How to ride your unicycle!

Mat on 2010/04/04 20:17 of Doom central
— edited on 2010/04/04 20:18

Firstly I would like to apologise for how difficult it is to play our "game". This is totally my fault - I had intended to tweak the physics code a bit more towards the end of the challenge, but I haven't been able to do any testing for the last couple of days as I was away from my pc and my laptop can't run the game for some reason.

However! I do have some advice on how to stay balanced, and I think that compared to riding a real unicycle, it's not so wibbly wobbly after all :P

Here's how you can avoid falling over:

Redefine the laws of physics.
Since the default values for most of the constants are a bit iffy, you may you want to adjust them yourself before playing. The values are all stored in constants.py. I recommend decreasing g - so the unicycle is slower to respond to changes in how much you lean backwards and forwards - and increasing the mass of the unicycle (this makes your overall acceleration influence the wobbliness more).

Try not to tilt too much, and pay attention to your acceleration
If you lean over too much, the orientation of the unicycle will change very quickly, making it very easy to fall off. Your acceleration also affects the orientation of the unicycle, so it's possible to stay balanced without jerking the mouse about too much.

There is a very simple algorithm I was taught when I learned unicycle for real - if you're tilting too far forwards, pedal harder; if you're tilting too far backwards, lean forwards. This works suprisingly well, and using this technique I was able to stay on my virtual unicycle a lot easier too.


I hope this helps, and that you like our game, even though it's nowhere near as complete as we would have liked. If you have feedback of any kind, please leave a comment.

See you next pyweek! :)

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Comments

bencoder on 2010/04/04 20:21:

Also, if anybody can't play the game for whatever reason, there is a youtube video of me riding the unicycle here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yQrzsNs6br4

Unfortunately it's pretty low quality and I didn't manage to capture the sound from the game but it should give you an idea.

Cosmologicon on 2010/04/05 15:31:

Hey what did you use to capture that video, if you don't mind me asking.

bencoder on 2010/04/05 16:37:

I used glc: http://nullkey.ath.cx/projects/glc/

But I never managed to convert it properly. Couldn't figure out mencoder, so I exported them all to png files from the glc player and built the movie back up from the frames :/