Normally when you hear the words “rope” and “dog” in the same sentence, you think about a dog on a leash, but in this robot dog, the rope is what makes it move, not what stops it from going too far.

So you’ve built your Gothic castle-it’s time for your hero to dash into play and defend the battlements. Your gaming engine supports skeletons, an animation system called Inverse Kinematics (IK), and ...