Paper Sky

A folded paper crane, a dusk city, and a single button.

The crane flies right at a constant pace through bamboo scaffolding that rises out of the rooftops. Between every pair of poles there is one gap. Thread it and the number goes up by one. Touch a pole, drop onto the rooftops or climb out the top of the sky and the crane crumples into a burst of paper — and a card tells you what you hit, what you scored, and what your best is. One more press puts a fresh crane on the line about a second later.

That is the entire game. It exists to be replayed.

How to play

Keyboard	Space
Gamepad	A
Touch	tap the lower-right of the screen

There is exactly one control, and it does three things depending on where you are: it starts a run from the title card, it flaps while you are flying, and it clears the crumple card and puts you back in.

A flap sets the crane's upward speed rather than adding to it, so the button always feels the same no matter how fast you were falling — the rhythm is a beat you hold, not a button you mash. The nose pitches with your vertical speed, so you can read where the crane is going before it gets there.

The gaps start generous and narrow as you go, and the crane speeds up. Around twenty-five gaps in, they stop forgiving anything.

What makes it worth a look

• Folded paper, in real 3D. The crane, the scaffolding, the rooftops and the skyline are all real geometry under real lights and real shadows — hard creases, flat matte colour, visible facets. It reads flat without being flat.
• A dusk that has depth. The city sits in silhouette behind the play plane and slides past at its own rate, so the scaffolding you are threading and the town behind it never move together.
• A course that is a pure function of its index. Gate 412 is the same gate for everybody, forever; nothing about the course is stored or synced. Runs are comparable because they are literally the same course.
• One button, three device classes, from one control declaration.

What is still rough

Said plainly, because you will notice:

• The crane is modest in frame. It reads clearly, but it is smaller than it wants to be, and growing the art alone would desync it from its collision radius — so it is a tuning change nobody has made yet, not a scale bump.
• Your best does not survive the session. Close the world and the number starts again at zero.
• Dusk can read as night on a dim screen. The city is silhouette on purpose, but the whole frame sits low; on a bright panel it is exactly right and on a dark one it is murky.

Under the hood

Built in a single session inside this world: a planner, three parallel build slices (flight and course, art and sky, HUD and feel) and a playtest-and-fix pass. The whole run's engineering retrospective — including every engine issue it filed — is in /source/design/retrospective.md, with the per-phase detail in /source/design/filed/. Gameplay stills are in /source/design/shots/ and clips in /source/design/clips/.