Thx and agreed, I guess the whole concept stands and falls with a good camera control. But wouldn't it be difficult/complicated for the Player to control cam and ball simultaneously? Since the ball moves more freely and is trickier to control, compared to some dude in a common FPS, I thought to have no choice but making the cam automatic(?). In fact I wanted the cam to always stay just behind and above the ball, but found it surprisingly tricky to simply figure what's actually 'behind' - since the ball often changes direction quickly. For instance when deflected on some object, or the User presses 'opposing arrows', changing roll direction very quickly - a straight-forward implementation makes the cam swerve just as wildly.
My current idea for improvement would be to turn the camera in discrete 90 degree steps (front, left, back, right in world space), so you'd get a stable viewing angle at least for some time.
I of course could be wrong, but I still think the player having normal third-person camera control would be better. I don't think it's any harder to control than any standard 3D platformer, it just has floaty physics but that's independent of the camera. The automatic camera makes it much harder to control, because I try go in one-direction but then the camera changes and the game decides that no, now I'm going in a different direction, and with the camera flying around wildly it's really hard to get a read on the depth and distance of my movements. I think it's always better to just use standard control schemes, especially with camera controls. Stand on the shoulders of giants and all that.
