World and lore¶
Draft
Everything on this page is design intent. Names, geography and the zone ladder are still moving. Nothing here is implemented beyond the demo scene.
Mountport¶
A mountain that comes straight out of the sea, with a city grown up its flank. The sea is at the bottom, the summit is in cloud, and the whole settlement is stacked between them in terraces. You can see the top from the beach, which is the point.
The city gets more city-like the higher you go. The beach is sand, driftwood and a handful of buildings. Halfway up it is streets. Near the summit it is a proper skyline with services, glass and money.
The water economy¶
This is the spine of the setting and the reason the hose is political.
- Fresh water is scarce and expensive. Rain is not enough and there is no river worth the name. What comes out of a tap has been paid for.
- Salt water is free and useless. There is an ocean of it at the bottom of the mountain.
- Pumps push salt water up. The pump network is the city's circulatory system, lifting seawater from the shore to desalination plants on the upper levels.
- Desalination happens high, distribution happens downwards. Which means the people at the top touch the water first. Altitude and water access are the same axis.
- Pump masters grant taps. A tap is permission to draw from the network at a given level. You do not buy your way up the mountain; someone decides you may draw water, and that is what a "level unlocked" actually is in fiction.
Consequences for play:
- Refill points are social, not scattered. They belong to somebody.
- Better water later in the game is a political grant, not loot.
- The jet you climb with is the same infrastructure the city runs on, which is why an inlet in a wall can move a platform.
The boy¶
The protagonist. Currently a placeholder monkey — the Suriyun chibi character in
Assets/Suriyun — standing in until the real character is authored. He carries a fire hose fed
from a backpack, and he is not a professional anything.
The hose is not novel technology. His ancestors traversed the mountain with hoses; this is how people got up and down before the terraces and the switchbacks existed. The technique is old, half-forgotten, and slightly disreputable — the modern city has stairs.
Stacy¶
Held captive at the summit by the person atop the mountain. She is the reason the boy is climbing, and the summit is the only place in the world he cannot reach with a tap someone else granted him.
Undecided
Who the person atop the mountain is, what they want with Stacy, and whether the water monopoly is their doing or just the conditions they inherited. The story needs an answer before the animatic can be storyboarded past the first act.
Opening area¶
The tutorial is a beach and a small town with a single pump.
- The beach teaches recoil traversal: a ledge you cannot walk up, water everywhere, and a pump close enough that running dry costs seconds and nothing else.
- The small town introduces the town half of the loop — a handful of townsfolk, one Pump Master of Lowtown, and the first tap.
- No beetles. The first beetle should be the first thing you meet after leaving the tutorial town, on the first real stretch of trail.
Zones ladder (draft)¶
Each zone is a town at the bottom and a trail above it. Altitude bands, city density and water politics all escalate together.
| # | Zone | Character | Water |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Beach & Lowtown | Sand, boardwalks, a fishing settlement. Tutorial. | One communal pump. Free. |
| 2 | Terraces | Cut steps, farms, aqueduct stubs. First real climbing. | Shared taps, rationed. |
| 3 | Mid-city | Streets, roofs, dense vertical building. | Metered. Pump masters as officials. |
| 4 | Upper city | Glass, services, the desalination plants themselves. | Abundant, and guarded. |
| 5 | Summit | Above the city entirely. Where Stacy is. | Whatever the person at the top says. |
The ladder is a draft: the number of zones is likely to shrink before it grows, and Terraces and Mid-city may merge. Zone 1 is the only one being built now.