A very small beetle, a very large idea, and an atmosphere that fights back.
Ladybug Moonshot is a one-thumb vertical climber. Time the swinging launch meter off a sunflower, then flap up through the garden, the treetops and the cloudbank — landing on flowers, leaves and bouncy clouds to refill your wing stamina, dodging spider webs and swooping birds, and scooping stardust as you go. The higher you get the thinner the air: flapping costs more, the gaps widen, and past the Karman line the flowers give way to drifting petals and tumbling rock. Reach the moon and you climb straight past it into numbered sectors that never run out. (v1.0 — Released; game build F.)
STORY & LORE
Dot
Dot is about six millimetres long and has never been told what she cannot do. The garden ends at the fence. She has decided that it does not.
There is no top
The moon is not the end of the climb — it is a thing you go past. Above it the sky is out of names, so the game just starts numbering: SECTOR 2, SECTOR 11, SECTOR 59. It keeps getting harder for as long as you keep going. How far you got is the whole score.
HOW IT PLAYS
The launch is a timing shot, not a hold
The meter swings up and back down for as long as you hold, and you leave the flower with whatever it reads when you let go — so a launch is a decision. There is a marked window at the very top worth aiming for: hit it and you get a bonus shove and a badge. Previously the meter filled to maximum in a second and a half and simply stayed there, which meant every launch was a maximum launch and the meter was decoration.
Flapping, and what it costs
A tap flaps, and a flap has a tempo: wingbeats are 115 ms apart, so hammering the button faster than that does nothing at all — twelve taps inside one frame are worth exactly one beat. Each flap sets your upward speed rather than adding to it, and each one takes a bite out of your wing stamina. When the bar is empty the wings still move, but an exhausted flutter only SLOWS a fall — it cannot lift you. KEEP holding and you glide: the wings stay out, gravity drops to about a third, and a descent is capped at a quarter of free-fall speed. A glide costs a slow trickle of stamina, and it hands the wind roughly twice as much of you to push on. Landing refills you — a flower is a full tank, a leaf about a third, a drifting petal or rock a fifth. A cloud does not refill you at all; it bounces you hard, and above 2,200 m that bounce leaves ice on your wings.
The air runs out, and the game notices
Every difficulty dial is a single function of your altitude, and none of them level off. Between the ground and 80,000 m the gap between rows goes from 96 to 225 px, spider webs from 2% of rows to 34%, tumbling rock from nothing to 40%, birds from none to more than one a second, and a flap from 7 stamina to 18. What you can stand on changes too: a third flowers near the ground falling to one in sixteen by the Karman line, then only what drifted up before you did — petals, torn leaves and rock. The old build had every one of these fixed at one value for the whole game, which is why it stopped being difficult once you had the launch down.
The air is the game
Gravity used to be the only force in here, which is why it played the same at 300 m and at 30,000 m. There are four now and they feed each other. WIND pushes you sideways, easing from one value to the next rather than switching at a boundary, with gusts riding on top; it is worst in the middle altitudes where the air is fast and thin at once, it changes sign as you climb so it is never one steady shove, and it dies with the atmosphere. THERMALS are columns of rising air. FROST creeps onto your wings in the cold and takes the power out of them. And gliding changes your relationship to all three at once. And they are wired to each other, not just present at the same time: the wind leans the thermals over as they rise, so in a gale the top of a column is a long way downwind of its base; the wind blows the light platforms — petals and leaves — so a landing pad in a gale is a moving target; a cloud is water, so bouncing off one above the freezing line leaves ice on your wings; loose stardust gets carried up the warm columns, so the line that gains you the most height is also the line that pays best.
A thermal is not a lift — it is a lift for a glider
A warm column pushes up at about 320 against gravity's 1,500, so on its own it only slows your fall. Put the wings out and two things happen at once: gravity drops to about 510, and the column's push on you doubles to about 640. Only then does it carry you, and then it carries you a long way — a big column is 700-odd pixels of free height and the best thing that can happen to a climb. It also strips the ice off your wings faster than anything else. The columns are drawn with shimmering edges and motes travelling up the inside, because the direction is the whole message. This is the one combination the game is really about: everything else costs you something, and this pays.
Frost
Above about 5,200 m ice starts building on your wings, and the rate climbs with the cold. Fully frosted, a flap has 42% less in it and a glide sinks nearly twice as fast — so the top of a run is a slow strangling rather than a wall. Landing knocks some off, dropping back below 3,000 m melts it, and a thermal clears it fastest. Deep Lungs slows how quickly it forms. It shows as a second thin bar under your stamina, and it appears on the bug as a rime of ice with frost spurs on it.
