Learning the mechanics of the game begins with movement.
Starting with stationary movement.
When you move your mouse around on the screen you will notice that your SuperAnimal in the center of the screen adjusts position and faces the cursor.
When your cursor crosses the imaginary vertical line down the center of your screen, the SuperAnimal will immediately change facing accordingly.
Due to the 2D Top-down nature of the game, and style choices, you always get presented a forward representation of the character regardless of its facing.
Let’s move around. The ‘W’ and ‘S’ keys move one’s SuperAnimal up and down, and the ‘A’ and ‘D’ keys move one’s SuperAnimal left and right on the game terrain. The position of a SuperAnimal is always centered on screen.
Combining non-opposed keys combines those inputs to enable eight directions of movement while pressing opposed keys nullifies movement along that axis.
Standard movement offers a good deal of control, but it is not particularly fast.
Jumping:
Pressing the ‘space bar’ key prompts a SuperAnimal to jump, and jumping around is a lot faster.
Jumps can be made even faster if a player manages to follow up a jump with another jump at the precise time that the SuperAnimal lands following the previous jump.
This is called a super jump and if done right then one should notice sparks flying behind the super jumper.
The main advantage to moving instead of jumping is that some actions that would be interrupted by jump actions are not interrupted by moving. It is also less noisy and also doesn’t require tapping the space bar repeatedly.
More speed is nice though, so if one plans on doing lots of jumping, try to make them super jumps for that nice boost in speed.
One last thing to mention about jumping is that a SuperAnimal retains movement control, and so can change movement direction throughout the course of a jump.
Crouching/ Sneaking:
There is another kind of movement that a healthy super animal is capable of – and that is crouching and sneaking.
By default this is bound to your ‘Ctrl’ key – and it isn’t a bad key-bind, to be fair.
While crouched, a super animal is able to move more slowly and more quietly than normal.
While crouched one can also roll, and this is faster than normal sneaking. There is also one more thing that sneaking can do – depending on the equipped weapon – and that is zooming out a little to see further.
Jumping out of the Eagle:
The last kind of movement to talk about is jumping out of a flying eagle like the badass that your SuperAnimal is! This using the default ‘E’ key. A very useful key, that, but we’ll cover that later.
Actually a SuperAnimal less jumps out of a flying eagle and more kind of glides out of it clinging to an umbrella or similar for dear life.
Now if a player presses the same button that was used to jump out of the Eagle, well then the super animal puts the umbrella away and it begins hurtling towards the earth like an actual badass. Just don’t forget to use the same key to deploy the umbrella before it hits the ground as otherwise it’ll just embarrassingly go splat. Not necessarily the end of the world as while it’ll be stunned, the super animal won’t actually take any damage from landing hard. Just hope that nobody was there to see it.
And that mostly covers movement. There are other ways to get around. Namely, zip-lines, emus and hamster balls, and these can be interacted with using the same button used to jump out of the eagle, but I’ll cover these later.
Pick-ups are ‘next’ to be covered.