Imagine a racing game where the cars grip the road with almost glue-like quality, that can accelerate to maximum speed in the blink of an eye, where races are dull affairs essentially comprising the movement of a weightless metal block from A to B in the most efficient manner possible. Doesn’t sound like much fun does it? That’s because the primary challenge, (and therefore gameplay), of a racing game centers around the relative unwieldiness of the car. This challenge can be further expanded upon by offering multiple vehicle-types, all with different handling characteristics, as well as a variety of road surfaces with which the vehicle traction can be affected.

So what relevance does a driving game bear on the subject of animation? Analogies aside, relative unwieldiness, created by inertia, is one of the most basic and often overlooked avenues of character driving with which we can improve that all-important fun-factor that games strive to produce.

Though touched on earlier in the article Player Control: Fast vs Slow, inertia does not deal with the speed and responsiveness of animations themselves, but instead with the movement of the character through the gameworld, which is closely linked to the animator’s driving animations.
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