Vision: dream the dream big

Airtime is a first-person jump game. Movement comes first: it keeps the exact movement physics that a community spent twenty years mastering, bit for bit, and puts them in a world that looks like today.

This page describes Airtime as the finished game: what it is, how it plays, how it looks. The details live in gameplay/, world/ and tech/.

The one-sentence pitch#

Mirror's Edge looks, Defrag depth, Trackmania's loop.

Mirror's Edge looks: a believable, beautiful place to run through, with a body you can feel.
Defrag depth: physics with no ceiling. Ten thousand hours in, you still find new lines.
Trackmania's loop: retry in a heartbeat, beat your ghost, beat your friends, build your own track, share it.
Old engine underneath, new engine on top: the collision and movement are Quake 3 / UrT, exactly. Everything you see and hear is a modern engine.

Pillars#

1. Movement is the game#

The core is exact Urban Terror 4.3.4 movement, bit for bit. Strafe jumping, walljumps, ledge grabs, power slides, stamina, slick and icy surfaces all behave exactly as there. That is the promise to the jump community: your skills and your muscle memory carry over, and records stay comparable.
More moves, built on it: double jumps, dashes, gravity flips, wall-runs, jetpacks, grapples, bounce surfaces. They're part of the places built around them: a gravity lab, a jetpack chapter, a wall-run garage. You pick them up as you play; the game keeps every board fair by itself (gameplay/mechanics/).
Movement first, guns second. Some sections hand you a gun: a shootable switch, a lock, a drone, Wardens on your heels. Gunplay is part of the game, but always secondary to moving well. Races and boards are about movement.
Physics is the referee. Inputs in, the same simulation everywhere: in the game, on the server, in a replay. A time is real because it can be replayed.

2. Learning comes first#

The honest truth about jump games: **a new player may need a week before they finish the hard jumps at all.** That's not a flaw, it's the skill. Airtime is built for that learning curve, not only for the people at the top of it.

The first goal is to finish. Every jump, section and route tracks your first finish, and the game celebrates it more than a personal best. Racing comes after.
Progress you can see: jumps learned per map, routes finished, a "Finished" medal before bronze. You always see how far you've come, not only how far the record is.
Practice is the main road: save and load positions, rewind, slow motion, the strafe HUD, the walljump helper, drop-in ratings, and ghosts that show how a jump is done.
A path from easy to hard: maps and routes have difficulty tiers, the story mode is the guided path, and the game suggests the next jump that fits your skill.
No shame in slow: your own progress comes first on every screen. The top 10 is there when you want it, not pushed at a beginner.

Details: gameplay/learning.md.

3. A world worth running through#

A run looks like a trailer.

Two layers in every map (tech/engine.md):
- Collision, the old engine: where you can run, jump, slide, walljump, climb, swim and water-jump is Quake 3 brushes and patches, traced exactly like UrT.
- Visuals, the modern engine: what you see is modern geometry, materials and light, laid over the collision. As detailed as it gets, and it never lies about the collision.
Modern rendering: physically based materials, global illumination, reflections, volumetric fog and light shafts, and a sky with weather and time of day.
Ice that looks like ice: slick surfaces you read at a glance, through gloss, frost, reflections, glare and the carve marks of your blades (world/concept-design.md). Clarity first: the look never hides where you can stand.
Readable at speed, like Mirror's Edge's runner vision: optional colour hints for the line, while the world itself stays calm, clean and architectural.
A body: full-body first person, with arms reaching for ledges, blades snapping out on the ice, a roll after a big drop (purely visual, it never changes the physics), and a camera that sells speed through FOV, subtle shake, wind sound and motion blur, each one adjustable.
Sound as feedback: a footstep that tells you the surface, the carve of steel on ice, wind that rises with speed, and a clean chime for a leet. You can hear your speed.
It runs on a laptop: scalable quality, never at the cost of frame timing. 125 Hz input and a smooth frame rate beat any effect.

4. Instant#

Straight into a run: start the game and you're on a map in seconds. Invites and shared links open the game at that map, next to that ghost, or in that room.
Retry is free: one key resets to the start in under a frame. You never wait for a load screen between attempts.
Practice tools built in: save and load positions, rewind, slow motion, a strafe HUD, path lines, a walljump helper, drop-in ratings and hidden-surface views. Training is part of the game, not a mod.

5. Never alone#

Ghosts everywhere: the crowd of other people's runs moves through the map with you, so an empty server still feels alive.
Race anyone: your best, your friend's best, the world record. Live splits and the full speedrun timetable tell you where you lose time.
Rooms: drop into a realm with others, run together, chat and spectate. Online play never changes the physics.
Live races: the server calls a race, everyone lines up, the countdown runs, and you all go at once. Fall off and you're out. Last one standing or first one home wins (gameplay/multiplayer.md).
Teams: relay runs, team averages and co-op maps where one player opens the way for the other (see gameplay/teams.md).

6. Build while you play#

The editor is part of the game. Press a key, the world freezes around a build crosshair, you place a curve, press the key again, and you're running it at full speed, with your momentum kept.
Pieces, not polygons: boxes, ramps, curves, bowls, pipes, slick and icy surfaces, timers, teleports and lights. Easy to start, deep enough for real jump maps.
Build together: several builders in one room, one testing while the other shapes.
Publish in one click: the map gets a link, a levelshot and a leaderboard, and ghosts appear as soon as people play it.

7. Fair, proud competition#

Verified times: the server replays your inputs and confirms the time before it reaches the leaderboard (see tech/replay.md and tech/timing/).
Every record can be watched: every leaderboard entry is a ghost you can race or spectate.
Medals and leets: finished / bronze / silver / gold / author per route, leets as visible goals, secrets to find. A new player always has a next target, and the first one is just to finish.
Events: a map of the week, cups, seasons and community tournaments.

Concept art (described)#

These scenes are the brief for concept art and for every visual decision. More scenes from the frozen city: world/concept-design.md.

Glass bowl at dawn. A huge icy bowl hangs inside a concrete atrium. Low sun comes through tall windows, the ice glows orange where it catches the light, and you can see frost in the shadow. A dozen translucent ghosts trace arcs across it in different colours. You stand on the rim, about to drop in.
Rooftop line. Clean white rooftops above a city at noon, with a red line of runner vision across them. Gaps you can strafe-jump, a walljump off a billboard, a slick ramp down into a courtyard. Long view distance.
The Steel Slide at night. A long brushed-steel half pipe under sodium lights, wet reflections, your speed shown as a soft streak. The leet exit is a narrow window at the top that only opens if you carry more than 1200 ups.
Builder's view. The same map half built: grid lines on the floor, a ghosted curve piece snapped where the player looks, the timer start shown as a glowing gate, and a friend already running the part you placed a minute ago.
The finish. You cross the stop gate. Time freezes for a beat, splits fly in and the race ghost lands a hair behind you. The crowd's ghosts keep running. Retry is one key away.

Mood words: clean, airy, cold light, warm accents, architectural, fast, calm. Not grimy, not noisy, not military.

What Airtime is not#

Not a shooter: movement comes first. Guns appear in some sections, and they're always secondary.
Not only a racing game: first you learn to finish, which is a real skill with a real learning curve. Racing is what comes after.
Not a battle royale with movement tech.
Not a cutscene game: the story mode tells its story through places, voices and chases (world/), and never puts a long scene between you and the next run.
Not "UrT-like" physics: it is UrT physics, with Airtime's moves on top where a place is built for them.