An ode to gymnastics, from someone who spent 20 years doing it

In the mid-2000s I played a lot of flash games with simple gymnastics in them, and Walaber's Trampoline. Gymnastics Simulator is my answer to those — an attempt to make something for every gymnast, young and old.

Every shape, flip and twist here comes from over twenty years in the sport. That is also why it does one thing instead of many: this game is about what happens in the air.

Two seconds of air. Make them count.

You bounce automatically. Everything else is yours.

• Pick a direction and start turning — forwards or backwards. It locks the moment youcommit. No taking it back.

• Shape is your throttle. Tuck spins fastest, pike is the middle, straight is slowestand worth the most. Change it mid-flight, as many times as you dare.

• Twist around your own axis while you rotate. Twisting steals speed from yoursomersault, so every skill is a trade you are making in real time.

• Boost when it matters. Force more speed out of a rotation, or whip the twist roundfaster — but you cannot have both. Boosting one always costs you the other, and you arechoosing which mid-flight, with the floor coming up.

• Stack them. A single flip is nothing. A double full-in, tucked, is four decisions inunder two seconds, and the whole thing falls apart if you are late on one.

Land it or lose it

Come down upright: you keep your height, you bank the skill. Come down crooked: you drop height, and less height means less air for the next one, and the run starts eating itself.

Land clean, over and over, and the pot builds. It keeps building. One bad landing and the whole thing is gone.

Ten jumps. One shot.

A run is ten jumps, judged as a routine, the way a real competition pass is judged. Repeat a skill you already threw and it scores nothing — and in competition it ends your run on the spot. So you are not just doing tricks. You are spending them, deciding what to hold back and what to open with.

Two minutes a run. You will not stop at one.

Build the gymnast

Everything you earn goes into the three things that decide what your body can physically do:

• Jump height — more air, more time, more room for the big stuff

• Rotation — how fast you turn

• Twists — how fast you twist, and whether you can twist at all

Skills that were flatly impossible an hour ago start landing. That is the whole progression, and it is the same one real gymnasts have.

Twisting and boost are not things you start with. You earn the right to them, and the first run after unlocking one feels like a different sport.

Garden trampoline to Olympic floor

Every venue has its own bed size, spring stiffness and bounce — a garden trampoline will not throw you the way a competition bed does, and you will feel that in the first jump. Each one has its own unlock requirements and its own short list of goals to tick off.

Beat the board, fill the book

Every venue remembers your best run, and your best run goes up against everyone else's. There is always a number to beat — yours, or somebody's sitting one place above you.

Landing a skill for the first time is permanent.

The game keeps a record of everything you have ever pulled off, and there is more in there to find than the skills alone. Working through it is its own long game, running quietly underneath the ladder of venues.

What this is not

No combat. No crafting. No open world.

One apparatus, made as accurately as I could make it, and a very high ceiling on how good you can get at it.

If you have ever been on a trampoline and wondered what a full-in actually feels like — this is that.