Building a Character Controller with the Game Agent
Make your animated sprite playable: what a character controller does, and how to ask the Voidless game agent for movement, facing and animation states that feel right.
You've generated a character and animated it. A character controller turns that art into something the player drives: it reads input, moves the sprite, faces the right way and plays the right animation. In this guide we'll cover what a good controller does and how to get one from the game agent.
What a controller does
Three jobs, in sync:
- Read input: arrow keys, WASD, a gamepad or touch.
- Move the character through the world.
- Play the matching animation: idle when still, run when moving, facing the direction of travel.
When these line up, the character feels alive instead of sliding around.
Step 1: Have the animations ready
The controller is only as good as the animation set behind it. Put the character's animations in the project first: idle, run, jump and attack for a platformer, or walks in every direction for a top-down game.
Step 2: Ask for the controller
In the project chat, describe what you want in terms of feel, not code:
- "Make the knight the player. Arrow keys or WASD move, space jumps, J attacks. Use the knight's idle, run, jump and attack animations."
- "Top-down: the cat walks in eight directions with WASD and uses the walk animation for each direction."
The agent writes the code, reloads the game and tells you what it changed.
Step 3: Check the states
Play and watch the animation follow the action:
- Not moving: idle.
- Moving: run or walk, facing the right way.
- Acting: attack or jump plays once, then back to idle.
If something is off, say what you see: "the attack animation gets cut off when I move", "he faces left while walking right".
Step 4: Tune the feel
Small changes to speed and responsiveness change everything. Ask for them directly: "accelerate faster", "a little less floaty on the jump", "let me change direction in mid-air". A controller that responds at once feels tight; a laggy one feels mushy. Every build is a checkpoint, so you can roll back.
Where it leads
Once the player moves and animates correctly, you have the base for everything else: a level to move through, enemies to fight and items to collect.