Aero Glide: Canyon Rush

Aero Glide: Canyon Rush is a single-player, portrait mobile prototype of survival flight.

You pilot a ram-air paraglider down a canyon line. Altitude is the resource. The wing sinks every second. Blue thermals are gather points: fly through them to climb and refill boost. Speed bar converts height into airspeed. Flare converts that speed back into lift so you can stick the landing pad. Downdrafts and cliffs are the threat that ramps as courses tighten.

A session has a start (pick Alpine Glide), a loop (bank, gather, spend, thread rings), and a win / lose / retry (pad, crash, Play Again). Stars unlock the next short course in the same sitting.

Genre: Survival & Resource Management.

Inspiration

Real paragliding is already a survival-and-resource game: you spend height, hunt lift, and convert speed into a flare. Most flight games hide that economy behind a vehicle or a health bar. We wanted the player to feel the polar with their thumbs.

Portrait thumbs as left/right brake toggles came from how a real harness is flown.

How I built it

Prompt-built with Grok (xAI) across short, playtested passes:

Polar + camera + pad so energy is playable.
Rings, thermals, downdrafts, stars so a session has gather / spend / escalate.
Seated pilot + ram-air wing (Hyper3D person/parachute, no pod) so the silhouette reads.
Portrait sliders, Web Audio vario/wind, Kenney hits so climb and sink are obvious on a phone.
Offline packaging rules: relative assets, no CDN. Contest zip is a self-contained Three.js pack, separate from any public host.

Hand edits were limited to bug fixes, feel tuning, and keeping the pack legal.

Challenges

Valley "landings" and wall-folds stole the stick. Landing now only counts on the pad.
Camera clipped the canopy; a shadow map flickered a black square. Fixed with a camera clamp and no shadow map.
Portrait HUD covered the valley. Desktop chrome collapses; thumbs stay on the brakes.
Root-absolute /models paths 404 on prefixed hosts. Locked relative ./models, ./audio, ./terrains.

What I learned

Hidden fails and unreadable silhouettes cost more than missing features. Depth on one energy loop beat extra systems. Tell the AI the pack rules (portrait, offline, unminified index.html + vendor/) on day one.

What's next

If this wins a completion grant: rebuild the same loop on Horizon early-access tools as a portrait, single-player title. Local ghosts on your best line and a tiny course workshop. No multiplayer in the prototype, by rule.