Cave Pilot

About the game

Cave Pilot is a time-trial game about momentum. A small ship floats in empty space inside a track made of red walls, and there is no friction: when you stop pushing, the ship keeps going in the direction it was already moving. The course is a loop. You race around it against the clock, and every lap you finish is added to a list of lap times in the corner, so you can try to beat your own best.

Steering is the whole challenge. The ship does not slide sideways: you turn it with the left and right keys, and the thruster only pushes in the direction the nose points. To change course you have to turn around and push against your own motion, or use the brake, which kills your speed quickly but costs time. The wide corridors invite you to go fast, and the narrow turns punish you for it.

Touch a wall and the run is over: the ship goes back to the start, the lap timer drops to zero and your checkpoints are cleared. A lap only counts if you have flown through all the checkpoints before the finish line, so you cannot cut the track.

Playing it here

Click Play and click inside the game once so that it receives the keyboard. The clock starts at once. Hold Up to thrust, tap Left and Right to turn, and press Down to brake. On a phone or tablet the round direction pad at the bottom right does the same: the direction you hold is the direction the ship turns to, and it fires the thruster. The Options button changes the colour scheme.

Controls

A few things worth knowing

Turn early. The ship keeps its speed through a turn, so start rotating before the corner, not at it.

Thrust in short bursts. Short pushes are easier to control than a long one, and you can always add more.

Use the brake before narrow parts. It is slow to recover from a crash, so slowing down for a tight passage usually costs less than a restart.

FAQ

Is there a finish and a winner? There is no opponent: the game keeps the times of every lap you complete, and the goal is to improve them.

Does it save my times? No, the lap list belongs to the current visit.

Can two people play? No, it is a single-player game.

Credits and licence

Cave Pilot is one of the games of the AlexGames collection, made by Alex Barry as a small Lua program on his own game engine, and it is free software under the GNU Affero General Public License, version 3. The ship and the direction pad are pictures from the same repository, covered by the same licence. The engine, the Lua interpreter (MIT licence) and the game run in your browser as WebAssembly. We removed the online multiplayer, the zip upload and the links to other sites from the page; the game itself was not changed. Because the licence is the AGPL, the complete source of the version played here, the patch and the build script are linked from this page, together with the licence texts.