Guide
Sky Hopper: how the flap really works, why the speed never changes, and how to get through more gaps
One tap, one flap, and pipes that never speed up. What a flap does to your bird, why hitting the top of the sky also ends a run, and a rhythm that gets you past your best score.
Sky Hopper is a one-button flying game: your bird falls all the time, every tap gives it a flap, and you guide it through the gaps between pipes. Each pair of pipes you pass is one point. You can also play it in your browser.
Controls
- Tap the screen, or press Space or Enter, to flap. The first tap also starts the run.
- After a crash, tap Try Again or press Enter. Space does not restart, so a late, panicked press won't throw you straight into a new run.
- Your Best score is saved on the device.
What a flap actually does
A flap doesn't add lift on top of what you already have: it sets your upward speed to the same value every time. Tapping twice in a row while you're already rising doesn't send you twice as high; it just restarts the same climb. Gravity then pulls you back down at a steady rate. That makes the bird very predictable: one flap is always the same height.
What ends a run
- Touching a pipe.
- Touching the ground.
- Touching the top of the screen. The sky has a ceiling, so tapping too fast near the top is just as fatal as falling.
The bird's hitbox is a circle a bit smaller than the drawing, so brushing a pipe with a wing tip is often forgiven.
Speed and gaps
The pipes move at one constant speed for the whole run: Sky Hopper never speeds up. The gap is always the same size (a little over a quarter of the sky height), and a new pair arrives about every half screen width. Only the height of the gap changes, at random. So a score of 50 is no harder per pipe than a score of 5; what gets harder is staying focused.
A rhythm that works
- Aim to sit around the lower edge of the gap as you enter it. A flap from there carries you through the middle, whereas a flap from the top edge sends you into the upper pipe.
- Let the bird fall more than you think. Most crashes come from tapping too often, not too rarely.
- Look at the next gap as soon as you're inside the current one, so you already know whether you have to climb or drop.
More on the Sky Hopper page, or play now.
