Wishtrap

One shared world, rebuilt for everyone at UTC midnight. Nobody designs the level. It is written by where people died.

What it is

A one thumb runner where the level is written by the people who failed it.

You run automatically and you tap to jump. When you die, you get to leave a trap behind at the place you died, and that trap stays in the world for everyone who plays after you. So the world gets crueller as the day goes on, because every player who dies adds to it.

Everybody alive is playing the same world on the same day. Not a copy of it, and not a level generated for you: the same one, with the same strangers' traps in it. The world is rebuilt at midnight UTC, which is the same instant for everybody and therefore the middle of the afternoon or the previous evening for somebody. Most of it is wiped, and the traps that proved themselves carry over into the new one.

The ten second experience is deliberately familiar. The novelty is entirely in who authors the level.

How to play

• Tap to jump

  You run forward on your own, at 8 metres per second, and the only control is a jump. The whole screen is the button.

• Hold for a higher jump

  Lift your finger early and you get a short hop. Hold it and you get the full arc, and the runner turns a tucked front flip on the way over.

• The level is 600 metres

  Which is 75 seconds of flawless play. The first 30 metres never hold a trap, so every run starts calm.

• When you die, you leave a trap

  Three a day. We call them wishes, because you are wishing somebody else ill.

• You can only place near where you fell

  A 30 metre window, centred on the spot that killed you, so a trap has to be earned by getting there. Clear the whole level and you unlock all 600 metres.

• Your trap has to earn its place

  The world holds 100 traps and no more, 10 in each tenth of the level. When a stretch is full something has to make way, and what goes is whatever is doing least: the game's own placeholder traps first, then the real trap killing the smallest share of the players who reach it. A trap that has been met by 10 players and killed at least one of them can survive midnight and carry into the next day.

The three traps

Drawn here at the same scale as each other, so the low one really is that low.

SPIKE

Jump it. The baseline, and any jump beats it.

0.7 metres tall

BLOCK

Too tall for a hop. You have to commit to a full jump.

1.9 metres tall

BAR

An overhang. Run underneath it, and do not jump.

Hangs from 1.2 metres

Placement is checked before it is allowed. The game simulates the whole level and refuses a trap that would make the world impossible, so however cruel a day gets, it is always still finishable.

What else is in it

Four standings tables: Deadliest players, Deadliest traps, Still standing and Furthest today. The first three are about the traps standing in the world at that moment, and they count everything those traps have done across every night they have survived, so a trap that has lasted a week is being judged on the whole week. Only the last one is about today alone.

The game tells you who is doing this to you. When something kills you it names the trap's owner, and it keeps count: "KIND OTTER has killed you 4 times today". Get past the trap that owns you and it says so.

A play streak that counts consecutive days and survives midnight. And your trap's day, which is a card you can share as a picture, stating what your deadliest standing trap actually did to people.

Twelve achievements

All about how deep you got and what your traps did to other people. There is nothing for playing a lot or logging in, because rewarding attendance would be rewarding the wrong thing.

• YOUR MARK, leave your first trap in the world.
• FIRST BLOOD, have one of your traps kill somebody.
• MENACE, ten players killed by traps you left behind.
• ARCHITECT OF SUFFERING, fifty players killed by traps you left behind.
• LANDLORD, have three traps standing in the world at once.
• OUTBID, have one of your traps deleted to make room for somebody else's.
• HALFWAY, reach 50% of a day's world.
• DEEP, reach 75% of a day's world.
• SO CLOSE, reach 95% and die anyway.
• FINISHED IT, clear a world from end to end.
• AGAIN, clear a world on two different days.
• IRON THUMB, clear a world after the crowd has had all day to ruin it, with 60 or more traps standing.

Get it

Neither link is live yet. If somebody already testing sent you here, they can get a build to you directly in the meantime.

Installing it on an iPhone

Test builds for iPhone go through TestFlight, which is Apple's own app for exactly this, rather than being downloaded from this page.

1. Install TestFlight from the App Store. It is free and it is made by Apple.
2. Open the invite link we send you on the phone itself. It will open in TestFlight rather than in your browser.
3. Tap Accept, then Install. Wishtrap then behaves like any other app on your home screen.

Needs iOS 13 or newer. Test builds stop working after 90 days, and TestFlight tells you when a newer one is waiting.

Installing it on Android

Android builds are a file you download directly, which means your phone will ask you twice whether you are sure. Both questions are normal for anything that did not come from the Play Store, and here is what they look like.

1. Open the download link on the phone and let the file download.
2. Android will ask whether to allow installing unknown apps from your browser. It has to be allowed, or the file cannot open.
3. Play Protect may then say it does not recognise the developer. Choose to install anyway. It says this about everything that did not come from the Play Store, including plenty that is perfectly fine.

Needs Android 7.0 or newer. If you already have an older Wishtrap from us and the install refuses to replace it, uninstall the old one first and then install again.

Tell us what you thought

This is the part that actually matters. The whole question behind Wishtrap is whether dying to a stranger's trap and leaving your own is any fun, and no amount of building answers that. Only playing it does.

Anything is useful: it was confusing, it was too hard, the jump felt wrong, it crashed, you did not understand what a wish was, you got bored after two goes. Bad news is more useful than good news here, so please do not be polite about it.

Your mail app should have opened with the message in it. If nothing happened, or if what opened is missing the end of what you wrote, send it to contact@wishtrap.gg instead and it reaches the same place.

That button opens your own mail app with the message ready to send to contact@wishtrap.gg, so nothing you type here is sent anywhere until you press send yourself, and it goes from your address rather than into a form somewhere. If your mail app does not open, write to that address directly and it reaches the same place.

Names, and what is and is not moderated

There is no sign up. The game gives you a name the first time you play, something like KIND OTTER, and you can change it to whatever you like. Names are 2 to 15 characters, capital letters and digits with single spaces, which is narrow on purpose: it keeps a name readable everywhere the game draws one, and it makes it impossible to imitate somebody else's name using letters from another alphabet that look identical.

The server refuses a small list of names outright, and today that list holds nothing but names that would be confusing rather than offensive: ones that impersonate the game or an operator, such as WISHTRAP and ADMIN, the name the game's own placeholder traps are owned by, and one that would read as an absent owner instead of a person.

What does work today: from inside the game you can block another player, after which their name reads as SOMEBODY everywhere it would otherwise appear to you, and you can report a name. Reports are read by a person, which in practice means one person, so please be patient with them.