As it turns out, creating a rigid body physics system from scratch during a 48-hour game jam is not such a great idea.

My idea stars a prospector on the frontier, who slips and falls into deep chasm. He survives, but has to climb out. To do this, you control the limbs of the climber, dragging them from hold to hold. Ideally the game would calculate how much strain each limb was under, and he could lose grip and fall again. I picked this one because (so I thought) it was the simplest of the ideas I had come up with. Here’s the art I did for it. Ignore his missing limbs, they would just be mirrored in the game.

Unfortunately, Flaxen (my base code) doesn’t handle hierarchical transformations, let alone joints and rigid body constraints. I’ve wasted hours today just getting a positional transform to cascade, but this is worthless without also handling rotation. (And scale? Fuhgeddaboudit!) I’m feeling stupid for even trying.

So at this point, I’m going to do a cursory search for some rigid body physics libraries for Haxe, but it seems unlikely I’ll find anything that will integrate quickly with my library Flaxen, let alone the dependent libraries of Ash and HaxePunk. Then I’ve gotta decide if there’s enough time for a plan B, or do I just call up my friends and say never mind, I’m coming with you.