just flap bro — a free webcam flying game in your browser

two games in one forest. in escape you are a small bird and a hawk has decided you are lunch; in hunt you are the hawk. either way you fly the same way: gravity is working the whole time, so you have to flap to stay up — with your actual arms, in front of your webcam, like wings. lean your body to bank and turn. cross your arms in front of you to fold your wings and dive. no download, no install, no account, and no webcam required: keyboard and touch controls work just as well.

two modes, one forest

in escape you are the little bird, the hawk is behind you, and your score is how far you get. hunt hands you the hawk instead. the forest is the same and the controls are the same, but now the little birds are the ones running, and instead of a hawk on your tail you have a hunger meter counting down. catch a bird and it refills; let it empty and the run is over. your score is birds caught, and the two modes keep separate bests.

how to play — escape

survive. every flap gives you a burst of lift and a little speed, and then gravity starts taking it back, so the whole game is a rhythm: flap, glide, flap again. flapping costs stamina, which refills while you glide — panic-flapping empties the meter and your wings go weak, so pace yourself. the hawk behind you gets faster the longer you last, and when it gets close it screeches and lines up a swoop. that screech is your cue: bank hard or dive, and it overshoots.

how to play — hunt

you fly a bigger, heavier, faster bird. it glides further, it dives like a brick, and it does not turn like a sparrow. chasing a bird in level flight barely closes the gap: the only thing that catches anything is a stoop — get above it, tuck, and fall on it.

the birds are not oblivious. they watch where they are going, so one you come at from behind sees you late, and they hear your wings — a flapping hawk is noticed from half again as far as a gliding one. so the hunt has a shape: climb early while you are still a long way out, then shut up, glide in, and drop. a bird that spots you bolts for the treetops, where it can fly through the canopy and you cannot, and it jinks so a stoop that committed too early goes straight past. it can only sprint for a second or two, though — miss once and you can run it down, if you have the height and the hunger left to try again.

the forest is not scenery. clip a trunk or a canopy and the run is over, and so is touching the ground. your distance in metres is the score, and your best is saved on your own device.

the forest is not flat. mountains come up out of the fog — bare rock well above the treeline, tall enough to end a run, and scattered at random across the map, so no two runs put them in the same place. some are lone peaks and some are long ranges you have to find a pass through. you get a few seconds of warning, and then a choice: bank early and go round for free, thread a gap, or climb over the top, which works but will cost you most of your stamina with a hawk on your tail.

the weather changes as you fly. every few hundred metres it picks something new and fades into it: clear blue sky, fog thick enough to swallow the trees a short way ahead, or a thunderstorm — black cloud, driving rain, and lightning coming down on the forest, leaving a tree smoking behind you. it is never just decoration. fog and storm both cost you the sight of the ground, and the hawk does not care that you cannot see.

reading the hud

three gauges, and you can learn all of them in one run. the tall bar on the left is your altitude above the ground beneath you — not above sea level, because the ground is the thing you hit; it turns pink when you are low and red when you are about to land the hard way. the bar across the bottom is stamina. the meter in the bottom right is the hawk: it runs the other way round from the other two, filling up as it closes on you, so empty is safe and full means it is already on your tail.

in hunt the same two instruments point the other way. the big number top left is birds caught rather than metres flown, with the hunger bar under it. the bottom-right meter is the nearest bird instead of the hawk — same reading, opposite feeling, so it is lime rather than red, and it grows a small arrow when the bird you want is off the side of the screen.

controls

the three camera moves, drawn from the same measurements the tracker takes. it watches your wrists against your shoulder line and against each other, so a flap is any decent up-and-down sweep of both arms, and a dive is your wrists ending up on the wrong sides of each other:

a flap you throw with your arms lifts you higher than one you tap — about a third more climb for the same stamina, which works out at a flap roughly every three seconds instead of every two. throwing your whole arms down is slower and more tiring than hitting the space bar, so it had better buy you something. keys and touch keep working in camera mode either way, so if the tracking loses you mid-run you can still land the bird.

about the camera

the webcam is opt-in. nothing starts until you press "play with camera", and your browser will ask permission first. the video is analysed on your own device by a pose-detection model running inside this tab — no video, images or landmarks are uploaded, recorded or stored anywhere. close the tab and it is gone. the model file itself is downloaded from a public CDN the same way any script on the web is. full detail is in our privacy policy.

it works best with your whole upper body in frame — stand or sit back far enough that both hands stay visible when your arms are out wide, with a light source in front of you rather than behind. it comes pre-calibrated for a level camera and a square-on seat, so there is nothing to set up: press play, let it find you, and flap. if leaning or flapping feels off — a tilted webcam, a lopsided chair — choose re-calibrate camera on the menu and a short three-step calibration learns your own neutral posture instead. it is remembered for next time.

about the game

just flap bro is a tiny 3D arcade game by brainrotlabs, playable from either end of the food chain. the forest is generated as you fly — the weather, the hills, the mountains and where they stand, the trees all come out of a noise function, so it never ends and never repeats. every sound is synthesised live in your browser: the wind follows your airspeed and the hawk's screech is built from oscillators. there is not a single image or audio file in the game. want more? try striker rush, our football endless runner, portal janitor, our alien goo cleanup arcade, or the forbidden button, our office comedy clicker.

faq

do i need a webcam? no. the camera is one of two ways to play — keyboard and touch controls are complete, and the game never asks for your camera unless you press the camera button.

is my camera footage uploaded? no. the pose model runs inside your browser and the frames never leave your device. nothing is recorded and nothing is sent to us.

why can't it see me? usually you're too close, or a desk is hiding your hands. step back until both hands stay in frame with your arms out wide, and put the light in front of you instead of behind you.

can i play on a phone? yes — tap to flap, drag to turn, hold to dive. the camera controls work on newer phones too, though you will want to prop the phone up a metre or so away so it can see your arms.

how do i get a better distance? stop flapping so much. find the slowest rhythm that holds your altitude, keep your stamina above a quarter, fly high enough that a mistake is survivable, and save your dives for the moment the hawk screeches.

what is hunt mode? the same forest with the roles swapped: you fly the hawk and chase the little birds. there is no predator behind you — the clock is a hunger meter that only a catch refills. it keeps its own best score, so a bad hunt never touches your distance record.

how do i actually catch a bird? from above, quietly. flapping is loud and a bird that hears you starts running before you are in range, so gain your height early, then glide the last stretch and stoop. they cannot sprint for long, so a first pass that misses is worth following up — as long as you have kept enough altitude to pull out of the trees.

does the weather do anything? yes. fog and storms shorten how far you can see, and how far you can see is how much warning you get about a mountain, a tree or the ground. the lightning strikes the forest, not you. the change is announced on screen and always fades in over about ten seconds, so you have time to gain height first — altitude is the only thing that buys back the warning the murk took away.

should i fly over a mountain or around it? around, almost always. the climb costs stamina you will want for the next swoop, and you arrive at the top with an empty meter and nowhere to fall. turn as soon as the rock comes out of the fog and it costs you nothing but a few metres of distance.