Duskwing Flyzone Design Notes

Core concept - You control Duskwing, a black bird flying through a scrolling sky. The goal is to chase and fly through clouds to collect power points within a 2-minute time limit.
Storm clouds drain your score. The tension is in reading what's coming and making quick decisions about what to chase and what to dodge.

Controls - Arrow up and arrow down move Duskwing vertically. On mobile or touch devices, two on-screen buttons appear automatically. The bird stays at a fixed horizontal position and the sky scrolls toward her.

Scoring - Score starts at zero and can go negative. There are three cloud types: Wispy clouds are small, semi-transparent, and give +1 with a small sparkle burst. Fluffy clouds are large and white, giving +5 with a big sparkle explosion. Storm clouds are dark and grey, dealing -5 with a yellow electric shock animation on Duskwing. There are no lives, just a score that rises and falls in real time.

The timer and phase system
The game runs for exactly 2 minutes using a real clock (not frame-based, so it's consistent across devices). A color bar under the HUD shows progress through each 30-second phase, shifting from green to orange to red as the game intensifies. The four phases are:
Phase 1 (0–30s) "Just warming up." Speed is moderate at 2.4, gaps between clouds are generous at 240–360px, and 8% of clouds are storm clouds. You should be scoring comfortably but not coasting.
Phase 2 (30–60s) "Picking up speed." Speed jumps to 3.1, gaps tighten to 190–290px, storm clouds increase to 22%. The difficulty jump should be noticeable.
Phase 3 (60–90s) "Watch the storm ones." Speed reaches 3.8, gaps narrow to 150–230px, storm clouds at 34%. Clouds also begin drifting vertically, so their position wobbles up and down as they scroll requiring you to track a moving target.
Phase 4 (90–120s) "Storm incoming." Speed peaks at 4.6, gaps as tight as 110–180px, storm clouds at 44% with heavy vertical wobble. The last 30 seconds is a genuine scramble.

Cloud placement - Clouds are always placed in either the top third or the bottom third of the sky. The middle is always kept as an escape corridor. This means you're never trapped and there's always a safe path but you have to actively move to chase the scoring clouds or avoid storm clouds at the edges.

Cloud variety within each phase - Within the darkChance and wispyChance percentages, the remaining probability is fluffy clouds. So in phase 1 for example: 8% storm, 50% wispy, 42% fluffy. As phases progress, storm clouds eat into the fluffy proportion, so the high-value clouds also become relatively rarer while adding strategic pressure.

Collision and hitbox - Duskwing's hitbox is intentionally small (only about 20% of her wing width and 16% of her height). Since the character is mostly wing silhouette, this means grazing a cloud visually doesn't necessarily register as a hit. This keeps the game feeling fair rather than punishing. A cloud is marked as collected the moment Duskwing's core intersects it, and can only trigger once, so flying through the same cloud repeatedly doesn't multi-score or multi-damage.

Feedback animations - Wispy collect: small 7-particle sparkle burst in cool whites and blues, +1 text floats upward. Fluffy collect: large 14-particle star burst in warm whites, gold, and mint green, +5 text floats upward. No flicker on Duskwing, the particle burst is the whole celebration. Storm cloud hit: 12 jagged electric bolt fragments in yellow and purple scatter from Duskwing, -5 text floats upward in red. Duskwing pulses slowly yellow (every 8 frames) for about 40 frames, subtle enough not to be jarring, clear enough to register as damage.

End screen - When the timer hits zero the game stops immediately and shows a final score with one of four messages: Sky Champion (50+ pts), Nice flight (25+), Not bad (0+), or Stormy ride (negative score). A replay button restarts from scratch.

Squarespace embedding - The entire game is a single self-contained HTML file so there are no external libraries, no server calls, no assets. Google Fonts loads from a CDN for Fredoka One and Nunito. It embeds cleanly into a Squarespace Code Block, scales to 100% width with a max of 640px, and the touch controls activate automatically on mobile so it works for caregivers on phones without any extra setup.