This is The Mechanic, where Alex Wiltshire invites developers to discuss the inner workings of their games. This time, colourful procedural climbing game Grow Home [official site].
Put simply, BUD is a box suspended over legs and is held together by springs. In practice, BUD is an ungainly robot child, staggering and tripping his way around a low-poly world. BUD is the star of Ubisoft Reflections Grow Home and Grow Up, all grinning face-grille and gangly limbs. He s a kind of super-ambulant WALL-E, able to run, scale walls, leap and fly, in a stumbling and toppling off things kind of way.
It s hard to begrudge BUD for his drunken awkwardnesses, though, because as you attempt to control him they form a sense of a delightfully clumsy personality: BUD s drunken awkwardnesses are BUD. But he s not carefully hand-animated. BUD is a bunch of maths, or more precisely:
THE MECHANIC: Procedural animation