The chain
Every clean landing is worth more than the last: four in a row and stardust pays 1.5x, and it climbs to 5x. Anything that touches you — a web, a bird, a rock — wipes it back to nothing. So the safe line through a screen and the profitable line through it are usually different lines, which is the whole point.
Sector conditions
Out past DEEP SPACE the numbers alone would just get bigger, so every sector rolls a condition instead: DEAD CALM, SOLAR WIND (a steady shove where there should be no wind at all), METEOR SHOWER, AURORA (dust worth double and it comes to you), DEBRIS FIELD (far more to stand on, and far more of it moving). The roll comes from the sector NUMBER rather than from chance, so sector 7 is always the same sector 7 and the road can be learned.
Stardust and the moon meter
Stardust is both the run score and the currency you take home. Picking it up in quick succession runs a combo, and every piece nudges the moon meter along. Fill it and you get a moonshot: a hard shove upward, a full stamina tank and a moment of invulnerability. It used to teleport you 1,500 px straight up through whatever happened to be in the way; it is real velocity now, so you can see where you are going.
What can hurt you
Spider webs hold you until you tear free — tap to struggle, and the web is gone once you are out of it. Birds cross the screen in the middle altitudes, and they dive at you rather than merely crossing your path. Above 5,200 m loose rock tumbles past with a hot edge on it. Any of them costs stamina and height, and none of them ends the run directly — falling off the bottom of the screen does.
Birds hunt now
A bird used to fly a straight line across the screen and hurt you only if you happened to be standing in it, which is a tax rather than a threat. It cruises, notices you, then holds still for half a second with its wings up and a ring flashing round it — the tell — and dives along the line to where you were. Read the tell and you can be somewhere else. Wind pushes a cruising bird about, too.
The Garden Shed
The upgrade screen is a labelled diagram of your own ladybug, with a line running from each upgrade to the part of the animal it improves. Each one reaches into more than one system, so the shed is a set of trade-offs rather than five meters going up: Wing Power is flap force AND glide efficiency; Deep Lungs is stamina AND how slowly you ice up; Long Antennae is stardust pull AND how far off you can see a thermal; Sticky Legs is web escape AND a wider ledge to land on; Lucky Spots is shields you start the run with.
Nothing on screen is an emoji
Every icon in the interface — the leaf on the stamina bar, the spark on the stardust counter, the moon on the meter, the speaker — is a drawn shape, so the furniture matches the thing you are flying. The type is round and friendly rather than the system serif. The HUD is laid out in three reserved zones — top left, top right and one bottom strip — so no two panels can land on each other at any screen size; the altitude readout and the moon meter used to be pinned to the bottom centre together and collided on any short phone.
The art is photographs
Every prop is a real photograph, cut out and pasted over a drawn sky — a seven-spot ladybird from directly above, a second shot of the same animal with its shell open and its flight wings spread for when you are gliding, a sunflower, a daisy, cherry blossom, a violet, a leaf, a dried leaf, a petal, a stone, an asteroid, a cloud, the full moon, ice crystals, a sparrow, a garden spider that sits on its own web, a dandelion clock, grass, a twig and a berry. Which one a prop wears depends on where you are: the flowers vary so a screen is never five copies of the same daisy, the greenery dries out as the air thins, and a stone becomes a piece of asteroid once there is no sky left for it to be a stone in. They live in ONE atlas — one request, one decode, one texture — and every one of them has a drawn fallback, so the game still runs and still looks like itself if the file never arrives.
Tightening the matte
Keying a photograph off a coloured screen always leaves a rim of half-transparent pixels carrying the screen's own colour — a pale halo round a daisy, a blue edge along a leaf. The atlas is passed over once as it loads: partial alpha is pushed through a steep curve so the halo dies but a pixel of softness survives, and what is left has the backdrop's hue pulled out of it. One pass over a 480x384 image, and then it is an ordinary texture for the rest of the run.
What a run is worth
Only the stardust you physically touched used to pay into the shed, which meant a ten-thousand-metre climb that happened to miss the pickups banked almost nothing — the meta ignored the thing the game is about. The climb itself pays now, one stardust per 200 m, and a long clean chain pays two per landing. The end screen breaks it down so you can see where it came from: picked up, climb, chain.
Your record is a place
The best you have ever climbed is drawn into the world as a ruled line with a paper tag on it, so the number on the title card is also a thing you fly at and, with luck, through. The HUD names the mark while it is still above you and says BEATEN once it is not. Crossing it is the loudest moment the game has.
