Sky Glide

About Sky Glide

Sky Glide is a one-button flying game made for Kaamko. You fly a folded paper plane from left to right past an endless row of stone pillars. Gravity pulls the plane down all the time. Each tap gives it a short lift. Thread it through the gap in each pair of pillars to score a point. Touch a pillar or the ground and the flight is over. The plane, the pillars and the hills are all drawn by our own code, and nothing is downloaded while you play.

The game gets harder as you go. The plane starts at a gentle pace and the world moves a little faster after every gap you pass, up to a top speed about one and a half times the starting one. The gaps stay the same height, so it is the timing, not the space, that gets tighter. Your best score is kept in this browser only.

How to play Sky Glide

1. Press Start, tap the play area, or press Space. The first tap also launches the plane.
2. Every tap, click, Space, W or Up arrow gives the plane one lift. Between taps it sinks, slowly at first and then faster.
3. Steer through the opening between the top and bottom pillar. Each opening you clear adds one point.
4. Flying above the top of the screen is safe, but you cannot see the pillars coming from up there.
5. Press P or Esc, or the Pause button, to stop. The game also pauses when you switch tabs or lock your phone.

Tips for a longer flight

Tap in a steady rhythm rather than in bursts. A single lift raises the plane by a little over a third of a gap, so two quick taps usually overshoot. Try to hold the plane level with the middle of the next opening well before you reach it, then make only small corrections as you pass through. Watch the next pillar, not the plane.

There is a small bit of engineering in this too. A real paper plane glides because the air flowing under its wings pushes up while gravity pulls down, and a pilot trades height for speed. Our plane is much simpler: it has a fixed forward speed, a constant downward acceleration and a fixed upward kick. That makes it a clean example of projectile motion, the same equations first-year students use for a ball thrown in the air. Each tap resets the vertical speed, and the path until the next tap is a parabola.