Spider Swing

About the game

Spider Swing is a one-button physics game. A spider hangs from a thread against a brick wall, and blue dots dotted across it are the places where the thread can be attached. Your goal is to travel to the right, past the finish line, by swinging from dot to dot, and the only control is when to hold and when to let go.

Pressing and holding sends the thread to the anchor point nearest to where you pressed, and the spider starts to swing like a pendulum around it. Releasing sets the spider free with the speed it had at that instant, and it flies on a curve until you grab the next dot. The two numbers in the corners tell you how it is going: E is the spider's energy, made of its height and its speed, and pos is how far it has travelled.

The wall is unforgiving: fall off the bottom and you start again from the beginning. Because every swing converts height into speed and back, you cannot just grab the nearest dot each time. You have to let go at the right moment of the arc, on the way up, so that the spider arrives at the next anchor with height to spare.

Playing it here

Click Play. The spider starts hanging from the first anchor. Press and hold the mouse button (or touch and hold on a phone or tablet) to attach to the dot nearest to the point you pressed, and let go to release the thread. Then press again near the next dot. The Options button in the corner holds New Game and the colour scheme.

Controls

A few things worth knowing

Release on the way up. The spider moves fastest at the bottom of the swing, and letting go while it rises sends it up and forward at the same time.

Press close to the dot you want. The game picks the anchor nearest to your pointer, not the nearest to the spider, so you choose where to grab by where you press.

Watch the energy. If E keeps falling, you are losing height on every swing, and a short extra swing on the same dot can win some back.

FAQ

How do I win? Cross the finish line at the right edge of the course; the game shows when you have crossed it, and Options > New Game starts another run.

What happens if I fall? The spider goes back to the start, and the run begins again.

Is it the same wall every time? New Game builds a new arrangement of anchors.

Credits and licence

Spider Swing 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 spider and the brick wall 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.