Eagles vs Hawks is a jousting game set inside a shrinking storm arena. You and AI hawks charge at each other on five fixed horizontal lanes. The mechanic is transparent by design: press SPACE at the exact moment you are inside the green strike window centred on the incoming hawk. Hit it cleanly and the hawk falls. Miss it and you absorb the impact and lose a life. Every loss is legible. Every success is earned. Nothing here relies on luck once you understand the timing system.
The green strike window is always visible when a hawk is within collision range on your lane — a highlighted rectangle around the hawk's position with STRIKE ZONE labelled above it. The window's physical size on screen is the game's primary difficulty modifier. On Easy it is wide and forgiving. On Insane it is narrow enough that timing needs to be accurate within approximately 0.2 seconds. Feathers dropped by defeated hawks widen your window permanently for the run, making feather collection the primary scaling mechanism available to compensate for faster hawks at harder difficulty levels.
The five horizontal lanes give every engagement a pre-decision point. A hawk is charging on lane 3 while you stand on lane 5. You have roughly two seconds to decide whether to switch up two lanes and take the joust, or stay and wait for a hawk on your current lane. Switching is instant — there is no animation delay or movement cost. The choice is purely threat assessment, timing confidence, and risk appetite around whether this specific hawk is one you want to engage now or later on its return pass.
At higher difficulties multiple hawks charge simultaneously from both sides. A hawk from the left on lane 2 and a hawk from the right on lane 4 both require assessment within the same two-second window. Choosing which to engage and which to avoid is the advanced multi-hawk management challenge. Mismanaging this results in either a missed feather opportunity or a mistimed joust because you were still mentally processing the first hawk when the second entered your lane and required a response.
Feather collection adds a retrieval layer after each successful joust. When a hawk falls it drops a feather at its last position on the lane. Collecting it requires being on that lane near that position before the feather fades — roughly three to four seconds. Immediately after a successful joust you must decide whether to collect the feather or switch lanes to intercept an incoming hawk on a different lane. In dense hawk situations feathers are sometimes sacrificed because the next threat demands immediate attention.
Power level determines how forgiving each joust is across the run. At power 1 (start) the green window is narrow and precise timing is mandatory. At power 4 (maximum) the window is wide enough that slightly early or late timing still succeeds. The power curve is intentionally generous early — the first two or three feathers dramatically improve survivability — and flattens in the late game where additional feathers provide diminishing return. This progression feels like proper skill scaffolding rather than arbitrary reward.
Storm ring mechanics prevent indefinitely safe play. The storm starts large and shrinks continuously at a rate set by difficulty. Flying outside the ring drains score passively and eventually costs lives. On Easy the ring takes several minutes to compress meaningfully. On Insane it is at approximately 80-pixel radius after sixty seconds, forcing you into the high-density centre zone where hawk spawns are heaviest. The storm makes every extended run a commitment to active engagement rather than patient edge positioning.
Kill streak scoring escalates the value of consistent performance. Every fifth kill within an unbroken streak adds bonus points to each subsequent joust. At a streak of fifteen with power level four, a single successful joust generates more points than an entire Easy difficulty run. This escalation rewards players who maintain clean timing throughout rather than those who take dramatic high-point moments between frequent mistiming losses that reset the streak.
The hawk movement system has internal logic that experienced players exploit. Hawks that reach the screen edge bounce and return from the same direction at the same lane on approximately the same timing. A hawk you chose not to joust the first time will return with a known trajectory. Factoring these return paths into your lane positioning during the bounce period — collecting a feather from a different lane before returning to the bounce hawk's lane — is the movement optimisation top players use consistently.
Mistimed jousts cost a life and reset your kill combo simultaneously, making them disproportionately punishing. One misjudged charge that costs a life and breaks a streak of twelve kills represents a compounded penalty significantly larger than the raw life loss. Learning to recognise when a joust window is marginal and choosing not to charge is a discipline that is counter-intuitive early in the learning curve and fundamental in advanced play.
The difficulty curve is designed so that each tier feels qualitatively different rather than quantitatively faster. Easy teaches the timing fundamentals with wide windows and slow hawks. Hard expects consistent timing with medium windows and faster hawks. Insane demands precise timing with narrow windows and very fast hawks in a compressed storm arena simultaneously. Each tier requires genuinely different play rather than simply faster execution of the same strategy.
Multiplayer is coming soon. When launched, the jousting mechanic will work identically but instead of AI hawks a second player controls the opposing bird. Lane selection, timing decisions, and feather racing take on entirely new competitive dimensions with a human opponent. Current single-player practice directly transfers to multiplayer skill, making the waiting period a productive training investment.