Building Game Worlds That Actually Move Like Reality

Most game physics courses teach you formulas. We teach you to feel how objects should behave when they collide, tumble, and break. Our autumn 2025 programme focuses on understanding force, momentum, and material properties through hands-on 3D experiments.

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Core Disciplines

What You'll Actually Learn

Collision Response Systems

Start with sphere-on-sphere impacts and work up to complex mesh collisions. You'll write solvers that handle bouncing, sliding, and friction in ways that look right to players.

Rigid Body Dynamics

Objects in games aren't just sprites with hitboxes. Learn how centre of mass, angular velocity, and torque create believable tumbling crates and toppling towers.

Constraint Solving

Chains, hinges, motors, springs. We'll build joint systems from scratch so you understand why rope bridges swing and why ragdolls sometimes go mental.

Material Properties

Wood doesn't shatter like glass. Metal doesn't bend like rubber. Model material behaviour so destruction effects match player expectations instead of looking like particle spam.

Soft Body Simulation

Cloth, jelly, deformable terrain. These require different maths than rigid bodies. You'll implement spring-mass systems and position-based dynamics for squishy stuff.

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Performance Optimisation

Physics eats CPU fast. Learn spatial partitioning, sleeping objects, and when to fake it. Real games need sixty frames per second more than they need perfect accuracy.

Programme Structure

How We Build Your Skills

Foundation Phase (Weeks 1-8)

No prior physics knowledge needed. We start with vectors, coordinate spaces, and basic calculus. First project is a bouncing ball simulator where you implement gravity and ground collision from first principles. Sounds simple but getting the damping coefficient right takes iteration.

Core Systems Development (Weeks 9-20)

Build a working physics engine piece by piece. Broad phase collision detection using spatial hashing, narrow phase with GJK algorithm, constraint solver with sequential impulses. You'll debug why objects tunnel through walls and learn why timestep matters more than most tutorials admit.

Advanced Topics (Weeks 21-32)

Character controllers that don't feel like ice skating, vehicle physics with suspension geometry, destructible environments using pre-fractured meshes. Plus integration with commercial engines so your knowledge transfers to Unreal or Unity workflows.

Portfolio Project (Weeks 33-40)

Pick something ambitious. Past students have built earthquake simulators, artillery ballistics systems, and soft body creature rigs. You'll present to industry guests and get feedback on both technical implementation and how it feels to play.

Learning Journey

Your Development Path

Enrolment Opens

Applications accepted from June 2025. We cap cohorts at eighteen to keep feedback personal.

Induction Week

September 2025 start. Set up dev environments, meet cohort, first physics challenge within three days.

Core Studies

Six months of structured learning with weekly projects. Expect to spend twenty hours per week on practical work.

Portfolio Phase

Final ten weeks building showcase work. Previous cohort projects have landed interviews at simulation and VFX studios.

Learning Environment

Our Stoke-on-Trent studio has twelve workstations with proper GPUs for real-time simulation. But most work happens remotely. Discord for daily questions, fortnightly code reviews over video call, and a Git workflow that mirrors industry practice.

Instructor Eilidh Gough previously worked on vehicle physics for racing sims. She's big on understanding why algorithms work rather than just copying implementations. Office hours twice weekly, longer if your collision solver is misbehaving.

About Our Team

Practical Outcomes

Skills You'll Have

Engine Integration

Connect custom physics systems to game engines through plugin architectures. Understand when to use built-in solvers versus rolling your own.

Performance Profiling

Use timing tools to identify bottlenecks. Optimise tight loops without breaking correctness. Ship physics that doesn't crater frame rates on mid-range hardware.

Technical Documentation

Write clear explanations of your systems for other developers. Comment code properly. Maintain wikis that don't go stale three months after launch.

Debugging Strategies

Physics bugs are subtle. Objects drifting, energy not conserving, rare edge cases causing explosions. Learn systematic approaches to isolating and fixing these issues.

Student Work

What Past Cohorts Built

$Destruction physics simulation showing fractured building facade$

Fracture System Project

Pre-computed Voronoi patterns with runtime stress calculation. Buildings crack at load-bearing points first. Took six weeks to get debris collision working without tanking performance.

Rope bridge physics demonstration with dynamic tension forces

Soft Constraint Networks

Chain links using distance constraints and position-based dynamics. The swaying feels natural because it accounts for wind force and weight distribution properly.

Character physics rig demonstrating realistic limb movement

Ragdoll Implementation

Full body rig with angular limits on joints and blend transition from animation. Harder than it looks because limbs need to not intersect while staying responsive to impacts.

Eilidh Gough, Lead Instructor

Spent nine years doing vehicle handling for racing games before teaching. Got tired of seeing graduates who could recite equations but couldn't tune a suspension that felt good. This programme fixes that gap.