Glydon Upflight

Glydon Upflight is an exploit that allows gaining unlimited height using the Glydon capture. It is performed by walking off the side of a slope as Glydon and immediately entering flight, then flying in an arc until Glydon is facing the direction that corresponds with the slope's uphill direction.

Explanation

An illustration depicting how the level plane (gray) relates to the areas Glydon can reach (teal)

Whenever Glydon walks around or flies, he has an invisible "level plane" that determines his upright direction. Normally, this level plane is horizontal while flying, and it essentially gives an upper bound to the locations Glydon can reach during flight. However, in reality, Glydon's height decays the farther he flies (although it decays less quickly if the player periodically inputs motion-controlled shakes). The diagram at right shows how the level plane corresponds to areas Glydon can reach.

While walking around, the level plane will be parallel to the surface that Glydon is standing on. If Glydon walks off of the surface he is on and thus becomes airborne, the game will attempt to correct the level plane to be horizontal again if it was tilted. However, the level plane will not be corrected if Glydon is actively flying, and there is a brief window before the game corrects the level plane in which Glydon can begin flying. Therefore, by walking off the side of a slope and immediately entering flight, it is possible to begin flying with a tilted level plane.

When the level plane is tilted during flight, the directions in which Glydon can fly (represented by the cone in the diagram) will tilt with it. Therefore, it is possible to abuse this process of tilting the level plane in order to fly in a direction that allows Glydon to gain height. This can be done by slowly curving Glydon to fly in a direction that corresponds with the uphill direction of the slope that the exploit was initiated on. Glydon must remain flying throughout this maneuver, or the level plane will be corrected to horizontal.

Once a desired amount of height is attained, the player can exit and re-enter flight in order to correct the level plane and resume normal flight, allowing Glydon to glide down to any desired location.

Uses

Glydon Upflight is used in Minimum Captures Darker Side, in single-player runs on versions 1.2.0 and later. Such a run requires traversing the Darker Side dungeon, with no way to skip it, since Frog Airswim is exclusive to versions 1.1.0 and earlier, and the Cappy return cancel to skip it requires two-player mode. Within the dungeon, Glydon is required to cross a large gap. Glydon Upflight allows the Glydon capture to be used to fly directly to the end of the dungeon, skipping two spark pylon captures that would normally be required at the end. The exploit is initiated from the side of the Sphynx's head, which necessitates a bit of backtracking from where Glydon is first found.