Stickman Sharpshooter

Drag, let go, pop the balloon.

A stickman, a ball, and a balloon somewhere out in the sky. Drag anywhere on the screen and let go: the ball leaves his hand and curves through exactly the point where your finger lifted. Hit the balloon and it pops, the next one appears further away, and the sky slowly turns into a puzzle about arcs. There is no timer, no lives and no way to lose - only the next throw.

How to play

1. Press anywhere and drag. A dotted line shows the path the ball will take.
2. Let go. The ball flies through the exact spot where you released, then falls.
3. Hit the balloon to pop it and move up a level.
4. Miss and nothing happens - the ball drops and you simply throw again.

Why it is not just clicking

The rule is one sentence long: the ball goes through the point you let go of. A five year old works that out on the first throw. What gets harder is everything around the rule - from level four the balloon drifts up and down, from level seven it slides sideways, and from level eleven it does both faster. You stop aiming at where the balloon is and start aiming at where it is going to be. That shift, from reacting to predicting, is the whole game.

Night and rain

How hard is it?

There is no difficulty menu because the game tunes itself: each level pushes the balloon further out and shrinks it slightly, though never below a size a small finger can hit. The dotted aiming line fades as you climb, so the help quietly disappears once you no longer need it. Every level up to twenty-five has been checked by an automated test to make sure the balloon is always actually reachable - the game never asks for a throw it will not accept.

Is it right for younger players?

Younger than most games allow. There is nothing to read, nothing to lose and no clock, so a four or five year old can play by dragging a finger and watching what happens. Older players get the harder half: leading a moving target with a curved throw is a genuine skill, and the levels keep going as long as you keep hitting.

For parents

No ads, no pop-ups, no sign-up, nothing to buy and nothing stored. The game keeps no score between sessions, so there is no streak to protect and no reason to come back tonight rather than tomorrow. It is a game you can stop in the middle of without anything being lost - which, with a small child, is the feature that matters most.

In the classroom

A projectile arc you can feel before you can write it down. Children discover that throwing further means throwing higher, that the ball keeps moving sideways while it falls, and that hitting something moving means aiming ahead of it. It is the intuition that formal physics later gives names to, arriving through the fingers first.

Questions