What is air traffic control?

Air traffic control is the work of keeping planes apart around airports and in the sky. Controllers watch where each plane is and where it's heading, and send it along a route that never brings it too close to another, all the way down to its runway. A plane lands into the runway's direction, lined up with it from far out, never across it.

In arcade versions of the job, players draw the routes by hand: they trace a line from each plane to a runway and watch the traffic so no two lines cross at the wrong moment.

Tool description

This is an air traffic control game for a group, played in the browser through a link. Open it, send the link, and everyone who opens it plays in the same sky: the planes, the score and the lives are shared, and anyone in the room can start, pause or restart the game.

Each player gets plane colors at random and steers only the planes in those colors, so the group has to work together: a crash between two players' planes costs everyone a life. The game needs no account, and the panel next to the board lists the players with their colors and has a chat.

Features

  • One shared game - every screen shows the same planes, runways, score, level and lives
  • Plane colors for each player - everyone steers as many colors as everyone else: one player steers every plane, two players two colors each (one of them shared), and from three players on everyone has one color, shared when there are more players than colors
  • New runways every game - each game puts the three runways somewhere else on the board, at new angles, always with room to line up with them
  • Straight-in landings - a plane lands only when it flies straight onto a runway from one of its ends, and its path turns the plane's color when it lines up
  • Your planes stand out - the planes you steer are solid, everyone else's are dashed outlines in their colors
  • Warnings before runways close - the color squares of a runway about to close blink first, and its colors move to another runway
  • The room's best score - kept while the room is open, and shown next to the score

How it works

The game runs on the sync server, with the same rules as the single-player Air Traffic Control Game: planes come in from the edges, fly straight until someone draws them a path, and land on a runway that takes their color. Every page draws the planes where the server has them and moves them smoothly in between its updates, so the board stays fluid.

Press on one of your planes and drag to draw its path. The path shows on your screen at once and reaches the others as you draw. While you draw a plane's path, it's yours alone: others see a square in your color around it. When someone joins or leaves, the colors are handed out again so everyone still has as many as the others, and most players keep the ones they had.

Limitations

  • Anyone in the room can pause, resume or restart the game for everyone.
  • The game pauses when nobody is left in the room.
  • The room closes some time after everyone has left. Your browser keeps the room's best score and the game in progress, so when you open its link again, the page offers to bring it back, paused, with the sky cleared.

Tips

  • Reloading the page keeps you in the room, with your colors.
  • Draw the last stretch of a path along the runway, from beyond its end: a path that comes onto a runway from the side doesn't land.
  • Leave planes of other colors room: you can't steer them, but a crash with one costs a life just the same.