SKEIN

Lead a skein of geese south through one night.

You start alone in the dusk. Somewhere in the clouds the others are calling. Find them, one by one, and bring them into the line. When the skein is whole, the night breaks open into the flyway: wind rivers, headwind fronts, a storm over the coast, and at dawn, the sea.

The front bird works hardest. The birds behind it draft in its wake and get their strength back, but only while they hold the line. So fly smooth, beat your wings on the pulse of the music, and hand over the lead before the front bird tires. Hand over on the pulse and the change is clean; off the pulse the line breaks for a moment. A goose flown until it is spent comes down to rest, and the skein goes on without it.

One flight is about three minutes. How many of the seven come home is up to you.

Made for thatgamejam #02

The jam's theme was a piece of music. We measured its shape and built the game on it: a quiet, sparse opening; a sudden turn where the whole ensemble arrives at once; and a held, unresolved ending. Those are SKEIN's three acts. The music's pulse is the wingbeat. The score is our own, written for this game in the theme's key and tempo; the jam track itself is not used.

How to play

• Beat your wings: Space, Z or Enter · left click · tap · gamepad A. A beat on the pulse (the little lamp at the top swells on every beat) is a full beat: more lift, less effort.
• Climb and dive: arrows or W S · move the mouse above or below the lead goose · drag · left stick.
• Hand over the lead: X or Shift · right click · the LEAD button on touch screens · gamepad B.
• Esc or P pauses, M mutes, F goes fullscreen, C on the title shows the credits.

Inside a wind river the front bird flies for free. In a headwind it tires fast. Rising air (the golden columns) lifts and rests everyone. Rain and cloud wear every bird down.

Windows and browser

Play it here in the browser (keyboard, mouse, touch or gamepad), or download the Windows build: unzip and run SKEIN.exe, no install, no network.

Credits

A game by Core Systems Asset Factory. Backdrops from our Verdant Battlebacks pack, type from our Lantern & Tallow pixel fonts. Score rendered through the MuseScore General soundfont (MIT licence; full notices in CREDITS.txt). Sound effects synthesised live in the browser.

AI disclosure

This game contains AI-generated content. The code, the goose sprites, the clouds and every word of text were written with AI tools (Claude). The backdrops were drawn by AI-written procedural code (no image model). The score was composed and sequenced by AI-written code and played through sampled instruments; no AI audio model generated any sound.

Paid, from the same studio

• Verdant Battlebacks ($9.99): every backdrop in SKEIN comes from this pack. 40 pixel art scenes, 10 biomes at dawn, day, dusk and night.
• Lantern & Tallow pixel fonts ($4.99): the two typefaces you are reading in the game.
• GUISER ($4.99, free browser demo): a Halloween action adventure where every costume is a power.