A walking animal, unpowered
You are the muscle.
This animal has no engine. It stands on the dusk plain with its weight in its hooves and waits. Turn your scroll wheel and the turning becomes its stride — down walks it on, up walks it back, fast breaks it into a run. Stop, and it stops with you.
Scroll to take the first step
Watch a hoof. When it lands, it stays — pinned to the exact patch of ground you left it on — while the whole animal draws forward over it. That is the only honest way to walk: the foot holds the earth and the body moves past.
Every footfall here is placed by you. Roll the wheel a little and a leg reaches, sets down, and takes your weight. Roll it back and the hoof lifts off the same print it made.
Ease the wheel down and it finds a four-beat walk. Three hooves stay on the ground while the fourth swings ahead — the animal is never off-balance, never in the air. This is the slow, careful gait: most of each stride is spent standing on the leg, not moving it.
The readout below names what your hand is doing: the cadence and the stride grow together as you push the wheel harder, just as they do in a living thing.
Now lean into it. As your scroll quickens, the diagonal pairs begin to fall together — foreleg and opposite hind striking as one — and the plain starts to stream past the legs. The neck lowers, the back begins to work, and the animal gathers itself under you.
Flick the wheel and it breaks. In a run there is a moment — the suspension — when all four hooves have left the ground at once and nothing carries the animal but its own flight. The spine flexes and extends like a bow, stealing an extra hand's-width from every stride.
Push harder and the ground blurs. Only your hand keeps it aloft; the instant you slow, it comes back to earth.
Reverse the wheel. The animal does not turn around — it retraces its own hoofprints, legs cycling backward, the whole plain sliding the other way. It will walk back through every metre you brought it, all the way to the first step, and stand where it started.
Let the wheel go still. The last stride finishes, the lifted hoof reaches for the ground, and the animal settles four-square. The bounce leaves its back; its head comes up; it breathes. It will wait here, exactly this still, for as long as you leave it.
No footage, no sprite sheet, no looped clip. Every limb is solved from scratch, each frame, on one canvas — and the clock that drives it is not time. It is your scroll.
Four two-bone legs. Given a hip and a hoof, the knee is found by the law of cosines — real inverse kinematics, bending fore and hind the way an animal's do.
Each hoof's world position is a pure function of distance travelled, so it plants where you left it and slides back as the body advances. Nothing is keyed to a timeline.
Distance is your scroll. Velocity chooses walk, trot or run and lengthens the stride; a flexing spine and a bounding back appear only at speed. Stop scrolling and every leg freezes mid-stride.