The bicycle had to be allowed to fall over

The first bicycle was a car with two wheels, and it was bad in a specific way. It was fine.

It went where you pointed it. It held whatever speed you asked for. It stayed upright at a standstill and it never surprised you. Every one of those is a bug.

A bicycle is a machine for turning a person into speed against three things pushing back, and you feel all three the whole time. It takes seconds to get going. It runs away from you downhill. It dies on a climb steep enough. Stop pointing uphill and it rolls backwards. None of that is friction to be smoothed out; it is what riding a bicycle consists of.

And it falls over. That is not a failure state, it is the defining property of the machine: a bicycle at rest is a bicycle somebody is holding up. So when you stop now, the rider slides forward off the saddle, puts a foot on the road and leans the machine onto that leg, and it stays where you left it whatever the slope until you pedal away.

Steering was the argument I had with myself for longest. Everything else here steers with the camera: you look somewhere and the body goes there, which is right for a person on foot and is how every third-person control scheme has worked for twenty years. It is wrong for a bicycle. A bicycle goes where the front wheel is pointed, and a rider looks through a corner well before the machine gets there.

So the bars are on the arrow keys and the mouse has no vote in where you go. It took me longer than it should have to accept that being deliberately inconsistent with the rest of the controls was the correct answer, because consistency is the easier thing to defend and it was making the ride worse.

The rider is solved onto the machine every frame rather than animated: both feet on the pedals at any speed, both hands on the grips, the cadence changing gear the way a person does, the head turning through the corner before the bike does. Animation would have been quicker and would have come apart at the first speed I had not made a clip for.

What I would tell myself a fortnight earlier: when a vehicle feels wrong and you cannot say why, check whether you have accidentally removed the thing it is supposed to be fighting.