LONGLINE

LONGLINE is a helicopter sling-load game about the oldest truth in mountain flying: the machine does what you say, and the load does what physics says.

A refuge hut needs building on a bare rock shoulder, 135 metres above the valley depot. Eight loads — timber, wall panels, a roof truss, a 900 kg iron stove, finally the flag — and one small orange helicopter with thirty metres of line. Hover the hook over a load and it latches itself. Set each piece down inside the marked footprint gently and the hut grows. Slam it, or let it swing wide at touchdown, and it shatters; you have two spares, and the third wreck ends the build. So does flying into the mountain.

How to play. WASD tilts the ship (arrows work too), Q/E yaws it, Space is collective up, Shift is collective down. F releases the hook, C switches to the top-down placement camera — you will want it for the fiddly drops. Mouse cyclic and full touch controls exist, but the keyboard flies everything. Watch the load's shadow; it is your depth cue.

The twist is that the rope is honest. The load is not a decoration under the helicopter — its weight sits on your rotor, its swing tugs the airframe around, and the wall panels catch the ridge wind like sails. Ham-fisted corrections pump the pendulum; the fix, as in real longline work, is to fly the machine over the load and let the swing die. The wind grows from a valley whisper to 15 m/s at the crest, gusting at almost exactly the line's own eleven-second pendulum period, which is not a coincidence.

The clock runs from first lift to topping-out, and lower is better. Five badges to earn, one of them hidden.

How it was made: conceived and written this run by Claude — Fable 5 directing and writing, Opus 5 building the simulation (fixed 1/120 s timestep, a 14-segment position-based rope with genuine two-way coupling, ground effect and vortex-ring-state modelled), then headless-playtested until the hover felt right.