How Skyhook works

What is Skyhook?

Skyhook is a one-button arcade game set in a world someone doodled into their notebook. You are a little round scribble with googly eyes and a grappling hook, swinging from anchor to anchor over a sketched city. Below you lies a lake of blue ink – fall in and the run is over. Behind you a giant eraser rubs the page clean, and it gets faster the further you go. The course is generated fresh for every run and gets harder metre by metre.

One run usually lasts one to three minutes. Skyhook works the same on a phone, a tablet and a computer – there is only one thing to do: hold and let go at the right moment.

Controls

• Phone and tablet: touch and hold anywhere on the screen, lift your finger to let go.
• Computer: hold the mouse button, the space bar, ↑ or W.
• Esc or P pauses, M mutes the sound. On the game-over screen, space or Enter starts the next run straight away.

How swinging works

Hooking on

The anchor your hook will grab is marked with a rotating ring and a dotted pencil line. Hold, and the hook flies there instantly. If the rope is longer than about eleven metres, it reels you in – so grabbing an anchor from far away pulls you towards it. An anchor behind an active laser can't be grabbed: the beam blocks the hook. If a laser rising from below lies between you and the anchor you grab, the rope reels in quickly until your arc clears the beam.

Letting go

While you hang on the rope you gain speed swinging down and forward. Let go while you are moving up and forward – at an angle between roughly 26 and 60 degrees and with enough forward speed, you get PERFECT: ten percent more speed, 25 bonus points and +1 on your multiplier.

The next anchor

If you keep holding after an anchor shatters, the hook grabs the next anchor in range by itself. The most reliable rhythm: let go on the way up, fly, and hold again as soon as you start to fall.

Anchors

• Green: a normal anchor that holds as long as you like.
• Orange with cracks: breaks about one second after you hook on (from around 170 m).
• Blue with arrows: turbo – pulls you in hard, kicks you forward and adds +1 to your multiplier (from around 100 m).
• Purple on a dotted line: moves up and down (from around 300 m).

Dangers

• The ink lake: the hatched blue water at the bottom. Sink into it and the run ends.
• Lasers: red marker beams between two striped boxes, rising from below (from around 120 m) and later also hanging down from above. Touching one is fatal; your rope is not cut. From around 500 m some lasers pulse – they show as a dashed line while off and flicker briefly before they switch back on.
• Mines: spiky black balls with a blinking red light that float up and down (from around 235 m). Pass close by without touching one and you get a CLOSE CALL bonus.
• The eraser: a giant eraser that rubs the page clean from the left. It starts slowly, gets faster up to almost 1,000 m and is never more than 60 m behind you. Whatever it has erased is gone – including you, if you hang around too long.

Points and multiplier

Every metre you cover is worth as many points as your current multiplier. On top of that there are bonuses, also multiplied:

• PERFECT release: 25 points
• Star: 5 points
• Boost ring (yellow, with arrows): 50 points – and a big burst of speed
• Close call next to a mine or a laser: 40 points
• Air time (more than 1.4 seconds in free flight): 30 points

The multiplier goes up to ×10. It grows with every perfect release, every ring and every turbo anchor. It shrinks by one if you hang on a rope for longer than about 2.4 seconds – Skyhook rewards flowing play, not waiting. If your shield saves you, the multiplier drops back to ×1.

Power-ups

• Shield (blue): saves you once from a laser, a mine or the ink lake – out of the ink it bounces you back up. It does not help against the eraser.
• Magnet (red): for nine seconds it pulls in every star within about nine metres – longer and further with the magnet upgrade.

Daily run

Every run builds a new course from random sections – rows, staircases, waves, zigzags, long jumps through a boost ring, turbo, cracked and moving anchors – and after two tough sections in a row you always get a breather. The daily run is the same course for everyone on the same day, whatever upgrades you own. It has its own best score, so you can compare with friends – the result can be shared as a picture.