A field notebook
The props are photographs, so the furniture round them is the thing you paste photographs onto: cream paper, ruled gauges, ink labels, a strip of tape at the corner, every panel lying at a slight angle. The cards deal in rather than blinking on, the altitude kicks every hundred metres, and the chain badge pops when it climbs. Paper is opaque, though, so every card is measured and then asked each frame whether anything in the world is behind it — a platform you were lining up, a bird coming in, Dot herself. If so it drops back to a fifth opacity and returns the moment the coast is clear, with a short linger so a stream of platforms cannot strobe it. The mid-screen band and milestone banners went further and dropped their paper entirely: they are lettering with its own halo now, readable over garden sky or deep space and covering nothing. The title card carries a record strip — best climb, stardust in hand, and how far you have ever got — and the shed states what each upgrade is at, what the next one buys, and how many of the twenty you have fitted.
THE CLIMB
Named places for as long as there are names worth having. Past DEEP SPACE the game numbers sectors every 4,000 m and never stops. The HUD follows the sky: the panels are pale glass with dark lettering over the garden and invert past the Karman line, where pale glass is unreadable.
WHAT YOU CAN STAND ON
Which of these a row offers you depends on how much air is left — and how much each one gives back is the difference between a breather and a reset.
WHAT CAN HURT YOU
None of these ends a run on its own. The fall does.
THE GARDEN SHED
Five upgrades, each wired by a line to the part of the ladybug it improves — and each one reaching into two systems.
SECTOR CONDITIONS
Rolled from the sector number, not from chance — so the road out can be learned.
GALLERY
THE CURVE
Every one of these is a function of your altitude alone, and not one of them levels off.
| Altitude | Row gap | Webs | Rock | Birds/s | Flap cost |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0 m | 96 px | 2% | — | — | 7 |
| 2,500 m | 114 px | 8% | 5% | 0.20 | 8.5 |
| 5,000 m | 132 px | 14% | 11% | 0.40 | 9.9 |
| 9,000 m | 162 px | 24% | 19% | 0.72 | 12.3 |
| 20,000 m | 183 px | 27% | 31% | 0.88 | 14.5 |
| 80,000 m | 225 px | 34% | 40% | 1.36 | 18.0 |
VERSION HISTORY
- THE INFINITE TAP IS GONE. On an empty stamina bar a flap used to still hand you a third of full power, for free, upward — so you could mash the button forever, never fall behind the camera and never die. An exhausted bug now flutters instead: it slows a fall and cannot lift you. Wingbeats also have a tempo of their own, 115 ms apart, so hammering the button faster than a wing can move buys nothing. Mashing with no route now ends a run in a few seconds, which is what it should always have done.
- LANDING IS A BREATHER, NOT A RESET. Rows start 96 px apart rather than 76 and open out to 225, so there is real air between one platform and the next. A flower is still the full tank — it is meant to be the thing you steer for — but it is now a third of the ground floor instead of two thirds, and one in sixteen by the Karman line. A leaf gives back a third rather than over half, a petal or rock a fifth. The free cloud bounce starts icing your wings at 2,200 m, where clouds become the majority of the board, instead of 4,000 — there is no longer a stretch of the climb you can ride on nothing.
- THE HUD GETS OUT OF THE WAY. The notebook cards are opaque paper sitting over the play area, and the world scrolls underneath them. Every card is measured and then asked each frame whether a platform, a bird, a hazard, some stardust or Dot herself is behind it; if so it drops to a fifth opacity and comes back once the coast is clear, with a short linger so a stream of platforms cannot strobe it. The band and milestone banners, which fire across the middle of the screen constantly, dropped their paper altogether — they are lettering with a halo now, and they cover nothing.
- A NEW UI, TOP TO BOTTOM: a field notebook. Cream paper, ruled gauges, ink labels, tape at the corner, every panel at a slight angle — furniture that suits a game made of photographs. The cards deal in, the altitude kicks every hundred metres, the chain badge pops, the band banner fades instead of snapping.
- YOUR BEST IS NOW A PLACE IN THE WORLD. It is drawn as a ruled line with a paper tag at the altitude where you set it; the HUD names the mark while it is above you and says BEATEN once it is not, and flying through it is worth a badge. The title card carries a record strip: best climb, stardust in hand, furthest band reached.
- THE META MAKES SENSE NOW. Only dust you physically touched used to pay into the shed, so a ten-thousand-metre climb that missed the pickups banked almost nothing. The climb pays — one per 200 m — and so does a long clean chain, and the end screen breaks the total down. The shed states each upgrade's current value AND what the next level buys (100% \u2192 115%), plus how many of the twenty you have fitted.
