Coffee Diary - January 2026

Hey Exanimates, We're working as hard as we can to get everything ready for the 0.9.5 update, but one of the new creatures we're introducing has proven a lot more problematic than we expected. This creature is larger and more oddly proportioned than anything we've done before, and this has caused a lot of problems with our physics driven character motion. Character physics have been our biggest development challenge, it took us literally years of experimenting, iterating and refining them before we got them to a point where most players were happy with how characters move and respond to inputs. This is immeasurably more complex than just an animation problem. Our character's movements are driven exclusively by physical forces and virtual muscles, they physically interact with everything, they must promptly react to inputs and move in any direction while also turning, performing actions, negotiating uneven ground, reacting to collisions and forces and trying to stay balanced, all at the same time. And that's just the basics, with many more specific and difficult problems we had to tackle. It's not just an animation or physics problem, the meat of it is how characters reactively decide when and how to move each part of their body, how much force to exert with each muscle in every moment to produce slick, smooth and plausibly human-like movement while also feeling very responsive to control. Humans are able to do this thanks to millions of years of evolution and a lifetime of practice in the real world. A program that can replicate much of this in a fast real time sim is no small feat. We started with something very clumsy, and while we hoped to improve it, we believed that players would be more forgiving of some of the clumsiness for everything that such a dynamic system has to offer. We know now that's not how things go. There's always room to improve many things, but after all this work the core physics that are the foundation of gameplay are undeniably in a good place and far better than we ever imagined they could be. Unfortunately, this new creature threw a huge spanner in the works of all this fine tuning we've done over the years. We've been focusing on teaching humans to move, and so far we've gotten away with just some broad adjustments for other humanoid characters. The odd proportions and even just the distribution of mass on this new creature really did not work well at all, and this was kind of terrifying as it's a very delicately balanced system that at this point feels more like magic than science. Any small change could throw everything out of whack, and we couldn't even be sure if getting this creature working is possible. Humans after all are real, bio-mechanically sound creatures, this is something less anatomically plausible. The new creature could barely even stand, it wasn't able to move its limbs properly and dashing and running around was far beyond its capabilities. We weren't just going to give up and cut it though, we had to try. We still want to add many more creatures, our plans include that creature types are very local and vary as we expand the world. We're even considering adding procedural elements to creatures as well, building on our already very modular and morphable character system. So we began the difficult and scary process of trying to understand all the reasons why it failed to move properly and do something about it. Our first problem was with basic muscle function, and this at least