WEB Signal 413
Building Tactile UX: Honoring Intentional Design With Lottie
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The team replaced a physics engine with programmatic Lottie state control and DOM math to deliver a precisely choreographed tactile web game.
Using Lottie lets front-end engineers keep animation frames exactly as designed, avoiding the approximations of physics simulations. The approach reduces reliance on heavy WebGL or physics libraries, but requires custom event handling and coordinate calculations. It demonstrates a path for projects that need deterministic, designer-driven motion rather than realistic physics.
Written by elseif from the cluster below · every claim links back to a sourceThe three things worth knowing
Deterministic animation was achieved by driving Lottie JSON files directly through its API instead of a physics engine.
Click positions are transformed into local coordinates and a single distance metric controls scoring, feedback intensity, and explosion placement.
The solution avoids WebGL and heavy physics libraries, but requires careful DOM mapping and manual segment control, and it cannot replace true physics-based interactions.
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