How to Fix Squash and Stretch That Looks Wrong Because Volume Is Not Conserved

Squash and stretch that grows the character taller without thinning it, or flattens it without widening it, looks like a balloon inflating rather than a body deforming. Conserving volume by scaling axes inversely makes the motion feel weighty and real.

How to fix it

1. Scale axes inversely

When you multiply vertical scale by 1.3 for a stretch, multiply horizontal scale by about 1/1.3 so the overall area stays roughly constant and the shape reads as deforming, not growing.

2. Pivot at the contact point

Set the sprite pivot to the feet for a land squash so the character compresses downward into the ground rather than shrinking toward its center.

3. Ease the recovery

Stretch quickly at takeoff and squash hard on impact, then ease the return to neutral so the deformation has snap on the action and softness on the settle.

Catching the ones you can't reproduce

The hardest version of this to fix is the one you can't reproduce — it only happens on a player's hardware, OS, driver, or save state, under conditions that simply aren't present on your machine. A report that says “it crashed” or “it froze” gives you nothing to act on, so the bug survives release after release while quietly costing you players.

Automatic error capture closes that gap. Each failure arrives with its full stack trace, the device and OS, the build number, and a breadcrumb trail of what the player did right before it broke, so even a failure you have never seen becomes a specific, reproducible issue. Fold identical failures into one signature ranked by how many players each hits, and your worklist sorts itself worst-first instead of arriving as a stream of vague complaints.

This is where a tool like Bugnet earns its place. Its SDK captures every error automatically with the full stack trace plus device, OS, memory, build, and game-state context, folds duplicates into one grouped issue with an occurrence count, and ties each to the build it first appeared on — so you fix the problem that hurts the most players first and confirm it is gone when its signature disappears from the next release.