About HelixJump.world

What this site is

Open the homepage and the game starts. A ball falls down a spiraling tower; you rotate the tower to keep the ball away from the red wedges. Your personal best is kept in your browser. If you want to compare with other people, your best score gets posted to the public leaderboard under whatever name you pick.

That's effectively the whole site. The half-dozen content pages — how to play, controls, tips, the high score guide, the longer-form strategy guide — exist because there's actually quite a lot to say about a game that looks this simple, and because written-down knowledge is more useful than locked-in muscle memory. The whole thing is written and maintained by the developer behind it, with no marketing copy and no SEO mercenaries in between.

The origin story

The site started as a weekend project in May 2026. The problem it solves is mundane: there's no good browser-friendly way to play Helix Jump on a desktop. The big game-portal sites have versions, but they're buried under ad networks, tracking scripts, and "are you over 18" interstitials. The official VOODOO app is excellent but locked to a phone. The opening was obvious — a clean, single-purpose browser version, hosted on a memorable URL, with nothing to install and nothing to sign up for.

The first weekend produced a playable prototype. The second weekend tuned the feel of the bounce, the rotation friction, the speed curve, and the powerup-arrow spawning — the things that turn "technically a game" into "actually fun to play." The third weekend added the content site: guides, FAQ pages, a sitemap, structured data, and an experiment in whether a single well-made personal page on a low-trust top-level domain (helixjump.world) could pull real organic search traffic for long-tail queries without any social-media presence. That experiment is still running.

The game logic has been refined steadily since that first prototype — the bounce feel, the difficulty curve, the powerup spawning. The changelog notes the notable changes.

What's under the hood

The whole stack is small enough to read in an afternoon:

• The game is one HTML file, one JavaScript file, one CSS file. It uses three.js over WebGL for rendering, and the three.js library itself is pulled from unpkg via an importmap — no bundler, no build step on the game proper.
• The leaderboard backend (helix-api) is a small Node service that accepts score submissions, dedupes them, and serves the top-10 boards. It uses better-sqlite3 for storage; the database file is a single ~100 KB blob on the server.
• The content site (this page included) is built by a ~700-line zero-dependency Node script. It wraps each page in a shared template, fills in per-page metadata from a JSON file, generates JSON-LD schema and the sitemap, and writes static HTML to dist/. The build also stamps a content-hash on the CSS and JS so returning visitors get fresh files only when something actually changed.
• The server is a single small Linux box running nginx, with the static files served straight off disk and the leaderboard service running behind a systemd unit on localhost. No CDN, no serverless, no container orchestration.
• The deploy is an rsync followed by a systemctl reload. No CI pipeline; the script runs from a laptop.

If you've written a static site before, none of this will look exotic. That's the point — small enough that one person can hold it all in their head, and small enough that nothing breaks while they're not looking.

Operating philosophy

A small set of opinions that show up everywhere on the site:

• Static where possible. Every page that doesn't strictly need a server is plain HTML served off disk. The pages that do need a server (the leaderboard) talk to one tiny Node service. No SSR, no edge functions.
• Memorable URLs over slick UX. helixjump.world/how-to-play/ is a URL someone can read aloud over a phone. The site invests in URL shape and meta tags more than animations.
• Honest about what you're looking at. The site doesn't pretend to be a studio, an esports brand, or an aggregator. It's one person and one server, and it says so plainly.
• One server, one stack, one laptop. The site runs from a single small server, with sources on a single laptop. No platform team to maintain because there's no platform to maintain.
• Readable code over clever code. The build script is one file, well commented, ~700 lines. The game logic is one file, also well commented, ~70 KB. A future maintainer can open either one and understand what it does without a deep dive.

Privacy

A short list of things this site deliberately doesn't have:

• No third-party trackers. No Google Analytics, no Facebook Pixel, no Hotjar, no segment.io, no advertising pixels. The game iframe doesn't load any of those either.
• No accounts. No sign-in, no email capture, no "create a profile to save your score." Your best run is in your browser; the leaderboard takes a display name only.
• No tracking cookies. The site doesn't set any cookies for analytics, advertising, or fingerprinting. The only cookie that ever appears is for an authentication-protected admin section on a different subdomain you'll never see.
• No ads. No banners, no interstitials, no in-game popups. (This may change in the future — there's a long-term hypothesis about whether a single well-placed ad slot could fund the server cost — but if it ever happens it'll be one slot, well below the game, and labelled honestly.)

What we do collect, fully enumerated: one small visit beacon per pageview (path, referrer, country derived from IP at request time — the IP itself is not stored, only the country code). And, if you submit a score to the leaderboard, the score itself plus the anonymised userId generated locally in your browser plus the display name you chose. That's the entire list. No name, no email, no precise location, no device fingerprint.

The userId is generated client-side the first time you play, stored in localStorage, and used to dedupe score submissions so a single browser can't spam the board. It isn't tied to anything else — it's a random string. If you clear your browser storage, you get a new one, and your previous scores stay on the leaderboard under the previous id.

Update cadence and changelog

The site ships small updates fairly often — content tweaks, occasional new guide pages, polish on the game's feel. Larger changes (a new mechanic, a new mode, a UI rework) are rarer but happen. Every notable change is logged on the changelog page, which doubles as an Atom feed at /feed.xml for anyone who wants to subscribe.

If you want a quick way to know when something changed: the homepage shows the current site version in the small print at the bottom, and every guide page has a "Last updated" line in the header.

Independent — not affiliated with VOODOO or the official mobile app

"Helix Jump" as a name was popularised by VOODOO's 2018 mobile app, which is still actively published and available on the iOS App Store and Google Play. This site is not made by VOODOO, is not endorsed by VOODOO, and is not a clone or repackaging of their app. It's an independent browser implementation of the same arcade idea — a ball, a spiraling tower, gaps to fall through, red zones to avoid — built from scratch in JavaScript.

If you're looking for the official VOODOO app for iOS or Android, search "Helix Jump" in your phone's app store. If you're looking for something to play right now in a tab, you're in the right place.

Where to go next

If you want to put the game on your own site, see the embed page — one line of HTML, no key, no rate limit. If you want to read about the game itself, start with how to play or just play it.

FAQ

Who made HelixJump.world?

An independent developer building it as a personal project. The site isn't a studio, a publisher, or a marketing vehicle — it's one person and one small server. The game was written from scratch in JavaScript using three.js for WebGL.

Is this affiliated with VOODOO or the official Helix Jump mobile app?

No. HelixJump.world is an independent browser project. Not made by VOODOO, not endorsed by VOODOO, not a clone of their app. Same shape of game, different implementation, written from scratch in JavaScript using three.js for WebGL.

Why are there no ads?

Two reasons. First, the costs of running the site are small enough (a single small server) that ads aren't strictly necessary. Second, the experiment is partly about whether a clean, ad-free page can win search traffic on its own merits — sticking an ad rack at the top would muddy that. If costs ever require it, one tasteful slot below the game is the most that'd ship, and it would be clearly labelled.

Can I use the embed elsewhere?

Yes, freely. See the embed page — one line of HTML, no API key, no rate limit, no tracking. Score submissions from embedded sessions don't post to the public leaderboard, so embed traffic doesn't pollute the rankings. A link back is appreciated but not required.

How is my score data stored?

If you submit to the leaderboard, the score plus your chosen display name plus an anonymised userId (a random string generated in your browser) are stored in a SQLite database on the server. No name, no email, no precise location, no device fingerprint. Clearing your browser storage gives you a fresh userId on the next visit; the older scores remain on the board under the previous one.