- SIZING, SCALE AND HIT TARGETS, checked rather than eyeballed: the HUD is verified to fit and never overlap at nine screen shapes from a 320-wide phone to a 1080-wide desktop frame and a phone on its side, nothing spills out of its own card at the smallest size, and every pressable thing is at least 44x44 px AND verified to receive the tap at its own centre — a 44 px box behind another element is not a hit target.
- Three more achievements (seventeen total) covering the meta: a big single-run haul, a full jar, and every level of Wing Power.
- OPTIMISED: the sky gradient, the vignette and the stardust glow were rebuilt sixty times a second for a picture that had not changed — the first two are cached against their inputs and the glow is painted once into a sprite. A thermal was building sixteen gradients per column per frame; it builds one. The HUD cards are promoted to their own layers so their grain and shadows are not re-blended over a canvas that repaints every frame.
- Fixed: the shed's callout lines were pale green for the old dark panel and became invisible the moment the screen turned into a notebook page. Fixed: the banner column spanned the full width, so its box ran under the mute key on a short wide screen. Fixed: the HUD was not updated while you sat on the launch pad, so it opened a run blank.
- THE ART IS PHOTOGRAPHS NOW. Twenty real cut-outs — the ladybird from above, a second shot of her with the shell open and flight wings spread for gliding, sunflower, daisy, cherry blossom, violet, leaf, dried leaf, petal, stone, asteroid, cloud, the full moon, ice, a sparrow, a garden spider, a dandelion clock, grass, a twig and a berry. Generated on chroma screens, keyed, and packed into one 47 KB atlas: one request, one decode, one texture. Every prop keeps its drawn fallback, so the game runs and looks like itself even if the file never loads.
- Which cut-out a prop wears depends on altitude — the flowers vary so a screen is not five copies of the same daisy, greenery dries out as the air thins, and a stone becomes asteroid once there is no sky left for it to be a stone in. The spider now sits on its own web, which is rather the point of a web.
- TIGHTENING THE MATTE. Keying off a coloured screen leaves a rim of half-transparent pixels carrying the screen's colour — a pale halo round a daisy, a blue edge along a leaf. The atlas gets one pass at load: partial alpha through a steep curve so the halo dies but a pixel of softness survives, and the backdrop hue pulled out of what remains. Cheaper than re-cutting and re-shipping the art, and it fixes every sprite at once.
- THE HUD FOLLOWS THE SKY. The panels are pale glass with dark lettering, which is right over a garden and unreadable over deep space; past the Karman line they invert.
- Fixed: the leaf was photographed standing up and a platform lies down — it is turned a quarter turn now, which also makes it the right size. And a berry is a lovely photograph and a terrible thing to land on, so it is decoration rather than a platform.
- THE SYSTEMS ARE WIRED TO EACH OTHER, not merely running at the same time. The wind leans a thermal over as it rises, so in a gale the top of a column is a long way downwind of its base and you have to chase it. The wind blows the light platforms — petals and leaves — so a landing pad in a gale is a moving target, while rock is not moved because rock is the heavy thing. A cloud is water vapour: bounce off one above 4,000 m and it leaves ice on your wings, which finally gives the biggest bounce in the game a price. And loose stardust gets carried UP the warm columns, so the line that gains you the most height is also the line that pays best.
- BIRDS HUNT. One used to fly a straight line and hurt you only if you were standing in it. It cruises, notices you, holds still for half a second with its wings up and a ring flashing round it, and then dives along the line to where you were. A threat you can read is worth more than a threat you cannot.
- FIXED: the cloud icing and the landing frost-shed were two rules cancelling each other out, so a cloud — the one platform actually made of water — came out ice-neutral. Only a solid landing scrapes ice off now.
- GLIDING. Holding the button was the launch control and then did nothing for the entire rest of the run — a whole input sitting idle. Keep holding now and the wings stay out: gravity drops to about a third, a descent caps at a quarter of free-fall, it trickles stamina, and it hands the wind twice as much of you to push on.
- THERMALS, AND WHY THEY NEED THE GLIDE. Columns of rising air, seeded through the atmosphere and gone in vacuum. A column pushes up at 320 against gravity's 1,500, so alone it only slows a fall — but gliding drops gravity to 510 while doubling the column's push to 640, and only then does it carry you. The two mechanics are locked together on purpose: everything else in the game costs you something, and this is the thing that pays. A big column is 700-odd pixels of free height.
