✈ Paper Pilot

A one-tap arcade run through the print shop

Paper Pilot is a tiny, endless tap game. A single folded plane drifts off the press and your only job is to keep it in the air, weaving through the narrow gaps between spinning rollers. It borrows the simple one-button rhythm of the classics — lift, fall, lift again — but swaps the usual birds and pipes for a print-shop theme drawn in flat ink lines.

One tap, two forces

Only two things act on the plane, and they are not symmetrical. Gravity adds a constant 0.35 pixels per tick to your downward speed, sixty times a second, and never stops. The tap does not push against it — it overwrites your vertical speed outright, setting it to exactly six pixels per tick upward no matter what it was a moment earlier.

That asymmetry is the entire feel of the game. A tap while gliding and a tap while plummeting produce identical climbs, so you are never falling too fast to recover — only ever too low. And since the tap assigns rather than adds, hammering the button does not climb any faster than tapping in time.

Nothing caps the fall, which is why an unattended plane crosses the whole 600-pixel board in about a second while climbing the same distance takes a dozen taps. The nose tilt is cosmetic but tracks vertical speed honestly, so a steep nose is a real warning. The ceiling is forgiving — bumping it parks you there and cancels the climb. The floor is not.

The roller you keep dying on is not the same roller

It certainly feels like a fixed wall, always in about the same place. It is not. Each roller's gap centre is drawn fresh at random when it spawns, so no two runs share a layout and nothing is seeded. What repeats is the schedule underneath, and the schedule has a quietly nasty property.

The gap must stay 46 pixels clear of the top and bottom edges, so the band of legal centres is whatever is left over. As the gap narrows, that leftover band gets wider: about 336 pixels of possible centres on the opening rollers, about 410 by the time the gap is at its tightest. The target shrinks and the distance you may have to travel to reach it grows, at the same time, on the same schedule. Add the shrinking headway — rollers appear 295 pixels ahead of the plane's nose, which is about two seconds of warning at the starting scroll speed and about 1.3 at full speed — and there is a genuine wall in the late twenties and thirties that has nothing to do with any particular obstacle.

The collision test offers no mercy in exchange: it is a plain rectangle overlap between the plane's 34-by-22 box and the roller columns, which are 62 pixels wide. You must be inside the gap for the whole 96 pixels of overlap, not merely clip the opening.

What actually changes as you fly

Three linear ramps, all front-loaded

Gap height runs from 172 pixels down to 98 over your first 36 rollers, a 43 percent narrowing. Scroll speed rises from 2.4 to 3.9 pixels per tick — roughly 144 to 234 pixels a second — over the first 28. Spacing between roller pairs closes from 250 pixels to 172 over the first 30, leaving about three quarters of a second of clean air between obstacles at the end. Every one of those reaches its limit and then holds: past roller 36 nothing tightens again, ever. A forty-gate run and a four-hundred-gate run are played under identical conditions.

What does not change

The rollers do not actually turn. The ridges and the pale cylinder caps are redrawn in the same place every frame; the spin is an illusion sold by the ridges scrolling past you. Scoring is flat too — a clean 100 points per roller cleared, with no combo, no multiplier and no bonus for style, capped at 50,000.

Playing it one-handed on a phone

The board is a fixed 400-by-600 field scaled to your screen width, and the whole of it is the button, so the thumb of the hand already holding the phone is enough. Touch handling suppresses the browser's own gestures, so a fast tap never becomes a page scroll or a double-tap zoom mid-run. Crashing does not restart on a tap either — you have to press Fly again, which is there so a panicked last input cannot burn the next run. On a keyboard, Space, the up arrow and W all lift. Your best is kept in your own browser; posting to the shared board is opt-in and sends only the name you type, the score, the game id and a server timestamp.