Dino Jump

What is Dino Jump?

A Chrome-offline-style runner you control by jumping for real. The dinosaur jogs forward; physically jump (or raise an arm high) in front of the camera to leap over a cactus. Only deliberate upward movement triggers a jump, so accidental side-to-side waves are ignored. Speed ramps gradually as you survive.

The badge in Dino Jump

There is one badge here, kept on your own device and shown on the 🏆 Achievements panel on the home page. Nothing is sent anywhere and there is no account to make.

• Dino Survivor — Score 300 in Dino Jump.

How to play Dino Jump

1. Press Play now and allow the camera when the browser asks.
2. Stand back far enough that there is some empty picture above your head. The top third of the frame is drawn on screen as a band, and it is easier to reach into it than to already be filling it.
3. Wait out the three-second countdown. A kangaroo bounces next to a big arrow, in time with the dinosaur's practice hops, so a child who cannot read yet can see what is being asked.
4. Jump, or throw one arm straight up. Either does the job. What the game is looking for is something travelling upward into that band — not which part of you it is, and not how high off the floor you got.
5. After the crash, SPACE starts another run and H goes back to the picker. M turns the music off, and it stays off for every other game on the site until you turn it back on.

If the band never lights up even when a hand goes straight through it, the camera never started. The camera help page checks that in one click.

What counts as a jump

The band across the top of the picture is the whole control scheme, and it is fussier than it looks. Five things decide whether the dinosaur actually leaves the ground.

• It has to arrive from below. Waving about inside the band does nothing at all. The game wants something that was in the middle of the picture a moment ago and is at the top now — a head on the way up, or a hand thrown above the shoulder. Sideways movement is ignored on purpose; a wave, however big, is not a jump.
• Green does not always mean jumped. The band turns green and reads JUMP! as soon as there is enough going on up there, which is a looser test than the one that fires the dinosaur. Green with no jump means the movement never travelled upward — you were already up there, waving.
• Anything parked in the band stops counting. Stand tall with your head permanently in the strip and it goes quiet after about a second: whatever holds steady up there gets treated as part of the room. A sharper, more deliberate push still gets through, so a tall child does not have to crouch. They just have to make each jump a separate event instead of a constant presence.
• Your starting position is free. The first instants of a round are ignored, so a child already standing on tiptoe at GO does not waste a jump on simply being there.
• One at a time. The arc takes about three quarters of a second from take-off to landing, and nothing you do mid-air registers. Repeating the gesture faster does not stack up jumps.

Timing it, and the run to 300

Once the dinosaur is airborne it stays clear of a cactus for most of its arc, so the window for starting a jump is wider than it feels — a little over half a second at the opening speed. Too early and it lands again before the cactus arrives; too late and it clips the top. Because the gesture takes a few moments to read as upward travel, start a shade sooner than instinct says.

Cacti are sent out between about a second and a half and two and a half seconds apart on Normal. The spacing never changes, but the running speed climbs from the first step and never stops, so the gap in front of you keeps shrinking anyway. That ramp is the only thing that ends a run: there is no clock, and the round finishes when you hit something and not before.

The score is distance, ticking up at whatever speed you are running. HI in the corner is your best, kept separately for Normal and Hard so trying the other one costs you nothing. Passing 300 earns the Dino Survivor badge, which works out at roughly eleven seconds of clean running on Normal — a good deal longer than it sounds while you are doing it. The cactus is treated as slightly smaller than it is drawn, so a pass that looks like a graze is a clear.

What Hard mode changes

Three things, and none of them is the gesture.

• It opens a third faster. The dinosaur starts at the pace Normal takes about thirteen seconds to build up to.
• It accelerates almost twice as hard. The run tightens far sooner rather than easing you into it.
• Cacti come out every one to two seconds rather than every one and a half to two and a half.

The band, the arc and the forgiveness on the cactus are all identical. What Hard removes is recovery time — on Normal a mistimed jump usually has a gap behind it to gather yourself in, and on Hard it usually does not. It keeps its own high score, so it is worth a look even while Normal is still the one you are working on.

Before you clear the furniture

• It needs floor. This is one of the handful of games here flagged as needing room, and the flag is honest: real jumping, on a floor, near a laptop. Clear a stride in every direction and move anything off the desk that will not enjoy the landings.
• An arm will do. A child who is seated, tired, or on a hard floor at somebody else's bedtime can throw a hand up instead. The dinosaur cannot tell the difference, and the score does not either.
• It makes noise. Chiptune music underneath, a rising squeak on every jump and a low crunch when you hit something. M silences the music; the jump and crash sounds stay.
• Rounds have no fixed length. A first go can be over in ten seconds and a good one runs for minutes, so it ends when the child decides rather than when a timer does. H returns to the picker at any point.
• Nothing needs reading. The countdown is a bouncing kangaroo and an arrow, the score is digits, and the only full sentence in the game is on the crash card.

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