Pick a game.
Take flight.

How to get better at any of these

These are not games you win by reacting faster. They are games where the same mistake costs you every time, and the only way past it is to understand what you were actually being asked to do. The following applies to all fifteen.

Fly one game ten times before you try the next

Every game here is one small model, and a single run is not long enough to feel where the edges are. Fly the same one until you can predict what the readout will say before you look at it. That moment, when you know the aeroplane is out of energy before the number tells you, is the moment the game opens. Fifteen games played once each is fifteen minutes of confusion. One game played fifteen times is an afternoon of getting good at something.

Read the guide after you have lost, not before

The guide on each game page is roughly twelve hundred to three thousand words and it is written to be read by someone who has already been beaten by the game. Read it cold and it is a list of facts about a thing you have not done. Read it after three failed runs and every paragraph lands, because you have already met the problem it is describing. The section on why a technique works is worth almost nothing before you have felt the thing it fixes.

Watch the readout, not the aeroplane

The most common mistake across all fifteen is looking at the wrong thing. In most of these games the aeroplane itself tells you nothing you do not already know, because you are the one moving it. The bar at the top of the stage tells you what you do not know: how much fuel is left, how far the ground is, how fast you are actually closing. Fly the numbers and let the aeroplane follow.

Do less

Almost every one of these games is easier with fewer inputs. A held key is a decision you have not finished making. Several of the games use a slow response on purpose, which means the correction you make now arrives two seconds from now, and a second correction made in the meantime arrives on top of the first. If a run is going badly, the fix is almost always to take your hands off for a moment and let the aeroplane finish doing what you already asked it to do.

Give up on a bad run early

There is no penalty for ending a run here, and there is no reward for dragging a hopeless one out. If a flight is already lost, the useful information is in the first thirty seconds, and the rest is just watching a number fall. Start again, and use what you learned while it is still fresh.

How a game gets made here

Being specific about this is worth the space, because it is the difference between a site with games on it and a site that is a wrapper around somebody else's games.

One idea, chosen first

Every game starts as a single sentence about a trade. Height against speed. Fuel against distance. Turning against holding your line. A game that does not have a sentence like that does not get built, because the sentence is what the guide is about and the guide is the thing that has to be worth reading afterwards.

A small model, written by hand

There is no physics engine anywhere on this site. Each game has a handful of numbers and a few lines of arithmetic: how fast the aeroplane answers the controls, how quickly it bleeds speed in a turn, how much fuel a second of flying costs. The whole model for one game fits on a screen. That is deliberate. A model you cannot hold in your head is a model you cannot explain, and if it cannot be explained then the guide is just decoration.

The numbers get measured, not guessed

Before a game is finished, its model is driven headlessly and the results are measured. How long a full tank lasts. How far a turn actually takes you off course. How much a headwind costs on the way out and gives back on the way home. Every figure quoted in a guide on this site came out of one of those runs rather than out of a writer's imagination, which is why the guides can be specific about things like the exact number of seconds a contact has to be held.

Then the guide, against the measurements

The guide is written last, from those numbers, and it is written to explain the game rather than to describe it. A description of a game is something you can get from playing it for a minute. An explanation of why the difficult thing is difficult, and what to do about it, is the part worth writing down.