WHAT IS SKY RUNNER?

Sky Runner is a free 3D flying game that runs right in your browser — no download, no account. You pilot a little toy plane above a sunny miniature town while the sky fills with things that want to meet you nose-first: red drones, drifting hot-air balloons, flocks of birds, and speedy yellow toy planes. Survive the 90-second flight and your score tells the story. Five difficulty levels stretch from a gentle cruise (level 1 never puts more than two threats in the air) to genuine chaos (level 5 juggles up to ten, with far steadier aim).

CONTROLS AT A GLANCE

On desktop, steer with the arrow keys or WASD — up and down pitch the plane, left and right bank it into a turn. SHIFT is boost, SPACE is brake, F or Enter fires the cannon, and T flips auto-fire on or off.

On phones and tablets a touch d-pad appears at the bottom right with the fire button at its center, while BOOST, BRAKE, and the AUTO switch sit on the left — steering with one finger and shooting with another works fine. For the button-by-button breakdown and the ammo rules, see the full How to Play guide.

HOW THE SCORING ACTUALLY WORKS

Sky Runner uses what we call honest scoring: a dodge only pays out when a threat genuinely came near your plane. Anything drifting past at a comfortable distance earns nothing, so the number on screen reflects real flying.

Each clean dodge is worth +1. Cut it truly fine and it upgrades to a close call worth +3. Shooting a threat down pays +2 and hands back 3 rounds of ammo. A crash costs −5 (your total never drops below zero). Your best score is saved per level on your own device, and the Share Score button copies a ready-made challenge message for friends.

SIX TIPS FROM OUR OWN COCKPIT

• Never fly straight. Drones launch on an intercept course toward where your plane is about to be, so a constant heading is a scheduled collision. Small, continuous corrections beat big panicked ones.
• Boost and brake are dodges, not just speed settings. Interceptors aim assuming your current pace — the brake cuts you to roughly half cruise speed and boost nearly doubles it, making their firing solution stale at the last moment.
• Court the close call. A near miss pays triple a comfortable dodge. Once surviving feels easy, let threats get uncomfortably close on purpose.
• Watch your flanks. Most threats come from ahead, but bird flocks cut across your path from the side. And when a red ! flashes at the screen edge, a toy plane — the fastest thing in the sky, about one and a half times drone speed — has locked onto you.
• Farm balloons for ammo. They're big, slow, worth the same +2 as anything else, and every hit refunds more ammo than the shot cost. Easy income.
• Auto-fire is a trade. Double the firing rate while you steer, but it drains the magazine fast — flip it on for the dense waves at levels 4 and 5, not the whole run.

BEHIND THE BUILD

Sky Runner is the first cabinet in our little arcade. We're Webmaster & More, a small three-person web studio in Los Angeles, and the whole game lives on one hand-written page — Three.js for the 3D toy town is the only library involved. Even the audio is mixed live in your browser: boost layers in a deep roar, a dive adds airspeed hiss, and banking pans a wind whoosh toward the turn. We wrote up the design decisions, including the honest-scoring system, in the dev log: Building Sky Runner. Done flying? There's more in the arcade.