Learning: finishing a jump for the first time

Much of Airtime is about racing. But for a new player, racing comes second. **The first goal is to finish a jump at all.** On a hard icy map that can take days, sometimes a week. That's not a flaw in the game: it's a real skill with a real learning curve, the same one the UrT jump community has climbed for twenty years.

Airtime treats this phase as a first-class part of the game, not a hurdle before the "real" game starts.

What a new player has to learn#

Roughly in this order (each one is a page in mechanics):

Moving at all: run, sprint, jump, and the fact that jump must be pressed again each time.
Strafe jumping: gaining speed in the air with A/D and the mouse. The biggest hurdle: it feels wrong at first and takes hours to click.
Ice: no friction, steering with almost no grip, sprinting in arcs.
Walljumps: the timing window (only while falling), the wall rules, chains.
Drop-ins: landing on curves at the right spot and angle to keep speed.
Crouching and the power slide, ledges, stamina (on maps that use it).
Combining it all in one flowing line, which is where the week goes.

Finishing comes before timing#

Stage	What counts	Tools
Learning a jump	getting through one jump or section at all	save / load anywhere, rewind, slow motion, every training aid
First finish of a route	reaching the stop gate once, with saves and loads allowed	the same; the number of loads is shown, not judged
Clean finish	the whole route in one go, no loads	practice tools off, timer on
Racing	finishing faster	splits, ghosts, boards (runs.md, competition.md)

First finishes are tracked: per jump, per section, per route. The game remembers the day you first made a jump.
The first finish is celebrated more than a personal best: a moment, a sound, a mark on the map ("Finished"), and it's the first medal of every route, before bronze.
Loads aren't failure: a finish with 300 loads is still a finish. The count is shown so you can watch it go down over the days.

Seeing progress#

Learning a jump for a week is only fun if you can see that you're getting better.

Per jump: attempts, the furthest point you reached, your best attempt as a ghost, the day you first made it.
Per map: jumps learned ("7 / 12"), routes finished, leets and secrets found.
Over time: how far you get on the hard jump today compared with last week.
Your ghost vs your old ghost: race the version of you from three days ago.

Help that teaches (without spoiling)#

Ghosts as teachers: watch the jump done by someone else, in slow motion, with their keys, their strafe HUD and their path line.
Training aids: the strafe HUD (how to gain speed), the walljump helper (when the window is open), drop-in ratings (where to land), the ice arc coach, hidden-surface views.
Practice tools: save / load anywhere, rewind, slow motion, set your speed, start a practice run from any point of a ghost.
Hints on request: "what am I doing wrong?" Compare your last attempt with a ghost: you were 120 ups too slow at the take-off, or you jumped 30 units early.
Off by default in races: none of this ever changes the physics, and tools mark the run as practice.

A path from easy to hard#

Difficulty tiers for every route (1 = first day, 6 = months), set by the author and adjusted by players who finished.
A suggested next jump: the game knows what you've finished and suggests something one step harder.
The story mode is the guided path: each chapter teaches one mechanic and tests it (world/story.md).
Easy routes on hard maps: many jump maps have a "noob" route next to the main one. Maps should be designed with an entry path for beginners and leets for experts (see routes and leets).

Tone#

Respect the learning curve: the game never pretends it's easy, and never makes a beginner feel slow. Your own progress comes first on every screen; the top 10 is one click away, not in your face.
Never alone while learning: the crowd of ghosts shows that everyone fell off this jump a hundred times too, and that it can be done.