STOOP

STOOP is a hunting game set over an estuary at dusk. You fly a peregrine falcon. Below you, five hundred starlings fly as one murmuration, and they want the reedbed at the shore for the night.

Steer with the mouse or keys, hold to tuck into a dive, flap to climb. Height is your ammunition: a stoop trades altitude for speed, and turn radius widens as you accelerate, so every dive is committed before it lands. Catches score more the faster you strike and the lonelier the target.

The twist is the flock itself. It is a live 500-bird flocking simulation, and it defends itself the way real murmurations do: it tightens when alarmed, alarm spreads through it as visible dark waves, it parts around your dive path, and its dense heart buffets you aside if you hit it at speed. So you work the edges. Fast passes shear stragglers loose, a sawing run splits the flock in two for bonus catches, and a lone bird chased hard tires after a few dodges. Perch on the dead tree to recover stamina. As the light goes the flock leans toward the reeds; hunting near the shore holds them in the air and stretches the run. The run ends at full dark, or when the flock is down.

Built as a single HTML file: a boids simulation on a spatial grid, sound synthesized in WebAudio (wind that rises with the stoop, the rustle of the flock, curlew calls over the water), verified headless with Playwright at 60 fps. Five achievements and a score leaderboard.