Movement

• Steering Behaviours

  March 15, 2026

  Grid movement is discrete: an entity occupies a tile, moves to an adjacent tile. That works for turn-based games and many real-time ones. But the moment you want an enemy that smoothly curves toward a target, a projectile that arcs, or a group of guards that spread out without running into each other, you need movement that operates in continuous space.

  Steering behaviours — introduced by Craig Reynolds in 1999 — describe motion as the difference between where an entity is heading and where it wants to head. That difference, the steering force, is applied to the entity’s velocity each frame. The result is motion that looks purposeful and organic rather than grid-snapped.