v0.4.2

A quad bike in the shop, wheels that actually turn, machines that roll through a corner instead of pivoting on the spot, a view from behind your own eyes, and animals that walk at their own pace. Eighteen commits since v0.4.1, nearly all of them from riding about on a phone and reporting what looked wrong.

A quad bike

Purple, because nothing else in the valley is and a machine is recognised at two hundred metres by its colour long before its shape. It costs 199 coins — between the bicycle and the motorcycle, as it is in speed — and goes at twelve metres a second: steadier than the motorcycle because four wheels turn at any speed, and nearly as good a climber, because the grip is in the tyres rather than in the speed.

Balloon tyres with lugs round them, suspension arms out to the hubs, curved mudguards, footwells, a seat with a back, braced bars, twin headlights, a rack and an exhaust down the right side. One stands on the shop floor at the end of the bicycles.

Machines roll

Every steered machine turned at a rate per second scaled by how fast it was going, which at low speed spins it on the spot like a shopping trolley — a quad sitting still could be rotated on its own axis with the stick. What a machine on wheels does is roll: how fast it comes round is its speed divided by its wheelbase, times the tangent of the angle the bars are at. Standing still it does not turn at all; creeping it turns sharply; at speed the same lock sweeps a far bigger circle. Backing up it steers the other way round, as a car does.

The bars take time to go over and centre themselves when the thumb lifts, and they move less at speed. Machines have weight: they gather speed rather than reaching it, and roll on when the throttle is let go. And wheels do not slide sideways — a quad cornering used to drift like a car on ice, because its heading turned while its velocity kept pointing where it had been going.

The wheels themselves were baked into each machine's body, so all three crossed a meadow on tyres that never moved. All three have wheels as nodes of their own now, turning at the pace divided by the radius, which is what rolling without slipping means.

Looking out of your own eyes

A third button beside the menu and the map swaps the camera between over the shoulder and first person. The same rig rather than a second camera, so the yaw and pitch a thumb has already set are where the head is pointed and swapping does not move what you were looking at; the body is simply not drawn from inside it. The choice is remembered between days.

The engine

An engine is two sounds, and this had only the top one: a bright wail which, pitched down to idle, is a mosquito and, pitched up, a hairdryer. There is an exhaust now — fifty-four thumps a second, each the pipe ringing after the bang rather than the bang itself, every other beat weaker and darker because a twin does not fire evenly. The two trade places as the revs come up: thump at rest, wail at speed. The quad gets the same pair pitched down, with more coming out of the pipe.

Things bought, kept, sold and left

Owning a thing was a flag: you had a bicycle or you did not. A bicycle left at the far side of the valley still counted, so the shop refused to sell another and a child standing at the counter could not ride home. The purse counts things now, a second one may be bought and is charged for, and each machine is its own object in the world. What stops it running away is a limit on what can be owned at once: three bicycles, two motorcycles, one quad, three of anything else — and a machine left somewhere is still yours, so it counts.

The shop also buys things back, for half what it charged, rounded. The machine that goes is the one furthest away, that being the one you have decided you are not walking back for. And the shelf shows the price at all times with how many you have beside it, rather than replacing the price with a tick the moment you own one.

Trees, and what an axe costs

An axe fells the tree you grew yourself now — it used to reach past it into the forest behind — and the price is the point: growing it paid a reward, and felling it gives that reward back. Without it a child plants a sapling, waits, fells it for the coins and the timber, and plants it again, which a ten-year-old finds in an afternoon.

Nothing may be planted where something else already stands: the pitch, the fairground and a stride outside its fence, the crossing and the ground at either end of it, and the signs. A tree had come up through the fairground beside the big wheel. And a stump goes when a tree grows where it stood, as many as are within a stride — felled and cleared being two different things, because the tree has to stay felled or the forest stands the old one back up.

Animals

They were scaled spheres with ears on, and a field of sheep and cows read as bubbles. Flat panels gave them corners and turned a cow into a crate; an animal is neither, but a few round masses pushed together, where what reads as a shoulder is the join between two of them. So the bodies are ellipsoids — a deep chest, a rounded rump, a long flat topline — and the heads have a brow rather than a box skull.

Markings, so two of them are never the same animal: a ginger cat is a tabby with a white bib, white socks and a banded tail; the dog has a pale chest and a patch over one eye; the squirrel has ear tufts and paws against its chest; the sheep's fleece reaches its head; the cow has patches where a cow has them, in unequal sizes.

They also walk properly. Every animal moved at one speed, which for a cow is a brisk human walk — she crossed a meadow sliding along with her legs barely moving. Each kind has its own pace now, the stride rate goes with the size, and the big ones take longer steps. And they lean with the ground they walk on, rather than staying dead level down a hill.

Two of them could be walked through: a cow, because the bodies standing in for animals were upright capsules — a post through her middle, with open air at her head and her rump — and now they are boxes laid along the animal; and a sheep walked through a parked quad, because the animals only knew to avoid the furniture of the places.

Things that were wrong

• The coaster's track was a tilted box per piece, so a child standing on it sank in, caught and shook. It is one swept surface, as the bridge's deck already was.
• Wood was never an item: the bag showed it as "?item_wood", which is what the text lookup says out loud when a key does not exist.
• A machine went through trees at speed, because the player reported having moved only every four metres and the solid trunks are streamed against that.
• The button for getting off showed a horseshoe whatever was underneath.
• "Not here" was said over a sapling that had plainly just been planted.
• Nothing is ridden indoors any more; a quad had parked between the shelves of the shop.

Citing

Every release is archived on Zenodo. The concept DOI 10.5281/zenodo.22965441 always resolves to the newest one; this release has a version DOI of its own.