Doodle Jump

Steering an endless bounce

Your character springs upward the instant it lands on a platform, always to the same height, so you never press a jump button. You only steer left and right to make sure a platform is waiting under each descent. The wrap-around is your best friend: fly off the left edge and you reappear on the right, so a platform near the wall can be reached from either direction. Strong players lean on the wrap constantly, cutting across the screen the short way instead of chasing the long way round.

Look up, not at your feet

The platform you're bouncing on is already dealt with; what matters is lining up the next one and the one after that. Beginners fixate on the character and react late. Keep your eyes a little above it and steer toward the next landing before you arrive. You also have more steering time than you think. The bounce is a long arc, so start drifting toward your target on the way up, then spend the fall making tiny corrections. Players who only steer during the drop are doing the whole job in half the time, which is why their landings look like emergencies. And when two platforms are both reachable, pick the one that keeps more of the screen reachable on the following bounce. Usually that's the more central one, unless the wrap turns an edge platform into the best-connected spot on the screen. It can help to treat the screen as three lanes, left, middle and right, and to know which lane your next two landings live in.

• Some platforms drift sideways, so aim for where a moving one will be when you come down, not where it sits right now.
• Thinner gaps and sparser platforms show up the higher you climb, which is when the wrap-around trick rescues the most runs.
• Small early nudges beat big last-second corrections; a gentle lean lands you dead centre, while a hard swing overshoots and misses entirely.

Higher up, the air gets thin

The climb changes character as you rise. Platforms spawn farther apart, more of them drift, and the comfortable ladder of the early game becomes a scatter of lonely footholds. This is where the habits pay off: reading two platforms ahead, leading the movers, crossing by the wrap instead of the long way. One rule keeps runs alive up there: any landing is a good landing. There are no bad platforms, only missed ones. If a low platform is certain and a higher one is a gamble, take the certain one, bounce in place if you have to, and wait for a moving platform to swing into reach. Falling past the bottom is the only way to lose, so patience is never wasted.

Three habits that add height

First, bounce with a plan. On a safe platform you can ride the bounce a few times while you read the screen above, and those free seconds are the cheapest thinking time in the game. Second, commit early. Decide your landing while you're still rising and spend the fall on fine corrections, never on changing your mind. Third, never panic-swing. A hard lunge at a missed platform usually carries you past the one below it too, turning one mistake into two. The calm version of you climbs about twice as high as the flustered one, every time.

A phone-era classic

Doodle Jump was released in 2009 by Lima Sky, the studio of brothers Igor and Marko Pusenjak, and became one of the App Store's early breakout hits, back when a 99-cent game could sell in the millions. The springy little creature is officially called the Doodler, which is where this page gets its name, and the hand-drawn look, all graph paper and scribbles, made the game feel like it had escaped from the back of a school notebook. The original was steered by tilting the phone; here your keyboard or pointer does the same job with more precision. A sequel arrived years later, but the formula never really needed fixing. Countless imitators followed, for good reason. Falling off the bottom ends everything, so the whole game is a nervy, one-mistake climb where your height is the only bragging right that counts.