The shop

The stars you collect in every run are saved. At the end of each run you also get a few bonus stars for the distance (one star every 50 metres to start with), and once a day a daily gift of 30 stars is waiting in the shop – a red dot on the Shop button tells you. You can open the shop from the title screen and straight from the game-over screen. It has five tabs:

Upgrades

Upgrades are permanent and work in every run. Each has five levels; they cost 40, 90, 180, 320 and 520 stars.

• Longer hook: the hook reaches 17.6 m at first and 22 m at the top level.
• Stronger magnet: the magnet lasts 9 seconds at first and up to 24 seconds, and pulls from further away.
• More power-ups: shields and magnets turn up more often – twice as often at the top level.
• Perfect timing: the angle window for PERFECT grows from 34° to 59°, and you need a little less speed for it.
• Lucky stars: every star has an 8 % chance per level to count double – 40 % at the top level.
• Distance bonus: more bonus stars for the distance – up to one star every 22 metres.
• Lazy eraser: the eraser is up to 30 % slower and stays further behind you.

Items

Items are used once. You can hold up to nine of each; the title screen shows what you have packed for the next run.

• Rocket start (90 stars): your next run starts with a rocket that flies you over about 180 metres. On the rocket you can't be hurt, and it pulls in stars as it passes.
• Starting shield (50 stars): you start your next run with a shield.
• Double stars (60 stars): every star counts double in your next run.
• Second chance (120 stars): if you crash, you get five seconds to decide whether to keep flying. You then hang safely from the next anchor, nearby dangers are cleared away and you blink, protected, for a moment. Once per run.
• Mystery bag (250 stars): gives you a random skin, hat or trail you don't own yet – rare pieces come up less often.

Rocket start, starting shield and double stars are used automatically when your next run begins. If you restart before your first hook, you get them back.

Skins, hats and trails

These only change how your doodle ball looks, and once bought they are yours for good – tap one to wear it. There are 20 skins (from Sunny, Tomato and Mint to patterns like Ladybug, Zebra, Cookie, Basketball, Watermelon and Pumpkin, Planet with its ring, a slowly turning Earth, glowing Lava and a twinkling Galaxy), 12 hats (Cap, Party Hat, Bow, Headphones, Shades, Top Hat, Witch Hat, Viking, a spinning Propeller, Crown, Wizard and Halo) and 10 trails (Marker, Pencil, Dots, Bubbles, Hearts, Stars, Fire, Lightning, Rainbow and Confetti). Every piece has a rarity – common, rare, epic or legendary – and costs between 60 and 2,500 stars.

Strategy and tips

• Let go early rather than late. Hanging at the bottom of a swing costs height and, after a while, your multiplier.
• Hold on over lasers. Hook onto an anchor beyond a laser and the rope pulls you up until your arc passes above the beam – just don't let go before you are past it.
• Don't trust orange anchors. Use them as a quick swing, not as a resting place.
• Rings are worth the detour. Their speed boost helps you keep your distance from the eraser.
• Watch the dotted line. It always shows which anchor you will grab next.
• Start with Lucky stars and Distance bonus. Both bring in more stars every run, so everything else in the shop comes faster.

Frequently asked questions

Do I need an account?

No. Best scores, stars, upgrades, items and everything you bought stay in your browser's local storage. If you clear the site data, you start from scratch.

Does Skyhook work offline?

Once the page has loaded, the game itself needs no connection – the world is generated on your device.

Is Skyhook suitable for children?

Yes. There is no violence, no chat and no real-money purchases; stars can only be earned in the game.

Behind the scenes

Skyhook doesn't use a single image or sound file. The paper, the pencil city and every doodle are drawn on a canvas, and the lines tremble slightly eight times a second, like in a hand-drawn cartoon. The cheerful soundtrack – kick, claps, bass and a plucked melody – is played live with the Web Audio API, and the higher your multiplier, the more instruments join in. Every course is built from a seed: the daily run takes the date as its seed, which is why everyone gets the same course.