Freight Dog
Ten contracts into lakes that may be too short. What you load decides whether you fit.
What it is
Load the aeroplane, fly the contract, put it down on the water. Ten of them to a season, against a target you will not reach by playing safe.
Cargo, fuel and the aeroplane itself all come out of one pool of two thousand pounds. Everything you gain by carrying more, you pay for somewhere else.
Weight is the whole game
Gross weight sets how long the takeoff run is, how high you can climb before the ridge, and how far you roll after touching down. Those three numbers are quoted on the load-out screen before you commit: not estimates, the same functions the flight model uses.
So the decision is made on the ground and paid for in the air. Take the heavy contract and the lake at the far end may simply be too short.
No throttle
The approach is a power-off glide. You cannot stay up, you cannot go around, and you cannot add power to fix a bad line. One thumb: up and down is pitch, left and right is bank.
How to play
- PitchDrag up and down
- BankDrag left and right
One thumb, two axes, no throttle.
On a desktop, drag with the mouse for both axes, or nudge the pitch with the arrow keys or W and S.
What isn't settled yet
The load-out decision works and the numbers on it are honest. What is not finished is the season around it: whether ten contracts against a fixed target is the right shape, or whether a bad run early makes the rest of it academic.
Build Log
-
Build 50
The mountains were cones and boxes, and the ridge you could crash into was a separate rule they only roughly matched. They are now one continuous terrain, shaped to the rule: the saddle is held under the height you must clear, and the notch is open between the gate posts. Across 180 test flights, none that reached the lake was ever drawn inside rock. Scenery that stands in for a rule has to be measured against it.
-
Build 49
A well-flown takeoff unsticks in seventeen to twenty-two per cent less lake. That is not seventeen per cent more cargo: run length rises faster than weight, so the same technique is worth about thirteen per cent in pounds. The heaviest load now spends eight of it, so it has to be flown, not just chosen.
-
Build 48
The approach told you to ease the nose up from the top of the descent, though the window it describes is the last twenty feet. Following it when it appeared put you short of the water. The line now waits until seventy feet. An instruction shown before it applies is not early, it is wrong.
-
Build 41
Flying straight meant holding your thumb on one exact column of pixels; a fraction off centre and the aeroplane wandered wide of the lake. Bank now has a neutral band either side of centre, so roughly centred means wings level. A control that integrates twice needs somewhere to rest.
-
Build 7
Removed the weather system entirely. It added variance to a game whose whole appeal is that the numbers on the load-out screen are trustworthy, and a headwind you could not see coming turned a considered decision into a coin toss.
Credits and licences
Built on three.js, used under the MIT licence with the copyright notice retained in the shipped file. Typefaces are the ones already on your device; nothing is downloaded. Cover drawn from the game’s own aircraft, lake and terrain code.
Freight Dog is original work by Launchway Games.