Story and animatic

Draft

Beats and cast are a first pass. Nothing is storyboarded, recorded or in the project. The animatic is wave 3 work.

The intro animatic

A 2D animatic before the first playable moment. Hand-drawn, unvoiced or lightly voiced, short — under ninety seconds. It exists to sell the mountain and the stakes before the player is holding anything.

Tone: matter-of-fact about an absurd premise. Nobody in the film thinks the hose is strange.

Beats (draft)

1. The sea, then up. The camera starts on water and tilts. The mountain keeps going past the top of the frame. The city is stacked on it, thin at the bottom, dense at the top.
2. Water goes the wrong way. Pumps, pipes, salt water climbing. It arrives somewhere high and comes back down clean and expensive. Nobody comments on this; it is just how the frames move.
3. The ancestors. Older figures crossing the mountain on hoses, before the terraces. Brief, almost a woodcut. This is the boy's inheritance and the only tutorial the fiction gives him.
4. The boy and Stacy. A small ordinary scene at the bottom. Establish that they know each other and that the world is at sea level for both of them.
5. Taken. Stacy is taken up the mountain. The person at the top is not shown — a silhouette, a hand, a receding shape. Whoever they are, they are above the weather.
6. The backpack. The boy finds or is given the hose. The last frame is him looking up at what the first frame tilted across.
7. Cut to the beach. The animatic hands off directly into the tutorial beach with the same composition, so the first thing the player sees is the last thing the film showed.

Open questions

• Whether the person atop the mountain gets a face in the intro or is withheld until the summit.
• Whether the ancestors beat is in the intro at all, or is earned later from the Pump Master of Lowtown as dialogue.
• Length. Beat 2 is the one that will overrun.

NPC cast (draft)

Character	Where	Role
Pump Master of Lowtown	Beach & Lowtown	Grants the first tap. Knew the boy's family, and is the one who says out loud that people used to climb with hoses. The template for every pump master above him: an official who is also a person.
Townsfolk	Beach & Lowtown	Three to five short conversations. Purpose is texture and rules — what a tap is, why water costs, who lives up there. One of them should be openly resentful of the upper city, one should be indifferent to it.
Stacy	Intro, summit	The reason for the climb. Appears in the animatic and at the top. Whether she is present anywhere in between — messages, sightings, a voice on the pump network — is undecided and would substantially change the middle of the game.
The person atop the mountain	Summit	Antagonist. Undefined.

Later towns each need their own pump master; that is the structural repeat. Design each one around what they think the water is for, because that is the argument the boy is walking into.

Writing pipeline

Dialogue is authored in Ink and played by the runtime described in Dialogue system. Every line that ships needs an #id: tag so it can be localized — see Localization.