hoseboy

Mountport · elevation 0 m · in development

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

Mountport is a city stacked up the side of a mountain that rises out of the sea. Fresh water gets scarcer 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. You have a fire hose.

Read the design docs Follow the build

Engine
Unity 6, URP
Camera
Third person in town, first person on the trail
Studio
Yawn Factory
Mountport: a mountain rising from the sea, terraced with buildings, a pump line running from the shore to the summit.
Salt water goes up. Fresh water comes down. Never in the same pipe.

160 m · the loop

Town, trail, town

Towns are safe. They are third person, full of people who talk back, and every one of them has a pump master who decides whether you may draw water there. You leave a town with a tap that gets you as far as the next one and no further.

The moment the road runs out, the camera drops behind your eyes and the mountain becomes the problem. On the trail there is no separate movement button — there is where you point the nozzle, and there is where you end up.

Diagram: town in third person leads to trail in first person, which leads to the next town, one tap higher. Town third person talk · refill · ask Trail first person climb · spray · budget Town one tap higher and one town colder
The camera change is the difficulty change. Nothing else announces it.

410 m · the instrument

The hose is the whole game

A backpack, a length of simulated hose, and a nozzle in your hand. It is never holstered and never swapped out, so the design question for every mechanism on the mountain is the same one: what does it do when you point water at it.

Water leaves the nozzle, the boy goes the other way.

Point down and behind you and that is a jump. Hold it and that is a hover, and hovering is the most expensive thing you can do. Pressure comes out of a tank that drains while the trigger is down and refills when it isn't, so every stretch of mountain is a budget you are spending.

Climb
Spray downwards. Recoil does the lifting.
Fight
Spray at it. Usually you shouldn't.
Open
Spray into inlets. Platforms, buttons and taps run on the same network you do.
Read
One gauge, sloshing against your sideways acceleration. That is the whole HUD.
A fire hose nozzle with a pressure gauge, the hose coiling away behind it and a jet leaving the tip.
Nozzle, gauge, and the hose that never leaves your back.

840 m · the setting

Altitude and water access are the same axis

Rain is not enough and there is no river worth the name, so anything that comes out of a tap in Mountport has been paid for. There is an ocean of salt water at the bottom of the mountain and it is free and useless. The pumps exist to solve that, and the pumps run uphill.

Desalination happens high. Distribution happens downwards. The people at the top touch the water first, which is why the road up the mountain is not a road at all — it is a sequence of people deciding whether you may draw water at their level.

Schematic: sea water is drawn from the shore, pumped up the mountain to desalination plants near the summit, then distributed downwards through taps at each level. summit upper city terraces shore salt water, pumped up desalination fresh water, sold down
A tap is permission to draw from the network at a given level. Unlocking a level is somebody agreeing to that in fiction, not a door opening.

1190 m · the mountain's own

Beetles are beautiful and you should leave them alone

Protagonist-sized, iridescent, deliberate. The kind of insect you would stop and look at if it were the size of your thumb instead of the size of you. They are not vermin and they are not soldiers — they live here, and you are the one crossing.

Move quietly and don't spray and most of them never bother with you. That is the intended outcome. What makes a slope into a problem is that alertness spreads: a beetle notices you, another beetle notices that one, and the ripple runs uphill faster than you do.

Every fight on this mountain is optional and every fight is something you started.

A large beetle seen from above, with an iridescent split shell, six legs and two antennae.
Iridescent, unhurried, and paying attention to each other.

1880 m · honest about it

Where it actually is

Pre-alpha. There is one demo scene. The hose, the first and third person camera director and the Ink dialogue framework all exist as working code, and roughly half of that has never been placed in a scene — the tank, the fluid gauge, the arm IK and the dialogue system are written and unwired. The boy is currently a monkey, because the real character hasn't been authored yet.

Working
Hose simulation, recoil, camera director, Ink integration
Written, unwired
Tank and gauge, arm IK, dialogue
Not started
Beetles, towns, the water economy as systems
Placeholder
The boy. He is a monkey.

Follow development

Development happens in the open. The design docs are the same ones the game is built from — roadmap, systems, world, and pages marked draft where they are still just intent.