GPU, so they can be whatever resolution is called for.

You could probably do something similar where you make large sprites, and just reduce the scale by 50% most of the time, but I haven’t tried that before.

@grazer Mhx has a point, why not have a z-axis on the camera? Its not like youll be required to use it, if people want to use it, theyll use it, if people realize the sprites are pixelated when zooming in too far, theyll fix it. I think it would be a very nice feature to add.