Mikael Lind | Blog | Games | Texts

Ragdoll

26 Jul 2009

I’ve worked on a few physics games over the last few months. It’s kind of hard to identify with cannonballs and spinning letters. The gameplay is all abstract. I’ll continue making abstract games, but I’d also like to make games with characters — people, not letters. To be able to put people into my games, I need to learn more about animation. Last week I tried animating a character with physics, but the result wasn’t as good as I had hoped. The code is available here.

Next thing to try is attaching a non-physical animation to a simplified physics representation of the character, such as a box resting on a damped spring. I believe this is the most common approach to character animation. Some extra work is required to ensure that the character’s feet make contact with the ground, a technique known as inverse kinematics.