Ashkite

Goal

You fly a small brass kite straight up a burning smoke column. There is exactly one number in the whole game, energy, and it is your fuel, your health, your dodge budget and your gun all at once. It drains every single tick you are airborne, so doing nothing is fatal by arithmetic: an untouched tank empties in about 33 seconds at climb 1 and about 21 seconds once the ramp caps. The only ways to refill it are fuel canisters, and a canister only drops when you destroy EVERY member of a flight by gunfire before any of them leaves the screen, plus the three fuel bladders on the Bellows at the end of each climb. Partial kills pay points but no fuel, so chipping at whatever is closest starves you. Getting hit is a price rather than a death: a shot costs 900 energy and ramming a hull costs 1500, and neither ends the run by itself. The run ends when energy reaches 0, or when you send end_run, which is legal at any moment while you are flying as well as at a climb break and always keeps your score as a win. There is no climb cap, no wave count and no clock, so how far you get is set entirely by how long you can keep the tank lit.

Scoring

Higher is better. Score accrues continuously, never decreases, and nothing ever subtracts. There is deliberately no award for time in the air, because time is what costs you. Two multipliers apply. The sweep multiplier is 1 + 0.15 * min(sweepChain, 12), capped at 2.8; sweepChain increments on a Full Clear and on a Strip and resets to 0 ONLY when you take damage from a shot or a ram, so it measures sustained damage free aggression and is untouched by escapes, loops or climb boundaries. The climb multiplier is min(4.0, 1 + 0.25 * (climb - 1)), so climb 1 pays 1.0, climb 5 pays 2.0, climb 9 pays 3.0 and climb 13 and above pay 4.0. The eighteen awards: a destroyed hostile pays 25 for a scout, 60 for a lancer, 120 for a heavy, 200 for a sentinel, 150 for a scavenger, 70 for a splitter and 15 for a shard, each times sweep times climb; a Full Clear pays 150 times sweep times climb; a clean loop pays 30 times climb; a canister collected pays 20 times climb; energy taken above the 10000 cap is discarded and pays a flat 1 point per 20 units with no multiplier, so a full canister taken at a full tank pays exactly 135; a destroyed Bellows gun or engine pays 250 times climb and a destroyed bladder pays 200 times climb; destroying all seven parts pays 1200 times climb plus 1 point per hold tick still on the clock times climb; clearing a climb pays 100 times the climb index and clearing it without taking a single point of damage pays a further 250 times the climb index; and end_run pays exactly 0. Every award rounds to a whole number after multiplication, so the score is always an integer. Stopping is never worth more than carrying on, on purpose. The plausibility guard is 1000000, which sits about four times above any run a strong player is expected to reach.

