2026 Week 32: ducked, and finally able to turn

Building annoyances

It's strange how it is always the little things in a control system that drive you up the wall. Well, actually, we haven't implemented wall running yet precisely because it won't be a small addition. But that's not what we meant and we know it. We mean the subtle things, the little annoyances are what stand out, far more than the bigger moves perhaps not being or doing what you expected. It's the repeat glitch whenever you go over a certain corner, or the fact that sometimes the jump just doesn't trigger when you requested it. Or, as in our recent case, you are ducked and you decide to change direction and the character just sits there.

Well, no more. We officially have the 'ducked change direction' animation.

The reason it took so long is simply because any animation that edges into more 3d-style movement, rather than 2d, becomes a lot slower to animate and get right. Mainly because we have to bend the 2d frame system in ways it isn't optimised for.

Perhaps in the future we'll actually achieve the editor we dreamed of back at the start. The one where we have an actual 3d stick figure, but we only look at it in 2d. But we attempted that enough times to know that our 3d calculations weren't up to scratch, and it brought far more problems than it solved. Perhaps we'll try again when we get to EXIIT or maybe even EXIIIT.

Light on words, big in feel

There isn't much more to say about this week, we just focused on the feel of specific movements and got rid of the glitches that made things run clunkily. We're all about avoiding clunky as much as possible. Quite a lot of that bad feeling was just down to missing frame bridges, which is why our animation graph now looks worse that spaghetti junction -- but... players aren't going to see that. They will feel the difference however.