Glide / Hover

What it is. Hold a button in the air to cap your fall rate and buy horizontal steering — you don’t gain height, you spend it slowly. A jump is a committed parabola; a glide turns that parabola into a line you can bend.

Player fantasy. “I’ll make it.” The apex fear of a normal jump becomes calm: you see the far ledge, you lean, you feather down onto it. Mastery reads as grace, not twitch.

The verb

Airborne, hold glide → downward velocity clamps to a slow terminal, lateral control opens up. Release to drop fast, or run out of the resource that sustains it.

How it feels / why it’s fun

The arc becomes a puzzle. A committed jump is solved at takeoff. A glide stays open the whole descent — when to deploy, how long to hold, when to cut it and drop. Vertical levels stop being reflex tests and become slow route puzzles you read on the way down.
Soft landing lowers the floor, the resource cost raises the ceiling. New players float to safety; experts hoard altitude and stamina to reach the greedy line. One verb, two difficulty bands — see system-mastery-curve.
It reframes the camera down. Gliding pulls the eye toward where you’ll land, so the level below must be legible before you commit (pattern-readability).

Tuning levers

Lever	Effect	Sane default
Fall-rate cap	Terminal velocity while gliding	25–40% of free-fall
Air-steer authority	Horizontal accel/max-speed mid-glide	60–80% of grounded control
Deploy latency	Frames from press to float engaging	2–4 frames (crisp, no input-lie — `antipattern-input-lie`)
Resource	What limits it	Stamina meter, altitude budget, or free (traversal-only)
Drain rate	How long a hold lasts	2–4s of glide per full bar
Refill	Where it restocks	On ground contact; or updraft; or never (one-shot)
Cancel	How you exit early	Release → instant fast-fall; dash/jump breaks it
Momentum carry	Does entry speed feed the glide	Carry ~50% so a running start rewards planning

Push fall-rate cap and drain rate together: a slow float on a short bar is a tight tactical tool; a fast float on a long bar is a lazy cruise. Don’t move both toward “generous” or glide becomes flight and the gaps stop mattering.

Slots into

Genres. genre-precision-platformer (recovery + air-time control), genre-metroidvania (a gating traversal verb — locked crossings until you earn it), genre-puzzle-platformer (the descent is the puzzle), genre-physics-arcade (float as a scoring/steer tool), genre-exploration (reach-the-vista traversal).
Anchors. anchor-celeste (air-control feel, generous-but-honest recovery), anchor-braid (traversal-as-puzzle mindset), anchor-terraria / anchor-minecraft (glide items as a progression unlock — see system-progression).
Pairs with verbs. mechanic-double-jump (jump → glide is the classic extend-the-air combo), mechanic-dash (dash to break a glide for a burst), mechanic-wall-jump (bounce up, glide across), mechanic-grapple (swing out, release into a glide).

Twist seams

Glide but updrafts are the only way up, so wind IS the level (structure). The fall-rate cap becomes a sail: thermals and vents push you upward while you hold, so the level is authored as a wind map and routing = reading the air. The descent verb inverts into an ascent economy. Pair with system-hazards-and-environment and system-weather-and-time; the wind field is level geometry, not decoration.
Glide but it consumes the light you also need to see (constraint). Holding glide burns your lantern; float too long and the screen darkens toward blind. Now every crossing is a bargain between reach and sight — the resource meter is literally your view. Wires to system-resource-loops and a lighting layer (see the sandboxes/light-lab); the cost is legible because you watch it drain.
Glide but weight is a pickup you can drop mid-air (mechanic-swap). Carry cargo and you fall fast with tight control; drop it and you float far but arrive empty-handed — a pattern-risk-reward toggle mid-descent.

How it wires to Hayao

Glide is a cosmetic-free, deterministic movement state layered on the jump: a clamp on downward velocity plus opened lateral input, gated by a resource counter — all in world.probe()-visible sim state, all driven through the deterministic RNG if anything varies. Build the arc and the fall-rate clamp in the sandboxes/physics-lab (gravity, terminal velocity, integration) before it touches a level. Steer-during-air and the land-target framing belong to the sandboxes/camera-lab. The precision platformer reference examples/small-flame already owns the honest-air-control floor — study its feel before you tune yours. The float animation and any trail are pure view: set them cosmetic = true so they stay out of world.hash(). Feel and blockability get proven at the pointer in the frontmatter, not restated here.

Fails when…

It becomes flight. Cap too high + bar too long + free refill = the gaps stop mattering and the level design evaporates. Glide must spend something. See antipattern-false-depth.
The input lies. Deploy latency too high, or the float ignores your steer for a few frames — the player feels the game fighting them (antipattern-input-lie).
Landings are unreadable. You commit to a descent you can’t preview; the camera never showed the hazard below. That’s a fairness break, not difficulty (pattern-fairness-and-trust, antipattern-guess-the-designer).
The resource is invisible. Glide dies mid-air with no on-screen warning and you eat a fall you couldn’t have planned around — meter it, telegraph the last second (pattern-readability).
It trivializes every other verb. If glide out-ranges dash, jump, and grapple in all contexts, they become dead buttons — glide should own soft descent, not all of traversal (antipattern-boring-optimal).