I like being able to stand up on the tail, very interesting movement controls. I'm curious how you got them working underneath. It's a little tricky to figure out how to move with only a few loops, but I think was getting it!
Viewing post in Loois the Looping Loopster jam comments
Thank you for noticing it. The worm movement was really tricky, and it took me basically two full days of experimenting. It is basically a really fine-tuned set of many parameters with dependencies between them. Each segment contributes force to the worm, and the head gets some extra force depending on the length of the worm. That's why the game feels so hard with a short worm. I'm not completely satisfied, but I couldn't figure out something better ^^ Thanks for playing!
Oh that's really interesting. I wonder if you could use principles of real snake movement to help influence that. I have a friend that makes segmented robots based on the types here: https://userweb.ucs.louisiana.edu/~brm2286/locomotn.htm, but it sounds quite challenging.
I actually tried that first, and some of it is still in the game. Mainly for aesthetic reasons. Each segment has a shift register storing the angle of the previous segment. Then each segment tries to "replay" the angle from the shift register buffer in relation to its previous segment. But that sadly did not work as expected. Maybe with some more tuning it could be done, but probably not for a 4-day game jam. I think it would be close to Sidewinding. When you see the tail of my "snake" bending up while bending the head, that is part of the effect. I left it in the game because the loopster felt more alive.