FIELD MANUAL
THE MISSION
Scattered across this airfield are other companies' abandoned software projects — crated up, left on the tarmac, waiting for someone who knows how to finish things. Scope creep found them first. Drones descend, latch onto a project, and haul it into the sky; a crate that reaches the ceiling is lost forever and curdles into tech debt — fast, furious, and permanent.
You fly the rescue: shoot the drone, catch the project as it falls, and carry it home to the hangar. Every crate you carry slows you down — the game punishes taking on more than you can carry, and rewards landing what you picked up. Die carrying, and it all dies with you.
CONTROLS
DELIVERY — THE FOUR DISPOSITIONS
Fly low and slow over the hangar to deliver everything you carry. Each crate's condition decides its fate: Retain (untouched, 1.5× points) · Refactor (1×) · Replace (0.5×, refunds a hotfix) · Retire (0.1×, but the mass comes off instantly). A grounded crate can also be scooped straight off the tarmac with a slow touch-and-go pass.
FIELD GUIDE
 | Your aircraft — the Black Airplane. Faster than everything except a deadline. |
 | Scope creep — descends, grabs a project, hauls it skyward. Shoot it; catch what falls. |
 | Tech debt — born when a crate is lost at the ceiling. Hunts you forever. Never despawns. |
 | Flaky test — cruises the sky strewing mines. Officious middleware with somewhere to be. |
 | Bad sector — a mine. Blinks, waits about twelve seconds, shootable if you must. |
 | Dependency pod — drifts harmlessly until you pop it. Then the install completes… |
 | Transitive dependencies — the swarm one install unleashed. Fast, angry, disposable. |
 | Deadline — arrives when a sprint runs long. Relentless, dead-straight, and it keeps coming. |
 | Side project — light cargo, 250 points base. |
 | Product build — real weight, 500 points base. |
 | Enterprise migration — the Golden .EXE. Heavy as sin, 1000 points base. |
 | Stalled project — appears mid-air, already falling. Nobody even had to steal it. 750 points. |
 | Coffee — air-dropped by the tower. Catch it before it lands: eight seconds of carrying anything like it weighs nothing. |
THE ACTS
Assess teaches. Decide brings the heavy crates and the deadlines. Modernize is when the codebase fights back. Transition never ends — the score is what you ship before it consumes you. Lose every crate on the field and containment fails; survive the collapse and the work returns.