Dino Jump
A high-speed endless runner with power-ups and a shop.
How to Play Dino Jump
- Press Space or tap the screen to jump over incoming obstacles.
- Collect coins while you run to spend in the shop.
- The longer you survive, the faster the game gets.
Controls
| Keyboard | Space or Up Arrow to jump |
|---|---|
| Touch | Tap anywhere to jump |
Tips
- Save coins for the shield power-up before pushing for a long run.
About Dino Jump
Run, jump and dodge obstacles in this neon endless runner. Collect coins, unlock power-ups in the shop and push for your best distance. It runs directly in your browser with no download or sign-up, on desktop and mobile alike.
Design notes: how Dino Jump was built
The animation loop never stops. An earlier version halted requestAnimationFrame whenever an overlay was up — lobby, shop, game over — and the automated performance gate measured the game at 33.5 frames per second, which looked like a serious problem. It was not: actual play was 59.7fps and roughly forty percent of the measured window was time when nothing was being drawn at all, which the harness could not distinguish from a stall. Now only the physics step is gated by the running flag and the render loop runs continuously.
The runner is not an image. Its body is built from quadratic curve paths and rendered once per pose into offscreen canvases at load — run A, run B, airborne — then blitted with a single drawImage per frame. It is a sprite sheet that happens to be generated by the game instead of drawn by an artist, which means it scales to the device pixel ratio without a second asset.
The score element is only touched when the displayed value changes. The counter advances ten times faster than the number shown, so writing to the DOM every frame would rebuild a string sixty times a second to display the same digits. Rebuilding it six times a second instead is invisible to the player and measurably cheaper on a phone.
More of these in the dev notes.
Frequently Asked Questions
How is the score calculated in Dino Jump?
The score is the distance you cover. The run keeps speeding up, so the last stretch of a good run is worth more than the whole start.
What should I spend coins on first?
The shield. It absorbs one hit, and one hit is what usually ends a long run.
Can I play Dino Jump on a phone?
Yes. Tap anywhere on the screen to jump. The whole game works with one thumb and no keyboard.
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