Controllable rag doll like Ski Stunt, possible in Phaser3 physics?

Ski Stunt Simulator was a game from 2001 which, as it turned out, was a pretty clever and unique game. I can’t believe it’s a 20 year old game at this point, and there hasn’t been any games like this one.

The control scheme was remarkably smooth and intuitive. The ski guy’s posture would move depending on the mouse position on screen. So the mouse Y-axis controlled the stretch/crouch, and the X-axis the leaning forward/backward direction. By moving the mouse, it would extrapolate between these key positions, and this way you could shift your guy’s weight around. Combined with the semi-realistic physics you could do flips and saltos and it controlled really well. See what I mean in screenshot below:

It’s hard to get the original game up and running, I think it’s a Java app with some outdated dependencies or something. So I would like to recreate something like that in Phaser3 using Matter physics but I don’t think this is a trivial thing to do, bend at the knees, stretch etc. First of all it would require a ragdoll, so separate arm and leg elements, and then control the overall posture of the ski guy using the mouse.

But in the MatterJS examples, I don’t see any relevant examples, like how would you create a compounded rigid-body of several elements and control the arm and leg animations? Any ideas on how to approach this?

Maybe see https://brm.io/matter-js/demo/#ragdoll.

hm :thinking: turns out I was wrong, there was already a Ski Stunt remake back in 2011 it’s called Krashlander created by Jeff Weber (aka FarseerGames). It looks really cool with lots of extra features.

And on Steam there’s even a remake of the remake, a game called Just Ski+. Still though, a Phaser version of this type of game would be pretty neat.