Thread by @eastshade

A thread about Eastshade's bike mechanic!

When I originally thought of putting a bicycling in Eastshade, I was pretty sure it wasn't going to work, for the simple fact that if it was easy, we'd see a lot more rideable bikes in games. Well, I was wrong. It took a mere week.

Its essentially a first person controller with extra momentum, resulting in the the movement direction lagging behind your look direction. Then I used the angle between the look and the movement to dictate camera "bank" and handle bar rotation, and voila! Game changing feature!

The look of the bike was harder than the movement. Bicycles are fairly modern, so it was tricky to fit it to the setting. I took some artistic liberties and settled on a penny farthing (but wooden), ignoring how impossible that would be to ride on the rugged terrain in Eastshade.

Surprisingly, the hardest part was sound. It didn't feel like riding a bike until I found the right sounds and how to trigger them. For a while I was stuck thinking too realistically. A penny farthing is fixed gear, pedaling sounds nothing like a regular modern bike.

Finally I abandoned realism and went with sounds normal people would associate with biking. We're all so used to modern bikes that we strongly associate the distinct ticking of a freewheel mechanism (think of the sound when you stop pedaling and coast on a modern bike).

That ticking sound, along with some tire friction and wind passing the ears, plays whenever moving, and gets louder as you go faster. The ticking plays the whole time, pedaling or not, which is unrealistic, but nonetheless reminds us of being on a bike.

The final touch was extra tire friction, or a "turning" noise who's volume scales with the angle of the handle bars.

Overall I'm really proud of the bike feature. Its unique, and really fits in with the general theme of joyful tourism in Eastshade. For something that was relatively easy to implement, it turned out to be an iconic feature of the game.

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