150% speed
A physics-driven mountain biking game set on floating islands in the clouds. Reach the bottom. Try not to die.
The opposite of Peak. Instead of climbing, you descend.
- Dylan Strong - Lead Developer (core systems, lead)
- Cooper Horne - Developer (basic tasks, early development)
- Quinn Deboer - Music and Sound
A Milkless Cereal Studios project.
The game runs two separate physics systems simultaneously.
The rider is a full active ragdoll driven by a regularly animated ghost rig. Joints apply forces to match the ghost animation in real-time, producing natural movement that reacts physically to impacts. Hit the ground too hard and you'll biff it (on the bike or off of it)
The bike is based on a heavily modified version of Rayzngames' Simple Bike Controller, rebuilt to handle real mountain trail conditions. Air controls, downforce, and assist mechanics were all implemented manually.
Tires use a modified Unity WheelCollider with custom physics forces to prevent issues with clipping that emerge from a 1D raycast system such as Unity's.
Landing stability, and nearly everything else, is not explicitly programmed. The bike naturally stabilizes when both tires align with the surface normal on landing, an emergent property of the underlying physics simulation.
Alongside other emergent behaviours such as wheelies when going up an intense incline (requires feathering the input to avoid flipping)
Emergent behaviour from physical constraints and rules were central in the development of the project.
Custom shader work allows terrain to be authored directly in Blender using vertex colors (R/G/B/W channels) to blend between surface textures. This bypasses Unity's terrain system entirely, giving full control over the island geometry while keeping the workflow in Blender, and taking advantage of triplanar mapping for proper UV calculations.
This was done to achieve floating islands, tunnels, and more, that a terrain system like Unity's cannot offer out of the box.
Quinn and I used to run speedruns on each iteration of the game. On one run, Quinn completed the entire course without the bike. (Fully with the active ragdoll)
Single player demo. Project is cancelled, but still a great learning experience.
Multiplayer, a full map, and more features were planned but not implemented.