GD: True Flight Game Concept

True Flight (name still up for discussion)

True Flight is a whimsical third person flight racer set in the Kingdom of the Dawn, on the edge of the horizon. You are a paper plane who wishes to join the skies above; she was folded unto the earth with such finely formed wings and so she must use them, but her decidedly gravitized build keeps her mired on the ground. Then the Grace of the Dawn, she who breathed the plane into life, decides to grant Paper's wish: if she can keep airborne for as long as possible, Paper is able to pursue her dreams of true flight. If she touches the ground, her dream will end...

True Flight takes place in the aforementioned Kingdom of the Dawn, where the sun stays the course skimming around the horizon all day and all night, keeping the place suffused in a soft gold light. Islands of solid ground are adrift in a sea of clouds, kept in contact by the brave pilots of the Royal Air Force. People primarily inhabit large cities on the stronger pillars of ground; the rest of the land is heavily forested. You can usually navigate the air using the pillars as landmarks. Paper was created to be a companion of the Grace of the Dawn, one of the many princesses of Aurora City, but grew to be too independent and willful-natured, too in love with the sky. In a final act of petty spite, Grace of the Dawn granted Paper her wish, but on one condition: if she is to stop flying, she will die.

Here are some references to the kind of visual identity I'm trying for with True Flight:

And here's the basic breakdown of True Flight's mechanics:

What I'd like best to be able to do is have the whole map be procedurally and randomly generated, so the layout of the hoops, updrafts, and pods are never quite the same so the player can't memorise them. The idea is to keep yourself airborne for as long as possible, but there's no real end goal to land on. You just have to keep going until you die!