May 28, 2026

Short king goes full stretch mode

Our 2D game character grew 3% taller every time he walked

Gamers roast the ‘simple’ bug that made this hero magically stretch mid-stride

TLDR: A game hero kept growing taller whenever he walked because the artwork didn’t line up properly between animations. Commenters turned that odd bug into a bigger spectacle, fighting over whether the mistake was normal, trivial, or blog-worthy at all.

A tiny game bug turned into prime comment-section theater after developers revealed their hero, Leo, would become about 3% taller every time he started walking—then snap back to normal when he stopped. Even worse, his feet sometimes hovered above the ground, giving the whole game a subtle “why does this feel cursed?” energy. The fix was basically: stop treating every drawing the same, because the artwork was made on different-sized canvases and Leo wasn’t standing in the exact same place in each one.

But the real show was the crowd reaction. One camp instantly pushed back on the post’s big claim that this setup is “normal,” with one commenter bluntly declaring, “This is not normal,” arguing artists absolutely can use fixed-size sprite sheets. Another crowd was less interested in the bug and more interested in dragging the write-up itself: one person said it “reads like something that came out of an LLM,” while another went full scorched-earth and called the whole issue “fizzbuzz level,” basically saying: why is this even a blog post? Ouch.

And then there were the comedy replies. One disappointed reader joked they expected the story to be about a famous meme video instead, which is classic internet behavior: ignore the bug, chase the bit. Meanwhile, a more practical voice asked why the fix wasn’t done earlier when packing the game files. So yes, Leo stopped stretching—but only after the comments grew almost as heated as the character.

Key Points

  • The article describes a bug in which the 2D player character appeared about 3% taller during walking animations and could float up to 27 pixels above the ground.
  • The root cause was inconsistent animation canvas sizes and character placement within those canvases, combined with a single global sprite scale and vertical offset.
  • Different animations had different effective character heights, so applying one scale caused visible size changes when switching between idle and walk states.
  • Using a standard alpha bounding box alone was not sufficient because anti-aliasing and drop-shadow halos extended below the visible feet line.
  • The fix was to compute per-animation scale and offset at load time by scanning frames for a visual feet line and averaging feet position and character height across each animation.

Hottest takes

"This is not normal" — jay_kyburz
"Reads like something that came out of an LLM" — nnevatie
"It’s fizzbuzz level" — raincole
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