The brief
KITO RUN is our own platformer: a little fox, three islands above the clouds and the classic run-and-jump loop. The game had to feel good in the hands on a keyboard and on a phone. Its characters, levels and art are original, and everything is drawn in code, with no external art, fonts, analytics or SDKs.
What we built
Three sky islands
The islands are Sunny Shore, Moon Garden and Storm Heights. Finishing one unlocks the next. Along the way Kito collects crystals, finds secret caches and passes checkpoints. A slime is defeated by landing on it from above; touching it from the side costs a life. Kito has three lives. The menu offers island selection and, when a save exists, Continue.
Controls that forgive small mistakes
Movement uses the arrows or A and D, and the jump uses Space, W or the up arrow. A short grace window lets a jump work a few frames after leaving a ledge, and a jump pressed just before landing still fires. P or Escape pauses and R restarts the island. These rules live in a separate physics module that the game itself uses, and they are covered by tests.
The game world is a fixed 960 by 540 canvas that scales to the screen. On touchscreens, large left, right and jump buttons appear. On an upright phone the canvas turns into a narrower window onto the same world, with the camera keeping Kito towards the left. The HUD sits above the field and the controls sit below it in the thumb zone, so nothing covers the play area.
Two languages and saved progress
The game speaks Russian and English. It picks the language from the browser, offers RU and EN switches in the top bar and the menu, and remembers the choice. Everything is translated, from the HUD and island names to the finish sign drawn in the level.
Progress saves automatically every few seconds, at checkpoints and on pause: unlocked islands, best scores, collected crystals and the last checkpoint. A resumed game starts at the last safe checkpoint, so Kito never reappears over a hole. If the browser blocks storage, the game still plays.
A first run that teaches
New players see a three-step guide in the menu: move and jump, collect crystals, stomp slimes from above. On the first island short hints appear as Kito reaches each new idea, including a warning before the first gap, and they never stop the game. HOW TO PLAY in the menu brings the guide back. The first island was tuned after scripted test runs: early spikes were removed and checkpoints were placed on safe ground.
Where it stands today
On 8 November 2026 the game is live at kitorun.mmix.biz under the title "KITO RUN — an adventure above the clouds". It opens in Russian for Russian-language browsers and in English for others. The menu shows the Play button, the controls, the personal best and the line "Three islands, secrets and checkpoints, playable offline".
Related
How we build web products: web development. Another game of ours with keyboard and touch controls: Tiny Heist. A calm god-sim of ours: GLOSS: Little Worlds. A game studio's website we built: Everest Games.
Project lead: Marketing MIX. Product: KITO RUN, our own browser game. Year: 2026.