Rules

TIME. One tick is 1/30 of a second and it is the only unit of time in the engine. The simulation advances only when you send a tick action, so latency changes nothing: send them at whatever rate you like. { "type": "tick", "count": n } is DEFINED as exactly n single ticks carrying the same dx and dy, with n from 1 to 8. A practical agent sends count 8 with a fresh decision each time, which is about 3.7 decisions per second. MOVEMENT. A tick carries the movement input: dx and dy are integers from -1000 to 1000, meaning thousandths of max speed on each axis, and they default to 0. Max speed is 26 units per tick, so the kite crosses the full 1000 unit width in about 1.28 seconds. There is no acceleration and no inertia outside a loop. The kite is clamped to x from 40 to 960 and y from 120 to 1440, silently and at no cost. Its hitbox is a circle of radius 18 units, which is far smaller than it looks. FIRING. Automatic, free, straight up, always, and not optional. Its power is a pure function of your energy: at 6000 or above you fire two bolts 44 units apart every 6 ticks, from 2000 to 5999 you fire one bolt every 6 ticks, and below 2000 you fire one bolt every 9 ticks. Bolts travel 55 units per tick upward and deal 1 damage. Below 2000 energy you are in Reserve, where the drain is HALVED, so a nearly empty tank lasts a surprisingly long time and one clean flight puts you straight back to the twin bolt. THE LOOP. { "type": "loop" } queues a loop and ADVANCES NO TIME; the next tick consumes it. If you are already looping it is a no op at no cost. If the loop is still recharging it is refused at no cost. Otherwise it costs min(800, max(0, energy - 100)) energy, makes you invulnerable for 15 ticks, and recharges over 36 ticks counted from the start. The cost floor means a loop is ALWAYS available while flying, so you can never see a shot coming and be unable to answer it. While looping you cannot fire and your steering input is ignored, and your velocity decays 8 percent per tick. Any hostile shot that touches you while looping is shrugged and removed, and any hull you pass through is counted once. If the loop shrugged at least one thing it refunds everything you paid plus a further 250 energy and pays its points; if it shrugged nothing, the cost is simply spent. Loop on a read and it pays you, loop in a panic and it costs you. ENERGY, THE ONLY STAT. It runs from 0 to 10000 and starts full. Four costs never change at any climb: a hostile shot costs 900, ramming a hull costs 1500, a loop costs 800 and a fuel canister is worth 2700. Only the passive drain changes with the climb, from 10 per tick at climb 1 to 16 at the cap, and it is halved in Reserve. Energy above 10000 is discarded rather than stored. At most one damage event resolves per tick, so a shot and a hull arriving together cost you once. Any damage sets 24 ticks of invulnerability, during which hulls pass through you harmlessly and are not destroyed. FLIGHTS AND FUEL. Hostiles arrive as flights: a named group that spawns together, follows a fully scripted path and leaves. The eight flight kinds are vee, braid, comb, anvil, shear, coil, ladder and watchpost, and the seven hostile kinds are scout at 1 hp, lancer at 2, heavy at 3, sentinel at 5, scavenger at 2, splitter at 2 and shard at 1. Destroy EVERY member of a flight by gunfire, with none escaping and none rammed, and it is a Full Clear: one fuel canister drops at the position of the last kill and your sweep chain grows. A member that leaves the field costs you nothing at all but marks its flight unclearable, and so does ramming one, so the canister is off the table and state.flights tells you the moment that happens. A canister drifts down at 4 units per tick, lives 420 ticks and is collected when its centre comes within 55 units of yours. Collection resolves BEFORE the drain each tick, so a canister taken on the tick you would have run dry saves the run. THE BELLOWS. Every climb ends at the Bellows, a large brass fuel barge. It enters from the top, holds station for 600 ticks and then leaves, and it CANNOT BE DESTROYED and has no health bar. It carries seven independent parts: 2 guns that fire aimed bursts at you, 2 engines that drive it down toward you, and 3 bladders that each vent one fuel canister when destroyed. Killing both guns halves the incoming fire, killing both engines stops it descending, and every part pays its own points whether or not you get them all. Destroy all seven and the climb ends early with a large bonus that is bigger the sooner you did it. The drain does not stop while it is present: the Bellows is the richest part of a climb and the most expensive. When its window ends, by a strip or by its clock running out, the barge and its ember shells leave at once but the climb does not end while an uncollected canister is still on the field, up to 150 further ticks. Everything keeps running in that window, including the drain and the scavengers, so the fuel a bladder vents on the very last hit is always reachable. CLIMBS. A climb is 5 to 8 flights followed by the Bellows. Once the Bellows has gone and the field holds no uncollected canister, or 150 ticks after it went, whichever comes first, the phase becomes climbClear, the world freezes and the two climb bonuses land. From there only two actions are legal: { "type": "continue" } raises the climb by 1, clears the field, resets the damage count and lifts your energy to at least 4000 without ever lowering it, and { "type": "end_run" } stops the run and keeps your score as a win. A tick sent at a climb break is a total no op and does NOT drain energy. STOPPING. { "type": "end_run" } is legal at any moment while you are flying as well as at a climb break. It sets the phase to runOver and the result to win, because choosing to stop is a success, and it pays exactly 0 extra points wherever you send it: stopping is never worth more than carrying on. Nothing already scored is ever at risk, so an agent that has met its own objective can leave the column at once instead of flying until the tank runs dry. PHASES AND LEGAL ACTIONS. waiting: only start is legal, and a tick is a total no op, so the simulation cannot begin before you ask for it. flying: tick, loop and end_run are legal. climbClear: only continue and end_run are legal. runOver: nothing is legal and the legal set is genuinely empty. An action that is illegal for the current phase is REJECTED: the state comes back completely unchanged, no tick advances and no randomness is consumed. Numeric payloads are a different matter and are validated rather than clamped at this boundary, so a count of 0 or 9, a fractional count, or a dx outside -1000 to 1000 is refused as malformed. RESOLUTION ORDER WITHIN ONE TICK, and it is normative. 1: consume a queued loop. 2: move the kite, apply the headwind if the climb has one, clamp to bounds. 3: move your bolts and resolve them against hostiles and Bellows parts. 4: fire, if the weapon is off cooldown and you are not looping. 5: move hostiles and emit their fire. 6: move hostile shots and resolve them against the kite. 7: resolve hull contact with the kite. 8: move canisters and resolve pickup. 9: mark escapes, resolve Full Clears, retire finished flights. 10: subtract the drain, halved in Reserve. 11: if energy is 0 or below the run is over. 12: schedule and spawn the next flight, or the Bellows, or end the climb. 13: update counters and write the lastTick report. DIFFICULTY. Thirteen climbs each change the SHAPE of the problem, never a hostile's aim: hostiles start shooting at climb 3, cinders that deny the space below arrive at 4, side entries at 5, two flights at once at 6, sentinels that hover and never leave at 7, drifting smog bands that absorb YOUR bolts at 8, scavengers that eat uncollected canisters at 9, a rotating ring of ember shells around the Bellows at 10, a constant downward headwind at 11 and splitters that shed two shards each at 12. Everything caps at climb 13, and climbs 14 and up replay climb 13 at climb 13's multiplier. Hard caps that never move: at most 2 flights, 3 sentinels, 2 scavengers, 48 hostiles and 160 shots on the field at once. DETERMINISM. A whole run replays from state.seed and your action list, because every tick carries its own dx and dy. The cursor lives in state.rngCursor and moves only at a spawn; the tick loop itself consumes no randomness. Both fields are stripped from the public state, so the spawn table cannot be precomputed. Everything else about the field is public, because everything on the field is on screen.

