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Design overview

Pillars

The hose is the verb. Movement, combat and puzzle-solving are the same action pointed at different things. There is no separate jump-upgrade tree and no weapon slot — you get better water and better places to put it.

Pressure is the resource. The tank drains while the trigger is held and refills after a delay, so a climb is a sequence of bursts with pauses in them. Running dry mid-air is the failure state, and it is always your own arithmetic that got you there.

The mountain is legible. You can look up from the beach and see the summit. Every zone is visible from the one below it, so progress is measured in altitude you can point at.

Water is politics. Fresh water is scarce and expensive; taps are granted, not found. The people who let you up the mountain are characters, not gates.

Nobody explains the hose to you. Tutorialisation is geometry. The tutorial beach teaches recoil by giving you a ledge you cannot walk up and a pump that refills instantly.

The loop

flowchart LR
    A[Town<br/>third person] -->|pump master grants a tap| B[Trail<br/>first person]
    B -->|reach the next settlement| C[Next town<br/>third person]
    C --> D[Trail]
    D --> E[...]
    A -.->|dialogue, shops, refill| A
    B -.->|beetles, inlets, platforms| B

Town — third person, safe

The camera pulls back to the Cinemachine free-look rig the moment you enter a camera zone. Towns hold:

  • NPCs and dialogue. Ink-driven conversations, played out in third person so you can see who you are talking to. See Dialogue system.
  • The pump master. One per town. Grants the tap that gets you to the next town, which is the progression gate.
  • Pumps and taps. Refill points. Later towns hand out different fluid profiles, which change drain rate, recoil and what the jet does to what it hits.
  • No combat. Zone volumes are the contract: inside one, you are safe and you are in third person.

Trail — first person, hostile

Between settlements the director drops to first person and the mountain is the game:

  • Traversal. Spray down and back to lift yourself; spray sideways to cross. The recoil is strong enough to hover at full pressure and the tank is not deep enough to let you do it for long.
  • Combat. Beetles that roam calm, alert each other, and swoop to knock you back down the mountain. Height you lose is time you spend re-climbing.
  • Mechanisms. Water inlets that drive moving platforms and buttons, so the same jet that moves you also opens the road.

Back to town

Arriving at the next settlement is the checkpoint, the refill, and the next story beat. The ladder of zones is in World and lore.

What is actually playable today

One demo scene with the hose rig, the free-look camera and the first-person look. The tank, meter, arm IK, transitions and dialogue exist in code but are not wired into a scene. The roadmap is ordered around fixing that first.