Spare Altitude
Four hundred metres and no engine. Altitude is the only thing you own, and everything you do spends it.
What it is
You step out at 400 metres. Below you are six places to land, worth 100, 250, 600, 1250, 2500 and 5000, and all but the two nearest are deliberately further than you can reach in still air.
So the question is never where you want to go. It's whether you can still afford to get there.
Turning costs distance
Hands up, you glide almost three metres forward for every one you drop, whatever canopy you fly. Pull both toggles and you slow down, but on the standard canopy you fall at a little over one-and-a-half to one, so braking buys you time and takes away range. Turn hard and your sink rate climbs by half again.
Every input is a withdrawal. The good line isn't the one that points at the target, it's the one that arrives with something left over.
You can't plan the middle
The wind comes in three layers. Up high you're already in it, so you can read it off your own drift. Down low you can see it before you arrive, because there's a windsock at every zone.
The middle layer you cannot see at all. You find out what it's doing by flying into it, with about a third of your altitude already spent. That's the moment the run is actually decided, not at the door.
How to play
- TurnHold one side
- Slow down, lose rangeHold both
- Flare as you landHold both as you touch down
Two inputs. Land without the flare and you tumble for half the points.
On a desktop, hold the mouse button on the side you want to turn to. Or, once you have clicked the game, Left and Right (or A and D) turn, and Space holds both sides at once, which is the only way to slow down and flare without a touchscreen.
What isn't settled yet
The descent works and the middle layer does its job. What's unproven is whether one run makes you want another.
Build Log
-
Build 27
Four canopies to choose between, and not one of them buys glide. Reaching the far targets is the whole gamble, so a canopy that flew further would turn that decision into arithmetic. What you buy is handling: how hard it turns, what the turn costs in height, and how long the flare lasts.
-
Build 25
Every run after the first was flown blind (no altimeter, no wind, no flare prompt) because only the first-run path ever put the HUD back. It is restored from one place now, the function every descent passes through. A second caller is a second place to forget.
-
Build 8
Every landing was a tumble and every score was half. Standing up needed a sink under 3.35 m/s and the canopy could not get below 3.5, so the rule the game printed on its own title screen was unreachable. The tests had checked that the brakes did something. None had checked that the reward they promised existed.
Credits and licences
Built on three.js, used under the MIT licence with the copyright notice retained in the shipped file. Typefaces are the ones already on your device; nothing is downloaded. Cover drawn from the game’s own terrain, canopy and landing-zone code.
Spare Altitude is original work by Launchway Games.