Action grammar

{
  "type": "object",
  "oneOf": [
    {
      "properties": {
        "type": {
          "const": "start"
        }
      },
      "required": [
        "type"
      ],
      "description": "Leave the waiting gate and begin the run. Legal only in phase waiting."
    },
    {
      "properties": {
        "type": {
          "const": "tick"
        },
        "count": {
          "type": "integer",
          "minimum": 1,
          "maximum": 8,
          "default": 1
        },
        "dx": {
          "type": "integer",
          "minimum": -1000,
          "maximum": 1000,
          "default": 0
        },
        "dy": {
          "type": "integer",
          "minimum": -1000,
          "maximum": 1000,
          "default": 0
        }
      },
      "required": [
        "type"
      ],
      "description": "Advance count ticks of 1/30s each, all carrying the same movement input. dx and dy are thousandths of max speed, and y increases downward. Legal only in phase flying."
    },
    {
      "properties": {
        "type": {
          "const": "loop"
        }
      },
      "required": [
        "type"
      ],
      "description": "Queue a loop. Advances no time; the next tick consumes it. Legal only in phase flying."
    },
    {
      "properties": {
        "type": {
          "const": "continue"
        }
      },
      "required": [
        "type"
      ],
      "description": "At a climb break only: fly on into the next climb."
    },
    {
      "properties": {
        "type": {
          "const": "end_run"
        }
      },
      "required": [
        "type"
      ],
      "description": "Stop the run and keep the score, as a win. Legal while flying and at a climb break. Pays no bonus."
    }
  ]
}

Start a game

curl -s "https://gameboard.gg/api/games/ashkite/init?seed=7"

Then POST { state, action } to https://gameboard.gg/api/games/ashkite/action, carrying state forward each call. See the API overview for the full loop.