- WIND. It eases toward the value for your altitude rather than snapping at a band edge, with gusts on top. Worst in the middle where the air is fast and thin at once, it changes sign as you climb so it is never one steady push, and it dies with the atmosphere. Shown as a direction and a word — CALM, BREEZE, WIND, GALE — in the stamina panel, and visible in the drift of the pollen.
- FROST. Above 5,200 m ice builds on your wings; fully frosted a flap has 42% less in it and a glide sinks nearly twice as fast. Landing knocks some off, dropping below 3,000 m melts it, and a thermal clears it fastest. It shows as a second thin bar under the stamina and as rime on the bug.
- THE CHAIN. Four clean landings pays 1.5x on stardust, climbing to 5x, and anything that touches you wipes it — so the safe line and the profitable line stop being the same line.
- SECTOR CONDITIONS. Past DEEP SPACE each sector rolls DEAD CALM, SOLAR WIND, METEOR SHOWER, AURORA or DEBRIS FIELD, derived from the sector number so sector 7 is always the same sector 7.
- THE SHED NOW TRADES OFF. Each of the five upgrades reaches into two systems instead of one — Wing Power is flap force and glide, Deep Lungs is stamina and frost resistance, Long Antennae is dust pull and thermal range, Sticky Legs is web escape and a wider landing ledge.
- FIXED: unlock() was being called sixty times a second for the rest of the run by any badge whose condition stayed true — they latch now. FIXED: the game-over panel is revealed on a 700 ms timer, and would appear on top of the shed or of a fresh run if you moved on inside that window. FIXED: a held pointer leaked across runs, so a new run could start already gliding. FIXED: the bug was still drawn mid-glide on the death screen. FIXED: the first draft of the thermal used destination-out to fade its top edge, which erased the sky along with it and left black rectangles hanging in the air.
- Four more achievements — Sure Feet, Free Ride, Long Glider and Iced Up — for a total of thirteen.
- THE LAUNCH IS A TIMING SHOT NOW. The charge meter filled to maximum in about a second and a half and then STAYED there, so holding the button was always a perfect launch and the meter was decoration. It swings up and back down for as long as you hold it, you get what it reads when you let go, and there is a marked window at the top worth aiming for that pays a bonus and a badge.
- IT KEEPS GOING. Three fixed layers ending at 3,500 m became nine named bands up to DEEP SPACE and then numbered sectors every 4,000 m, generated from the sector number, forever. Reach the moon at 14,000 m and you climb past it — it slides down the screen and shrinks behind you.
- AND IT KEEPS GETTING HARDER. Every difficulty dial was previously a constant: webs on 14% of rows, birds at a fixed rate, rows a fixed distance apart, a flap always 8 stamina. All of them are now one curve of your altitude with no ceiling — row gaps 76→209 px, webs 2%→34%, birds none→1.4 a second, flap cost 7→18. What you can stand on changes with the air too: above the Karman line the flowers are gone and it is drifting petals and tumbling rock.
- THE UI IS NOT EMOJI ANY MORE. Every glyph — leaf, spark, moon, speaker — is a drawn shape, the type is round and friendly instead of the system serif, and the HUD sits in three reserved zones so no two panels can overlap at any size. The altitude readout and the moon meter were both pinned to the bottom centre and collided on short phones; they share one strip now. The mute button sat underneath the stardust pill.
- THE SHED IS A DIAGRAM. Five upgrades arranged around your ladybug with a line from each one to the part it improves, instead of a list of rows.
- FIXED: birds spawned on a per-FRAME coin flip, so a 120 Hz screen got twice as many as a 60 Hz one. Fixed: the moon meter teleported you 1,500 px straight up through anything in the way, next to a line of dead code and a 50 ms timer used to unlatch a flag — it is a real velocity boost now. Fixed: the tumble animation multiplied by the absolute page clock, so how fast the bug spun depended on how long the tab had been open. Fixed: a caught spider web was never removed. Fixed: holding SPACE auto-flapped and drained the bar.
- OPTIMISED: the HUD was five getElementById calls and five style writes every frame for values that had not changed — it writes only what moved. Every wingbeat allocated a fresh noise buffer and filled it with Math.random(); there is one buffer now. The drag handler forced a layout on every pointer move. The star field is scattered once instead of being re-derived 140 times a frame from a formula that collapsed it into three vertical dotted lines. The parallax horizon tiled identical scenery up to the stratosphere; there is one horizon and it falls away as you climb.
- Nine achievements, from Clean Launch to Deep Space, where there were none at all.
- Cataloguing pass — the game as first added to the site.