About Sky Hopper
Sky Hopper is a one-button flying game. Your bird is constantly pulled down by gravity, and each flap gives it a quick lift; the challenge is to thread it through the gaps in an endless line of green pillars.
How to play
- The bird hovers in place until your first flap, which starts the game.
- Gravity pulls the bird down continuously. A flap sets the bird moving upward at a fixed speed, so flapping repeatedly does not stack into a bigger jump.
- A new pair of pillars arrives every 1.5 seconds, each with a gap of the same height placed at a random level.
- You score one point for every pillar you fly past.
- Touching a pillar, hitting the ground or flying off the top of the screen ends the game.
- The scroll speed, the gap size and the pillar spacing never change, so the difficulty comes only from the random gap positions.
Controls
- Keyboard: Space or the Up arrow flaps.
- Mouse: click anywhere on the game to flap.
- Touch: tap anywhere on the game to flap.
Tips and strategy
- Tap in a steady rhythm rather than in bursts. Because a flap resets your upward speed, frantic tapping just keeps you rising.
- Aim to sit slightly below the centre of each gap. Falling into the bottom of a gap is easier to correct with a flap than rising into the top pillar.
- Look at the next gap as soon as you clear the current one, and start moving towards its height early.
- When the next gap is much lower, let the bird drop for longer than feels comfortable, then catch it with a single flap.
- Do not fly too high between pillars: leaving the top of the screen counts as a crash.
Background
One-button flying games, where you only control lift and gravity does the rest, have been around for a long time in browser and mobile games, with helicopter-in-a-cave games popular in the early 2000s. The format reached a huge audience in 2013 and 2014 with a mobile game about a bird flapping between pipes, created by Vietnamese developer Dong Nguyen. Its blend of very simple input and very high difficulty inspired a wave of similar games.
Questions
- Does it get faster?
- No. The pillars move at the same speed and with the same gap size for the whole game. Only the heights of the gaps vary.
- Can I fly over the top of the pillars?
- No. Going above the top edge of the screen ends the game just like hitting a pillar.
- Where is my best score saved?
- Your best pillar count is kept in your browser's local storage on this device.