Skip to content

hoseboy

A boy, a mountain, and a hose long enough to climb it.

Elevator pitch

Mountport is a city stacked up the side of a mountain that rises out of the sea. Fresh water gets scarcer and more expensive the higher you go, so pumps push salt water up to desalination plants on the upper levels, and the people who own the taps own the road. Stacy is being held at the summit by whoever sits up there. You are a boy with a fire hose.

The hose is the whole game. It is a physically simulated rope with a pressurised jet on the end: the jet shoves you where you point it away from, so you climb by spraying downwards, fight by spraying at things, and open the road by spraying into inlets that drive platforms, buttons and taps. Pressure comes out of a tank that drains while you hold the trigger and refills when you let go, so every stretch of mountain is a budget.

The loop

Town, trail, town. Towns are safe, third person, and full of people to talk to and pumps to tap. Between towns the camera drops into first person and the mountain becomes traversal and combat. Each town's pump master grants you a tap that gets you as far as the next one.

Status

Pre-alpha, and honest about it. There is one demo scene. The hose, the first/third-person camera director and the Ink dialogue framework all exist as working code, but roughly half of it has never been placed in a scene — the tank, the fluid meter, the arm IK and the whole dialogue system are written and unwired. See Roadmap for the order they get switched on in.

Pages marked draft are design intent, not shipped behaviour.

Where to start

If you want to Read
Understand the game Design overview
Understand the world World and lore
Work on the hose Hose system
Work on cameras Camera system
Write dialogue Dialogue system
Ship a change Getting started, then Workflow