A Totally Normal Bike Ride

Overview

A Totally Normal Bike Ride is a jam prototype built around an intentionally unstable bike-platforming premise. The three-day constraint required the central physics joke to become playable quickly and remain predictable enough for level design.

What I contributed

As the primary programmer, I owned the physics character, wire-authoring utilities, environmental visual pipeline, and integration needed to ship browser and Windows builds.

Two-body physics character

The character is a wheel and rider rigidbody joined by a pin joint. Locomotion applies torque to the wheel while balance applies lean torque to the rider, with separate ground and air tuning. A charge-and-release jump compresses the rider toward the wheel and scales its release impulse by hold time.

Telephone-wire authoring tool

The wire tool generates a segmented physics rope between two anchors, automatically spaces and sizes its segments, chains them with joints, and renders their live positions as a smooth baked curve. Authoring a new wire is reduced to placing two endpoints.

Day-night cycle

A normalized day timer drives a canvas-item shader that blends night, dawn, day, and dusk gradients. The same time value coordinates the sun, moon, stars, and cloud tint so the layers remain synchronized without direct coupling.

What the work shows

The project shows how a deliberately unstable mechanic can remain clear to tune and ship when locomotion, balance, authoring tools, and environmental presentation have explicit boundaries.