First Flight

About the game

First Flight follows a young witch on the night of her first flight. "I'm so nervous!", she says before take-off, and then it is up to you to keep her on course. The view is from behind her broom, low over a lake with mountains, pine forests and a crescent moon on the horizon, and a line of glowing rings comes towards you out of the distance.

Each difficulty is a fixed course of rings with a clock that counts up from the start. Every ring you fly through adds a point to your score, and a ring you miss is simply gone; a sparkling speed-up item lets the broom go faster for a while. The broom can climb, dive and slide from side to side, and you choose how fast it goes: push too hard and the next ring arrives before you have lined up for it, hold back and the clock keeps running. The best run is the one with the most rings, and between equal scores, the fastest time.

The main menu offers three difficulty levels, Novice, Adept and Expert, a High Scores table that is saved on the WASM-4 disk between visits, and a switch to turn the music on or off. The pixel art and the three tunes for the menu, the race and the finish were made by the two authors themselves.

Playing it here

First Flight was made for WASM-4, a fantasy console: an imaginary handheld with a 160 by 160 screen, four colours, a D-pad and two buttons, for which independent developers write new games. The duo bootra wrote it in Zig for the second WASM-4 game jam, in August 2022, and it runs here in the official WASM-4 runtime. Click Play, press X on the title screen, pick a difficulty and press X again.

High scores stay in your browser. Enter opens the WASM-4 menu, where you can also save and load the state while the page is open. A gamepad works too, and on touch screens an on-screen D-pad and buttons appear.

Controls

Space, V or the period key also work as X, and C or the comma key as Z.

A few things worth knowing

Line up early. Rings appear small in the distance; moving towards them while they are still far away is much easier than a last-second swerve.

Rings come first. Time only breaks ties, so slowing down with Z to catch a ring is always worth it; speed up on the easy stretches.

Grab the speed-ups. The sparkling items are worth a small detour when the next ring is nearby.

Credits and licence

First Flight was made by bootra: boo drew the art, and tra wrote the game and the music, in Zig. It is released under the MIT licence, with the source code in a repository on GitHub. The compiled game also contains the WASM-4 bindings (ISC licence), and it runs here in the WASM-4 runtime (ISC licence). The licence texts are linked from this page.