A first-person movement shooter built for speedrunning: chain jumps and dashes across rooftops, shoot down sentries with the ARC-9 pulse carbine, and clear each of three courses inside a shrinking split window. Every run against your own personal-best ghost.
SKYBREAK is a first-person movement shooter built around a single idea: keep your speed up. You launch off rooftops, chain double-jumps and a Shift dash into a running momentum, and shoot down sentries with the ARC-9 pulse carbine along the way — while a split-window countdown ticks down toward an S / A / B time threshold that decides how the run is graded. There is no ammo to manage (the carbine runs on infinite energy) and no health bar to nurse, only a suit percentage and a clock. The whole game is built for the run to end well under a minute.
It was posted by Rana Hanocka (@RanaHanocka) — Assistant Professor at UChicago and Founder/CEO of Thrixel, the build platform SKYBREAK actually runs on. The post is explicit that Rana didn't build it herself: "one of our teammates is obsessed with speedrunning, so she used Build World to create the exact game she wanted to play" — Build World being Thrixel's prompt-to-game tool, the same idea as ChatGPT Sites elsewhere in this collection, powered by Astra under the hood. The reply that actually links the game ("Think you can beat her score? She's crazy fast") is what's cited on this page, since it's the one carrying the playable URL.
The hosting address itself — bright-dolphin-85802.thrixel.world — is a disposable, per-deployment subdomain Thrixel hands out for a single Build World project, the same pattern as a chatgpt.site link. Every asset the game needs (three course bundles of glTF models, the weapon and drone meshes, the whole Three.js scene) loads from that one origin; there is no shared Thrixel backend involved in actually playing it.
How to play SKYBREAK
- Pick a course from the menu — THE SKYWAY, HANGING GARDENS or ION FOUNDRY — then press INITIATE RUN.
- WASD moves, the mouse looks and left-click fires the ARC-9. Space jumps, and a second mid-air press is a double jump; Shift is a Vector Dash, whose charges are restored by killing sentries rather than recharging on a timer.
- Each course is timed against three thresholds shown on the menu before you launch — an S, A and B time-under target — and the run itself shows a shrinking "S WINDOW" countdown so you know whether you're still on pace for the top grade.
- Shooting down a sentry (there are nine on THE SKYWAY) reads "SENTRY DESTROYED / +1 VECTOR DASH" on screen and refunds a dash charge, which is the game's actual resource loop: kill to keep dashing, dash to keep the time down.
- R restarts the run instantly from the pause menu or mid-run; Pause also has SOUND and CAMERA MOTION toggles and a CHOOSE COURSE button back to the menu.
- BEST GHOST, toggled from the main menu, races a translucent replay of your fastest clear alongside you once you have one — the menu is upfront that "your first finish records a ghost."
- On a touch screen nothing needs enabling: the interface detects it and swaps WASD/mouse for a virtual move stick plus separate Dash, Fire and Jump buttons.
Click Fullscreen above the game for the largest play area. If the game does not load, use Open in new tab to play it directly from our copy.
Why it's worth your time
Personal bests and the ghost recording are both plain browser localStorage, keyed per course and loadout, wrapped in a try/catch that falls back to an in-session-only ghost if storage is full or unavailable (the game's own UI even says so: "GHOST READY THIS SESSION · LOCAL STORAGE FULL OR UNAVAILABLE"). There is no server call anywhere in the bundle beyond fetching its own local manifest.json — confirmed by reading the shipped JS, not just watching a run — so your best time and ghost in this mirror are exactly as persistent as they are on the original: tied to this browser, not to an account.
Picking a course is a real navigation, not just a UI state change — the menu sends the browser to /?level=gardens or /?level=foundry, and each of those reloads with its own extra set of glTF models (ivy and a biopod for Hanging Gardens; a turbine among others for Ion Foundry) layered on top of a shared prop set used everywhere. All three had to be visited during mirroring or two of the three courses would have shipped with missing geometry.
The three courses read as three distinct biomes rather than three palette-swapped versions of one map: THE SKYWAY (HELION / TRANSIT DISTRICT) is sunlit rooftops with the loosest time targets, HANGING GARDENS (VERDANT / BIOSPHERE ARRAY) is a green canopy course chasing a sunset, and ION FOUNDRY (NEXUS / POWER DISTRIBUTION) is the tightest and most industrial of the three — "Live current. Cold steel. No hesitation," per its own menu blurb.
The grading language (S / A / B thresholds, a shrinking split window, a named personal best) borrows directly from speedrunning culture rather than generic arcade scoring — consistent with the post's own framing that this was built by someone "obsessed with speedrunning" who wanted this specific game to exist.
How it was made and where it lives
Hosted on the author's own page. The author publishes as RanaHanocka. Original: https://bright-dolphin-85802.thrixel.world. The Play button above runs our own unmodified copy, so the game keeps working here if that page goes down — which on free hosting usually has nothing to do with the author. Nothing about the game itself is changed, and the original stays linked from every page.
The post that led us here
Rana Hanocka@RanaHanockaThink you can beat her score? She's crazy fast
If you like SKYBREAK, try these
Iron Echo is the collection's other movement-and-shooting arcade game, a vertical shmup rather than a first-person runner. Ski Cross is the closer match structurally — a timed course you run against named thresholds and your own past result, just on skis instead of on foot.
Frequently asked questions
- What's the actual goal?
- Clear a course's sentries and reach the end inside the S time-under threshold shown on the menu before you launch; A and B are looser fallback grades.
- Does my personal best and ghost survive a reload?
- Yes — both are saved to your browser's local storage per course, with no account or server involved, so they persist in this mirrored copy exactly as they would on the original.
- Can I play it on a phone?
- Yes. The interface detects a touch screen on its own and switches to a virtual move stick plus Dash, Fire and Jump buttons — no setting to find.
- Who actually built this?
- An unnamed teammate at Thrixel, described in the source post as "obsessed with speedrunning." Rana Hanocka, Thrixel's founder, posted it; Thrixel's own prompt-to-game tool ("Build World"), powered by Astra, is what built it.
- Is Thrixel the same as ChatGPT Sites?
- No — they're separate platforms with the same basic pitch: describe a game, get a public link. This game happens to be hosted on Thrixel's own thrixel.world domain rather than chatgpt.site.
- Is SKYBREAK free to play?
- Yes. Everything on Floating Arcade is free, with no account, ads or downloads.
- Can I embed this game on my own website?
- Yes — copy the snippet below. The embedded player links back here, which is how we ask to be credited.
Embed SKYBREAK on your site
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