Soft body character, controlled by player. Mesh is skinned by physics particles. Connections between the particles act like muscules.

Dude. Duuuuuuude. This looks like such amazing fun. It's hard to overstate just how much character and personality this has. I know I'm basically turning into a cheerleader for you here but you're going about it exactly the right way, building from technology first, and letting the art arrive as it does through refinement and experiment. It's not about the endpoint. It's about having a system to arrive at some interesting endpoint. I think to get more character, you would need to attach rigid elements to specific points - eg, hats. This follows the convention of 'little nightmares' of using specific inanimate objects to distinguish characters from one another. There's also the Rayman concept, where you can have hands that are sort of floating besides a character. This is also how the hands in 'worms 2' and the other 2d worms games function. I did an older 3d model project where I translated this concept into 3 dimensional rendering, but with a 2-dimensional play space. If you had to do that with your system, you would likely need a boids-style model for the hands, which might be a bit tricky to design, but it should result in smooth (non-exact) animation. Of course, for now, your snake-thing is flat on it's belly and not able to 'stand up' - which is probably what you would want it to do. I also think you won't run into copyright trouble if you go with snakes...(rather than worms, which is probably a bit too close to something established)

Yep, attaching rigid bodies to soft bodies is a required feature. Which I have already solved for the 2d version of engine. And you're right, I'm pushing tech to the ideal state, and with that the game will automatically have unique features. Standing up ssoft bodies is also one of the targets. In the 2d engine, soft bodies already have bones and muscules independent of the fleh, wichi allows them standing, walking, and possibly doing plenty of things if I find a way to machine learn the controls. Otherwise, engineering a control system with so many degrees of freedom would be challenging.

I could see an obstacle based local multiplayer game where you're wriggling things like that through other simulated particles/on/around stuff. With all the mini games you've made have you considered putting them all together in a sort of warioware esque mini-game-athon?

I'm more inclined to make a good deep big game for players to spend hundreds of hours in. But at some point I might create a collection of minigames for local multiplayer.

meat

imagine one of these came out every time you gooned

Goob job! Looks awesome.

Very cool. Can you combine this with your destructible particle system you posted yesterday, so that shooting it makes chunks of "flesh" fly off? And what's the performance cost of one such character - how many of these could you have on screen on an average gaming PC?

I will make these soft body characters destructible, than it will be posssible to shoot them and have pieces fly off. I tried to have about 20-30 such snakes, and it worked well. On my 3090 it's rarely below 100fps during my experiments. But I'll be aiming 1050 to have an ok fps