StickmanMan

The only thing that comes to my mind are those old "halftime" games where you had to catch the falling people with a net... hmm...

I never really liked games where you had to control all the limbs... what you could do is make a stick figure action/adventure game... like an interactive stickdeath? I dunno... interesting idea though!

How about a climbing game. You have a stick figure facing a wall with hand/foot holds represented by lines. You use the mouse to grab a hand/foot and move it to the next hand/foot hold, but if you overreach you fall to your death.

four limbs is too much to control effectively, at least if you want to do it simultaneously.

to go with the climbing game idea: how about splitting controls between upper and lower half of the body (more along the lines of shifting weight than controlling individual limbs)?

I think wasd for upper and ijkl for lower half would be practical. Movement would be semi-automatical, i.e. if you manage to move a limb or body part close enough to a handhold it will connect, if you stretch far away it will lose contact.

the two halves will also influence each other (i.e. move upper to the left but leave the lower will also drag the lower to the left).

with a 2x4 direction control scheme you can come up with lots of possible techniques / movements:

ex:

top left + lower left = try and stretch uniformly to the left.
top left + lower neutral = try and stretch upper body to the left while maintaining foot position.
top left + lower right = try and stretch the upper body fartherst left, while lower body counters the movement, maximising lateral width.
...

to spice this up I would make movement incremental, i.e. as long as a button is pressed the body segment tries to move in that direction, as long as either a new contactpoint is met or the movement influences the other contact points to an extent where contact breaks.

if this seems too complex to start out with you can make a climbing/walking wiggly-worm with only two segments and two contact points.

I haven''t really gone rock climing so someone can correct me if I am wrong, but I beleve that on the the major tenents of rock climing is that you always have three limbs in contact with the rock wall at all times. i.e. right hand moving to the next hand hold and all the other limbs are holding fast to the wall.

This way you just use the mouse to select one limb and the pull it to the location you want to hook on to. The body would shift its weight around to try an grab the hand hold.

I like that climbing idea... seems like it could be quite possible to achieve... thanks a lot guys for the ideas

Could work. Throw in a muscular endurance meter that reflects fatigue, and you''ve got a handy time limit. The more stretched out your limbs are, or the more time you spend with one off the wall, the more quickly you fatigue. You might even do a meter for each limb. If you have two fingers wedged in a crackbelow your shoulder and aren''t holding on with the other hand, you''d better find something to grab in a hurry, or else you''re going to fall.

This reminds me of a number of experiments I read up on. They taught 2D and then 3D skeletons to perambulate on their own. The 2D were the most fun. They started out with just a little walking pair of legs, but then they came it an upper body and taught it to swing its arms for fluidity, and it could walk up hills, or even climb ladders, all by itself. The last animation I saw had it running, climbing up a sheer face, and then web-swinging across the sky. Hilarious.

hehehe... I think I saw some videos of something like that before

Ya, fatigue/balance meters of some sort would be pretty cool too so''s to add a challenge type thing to the game