The goal was clear. Make a QWOP/Getting Over It like game where you control the two arms (upper arm and lower arm or shoulder and elbow as we called it) of a physics-based ragdoll character to dive down 100m.

First step was to get the arms move in a somewhat organic and logic manner. This was achieved within a very short time.

After that it was time to add the movement part. For this I swapped the background with an super ugly checkerboard to see the movement and I started to think about how to calculate the applied forces. For the physics calculations Unity did all the parts, but I had to come up with a clever way of preventing wrong forces so that the swimming feels realistic.

The steps above took only a few hours to finish and the rest of the jam was spent making it look cool, add some background elements to make the scene feel more alive. Then we added an objective for the player to get, main menu, pause menu and of course music and sounds which were done by @merlinnsound.

But, the main mechanic (apart from some tweaking) stayed the same. The final result you can see below.

If you want to checkout our game, here is the link: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/48/how-to-swim

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