The Little Bike That Could

So, I released a game yesterday. You can grab a free copy of The Little Bike That Could over at the itch.io site.

I made this over the course of one month, using the same custom game engine that I use for all my games. I had tremendous fun creating it.

Bicycle dynamics are so fascinating. It's a lot more involved than it appears to be at first glance. As a matter of fact, scientists had a really hard time determining where a bicycle's stability comes from. It turns out it is not caused by gyroscopic effect of the wheels.

It's pretty amazing that humans can cycle at all, as the process is so much different than it appears. For starters... imagine your self riding in a straight line on a bicycle. You want to make a left turn. What do you do with the handlebar?

If you answered: for a left turn, you turn the handlebar left... No, that is not what happens, surprisingly! Instead, you turn the handlebar in the opposite direction (called counter steering.) So you turn them right, which causes the bike to fall (lean) to the left. Only now, do you turn the handle bars to the left, to stop the fall to the left. This maintains the left-lean, and causes a left turn.

To stop the left-lean, you briefly steer further left which brings the bike upright again, and thereby ending the turn.

How remarkable is that? To start a left turn, you first steer right. To end a left turn, you steer left. As a child, our brain somehow is trained on this behaviour, and for the rest of our lives, it enables us to ride and steer a bicycle.

So I made a scientifically valid physics simulation for a bicycle. The player will choose a lean angle (to left or right) and then the computer will turn the handlebar to reach a desired lean-angle, causing the turn. I also added independent controls for rear and front brakes. This enables rear-wheel slides and front wheel stoppies. I created 10 levels with different challenges.

It's hard to really explain the game play, and others do a much better job of it. So allow me to introduce Iwan who played my game and made an excellent video about it.