---
title: "It started as a creature creator"
description: "Evil Engine's first commit wasn't an engine at all. It was a creature creator for the crawler, with procedural legs and a ragdoll."
url: "https://evil-engine.com/devlogs/day-one-was-a-crawler"
published: "2026-10-25T17:30:00.000Z"
modified: "2026-10-25T17:30:00.000Z"
---

Devlogs

2026-10-25 10:30 MST

# It started as a creature creator

Evil Engine's first commit wasn't an engine at all. It was a creature creator for the crawler, with procedural legs and a ragdoll.

---

I spent most of the year after sourcegd working on other things, but the idea of mounting games in Godot never really left my head. I kept coming back to it, wondering how I’d actually pull it off properly.

The first commit of a brand new project landed on October 24, an empty Godot 4.7 scene called the creature creator. The plan was small, I just wanted to rebuild the crawler from my Evil suite somewhere it didn’t have to fight Garry’s Mod for every single leg.

![A rough sketch of the crawler: a big round body, a grinning face full of teeth, and long legs ending in round feet](https://evil-engine.com/_astro/creature-creator-sketch.jn0hi3Vx_ZehDSy.webp)

## The crawler

By the end it had:

- legs solved by IK, as many per side as you want, thinning out as they crowd together
- joint limits on the hip, knee, ankle and foot, with a strain value per leg
- feet that raycast for footholds, and search inward when there’s nothing under them
- steps that fire when a leg drifts too far or strains, and never at the same time as a neighbouring leg
- a body that tilts to fit its feet and rides a spring on top of them, so landings sag and bounce back
- a ragdoll when it dies
- sculpted parts for the torso, head and spike legs

![The sculpted crawler slung low between its long legs, its shadow spread across the grid](https://evil-engine.com/_astro/creature-creator-crawler-side.CEvR0CRD_Zl0yma.webp)

![The crawler straddling a step, its legs reaching down to find footholds on both levels](https://evil-engine.com/_astro/creature-creator-crawler.CMc7t0js_8Efjx.webp)

There was a whole creator wrapped around it too, with tabs per body type, an organ palette, a part inspector, and an orbit camera over a fading grid.

![An untextured four-legged creature that’s mostly a mouth full of teeth](https://evil-engine.com/_astro/creature-creator-chomper.gGjsuKdX_Z19AfRF.webp)

_(oh God…)_

## Then it came out

On October 25 I pulled all of it out in one commit: “Going to remove this stuff for now and focus on engine infra.” A creature needs a world to crawl around in, and the world it belongs in is Garry’s Mod’s… so the next step was teaching Godot to read Garry’s Mod. The crawler is still sitting in the history, waiting for an engine worth putting it in.

![The crawler head-on, mouth open, front legs raised high on either side](https://evil-engine.com/_astro/creature-creator-crawler-front.DSRbA8_o_15klPa.webp)

Older

### [Half-Life 2's models in Godot](https://evil-engine.com/devlogs/half-life-2-models-in-godot)

Newer

### [How far the first version got](https://evil-engine.com/devlogs/how-far-the-first-version-got)

## Details

- **Written**: 2026-10-25 10:30 MST
- **Edited**: 2026-10-25 10:30 MST

## Contents

- [The crawler](https://evil-engine.com/devlogs/day-one-was-a-crawler#the-crawler)
- [Then it came out](https://evil-engine.com/devlogs/day-one-was-a-crawler#then-it-came-out)

## Stay up-to-date

- [RSS](https://evil-engine.com/rss.xml)
- Mailing list
- [Steam](https://store.steampowered.com/app/3731310/Evil_Engine)