Line Rider

The basic concept is to draw one or more lines with the mouse on which a boy (referred to as "Bosh" by the creator) on a sled can ride after the player presses the "Play" button. The game includes simulated physics, which means the track must be sufficiently smooth to prevent the character from falling off the sled. The author has said that he prefers the description "toy" to "game", as there is no goal to accomplish, nor does it have an end. In spite of its simplicity, many complicated tracks have been created, which include loops and other stunts.

New tracks can consist of unrealistic tricks such as "flings" and "manuals" both on and off the sled. Many tracks created by the community have been set to music, such as the video This Will Destroy You, timed completely to the entire self-titled This Will Destroy You album. Others use background art to fill their tracks with hand-drawn mountain slopes and trees. Tracks are typically shared among users by uploading a video to websites, such as YouTube or Google Video.

Boštjan Čadež, a student at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Slovenia, was assigned to do an art project by the school's illustration class in 2005. He planned the project to be coded animation software from the beginning, as he had previous programming experience developing VJ sets, "little" Flash games, and presets for Advanced Visualization Studio. With that plus pages of his sketch book drawings to look at, his first idea was a mixture of pre-coding and traditional frame-by-frame methods of animation, where the user animated "by just drawing" and altered "on the fly."

Čadež noticed a program by Anderas Gysin named Cronodraw that partially matched this concept, and later placed the drawing and mouse control mechanics of Gysin's program into the final product of Line Rider. Čadež then found a page in his sketchbook that consisted only of a small man sledding on a tilted line; this brought back memories of when he was a child doodling the man sledding on various "path lines", and he decided this would be the basis of the project.