Pirate Cat by valkyrie
Oh oh! You need to escape the island but you've stolen too much gold. The hot air balloon is sinking and also there's a lot of cats that want to come with you for some reason. Escape into the ocean without jettisoning all of your stolen gold!
Controls:
Use S/down to drop gold coins (ballast) and go higher. Use W/up to vent hot air balloon air and go down. Use Left/Right to control the balloon.
Built with: Unreal Engine, Blender, bfxr, and Photoshop.

Ratings
| Overall | 583th | 2.878⭐ | 51🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 561th | 2.792⭐ | 50🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 339th | 3.17⭐ | 49🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 277th | 3.574⭐ | 49🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 451th | 3⭐ | 49🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 460th | 2.391⭐ | 48🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 163th | 3.283⭐ | 48🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 515th | 2.674⭐ | 45🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 53🗳️ | 44🗨️ |
Compile/Sync/Engine/Source/Runtime/Engine/Private/PhysicsEngine/PhysXLibs.cpp line 90
"Failed to load module ... Engine/Binaries/ThirdParty/PhysX/Win64/VS2015/PxFoundationPROFILE_x64.dll"
EDIT:
Got it working w/ a fresh download. I like it! Venting air and dropping balast don't seem very responsive but after dropping a lot of balast early on it settles in to something that is fun to control!
Great game! :)
I wonder what the least amount of gold is you can drop and still reach the ocean. Anyway, a fun idea, I'm a sucker for cats attached to balloons.
But it's a nice game overall! Very surrealistic for me, but good anyway.
My only complain is that the cats get attatched to the ballon when too far from it. Maybe they should be attatched only when their body collides with it, and not the whole model (body + cat's balloon)?
I didn't read the description before so I thought I was supposed to save the cats or something lol. Only realized that when my score was -100000s or something. Maybe the balloon cats should be threatening or something. Fun take on the theme!
Bizarrely, there's a weird thing where when I launch your game it also launches Steam VR? If I close Steam VR it closes your game! It confused me for a moment, I thought for a second you'd made a VR game!
I think your game might benefit from some kind of indication of your buoyancy/weight ratio or something? I found it difficult, after dropping ballast or venting air, to know how _much_ I'd changed my acceleration - because my current velocity was disguising my change? That felt frustrating somehow, not sure exactly how you solve it!
I managed to get a pretty good score my third run:

Here is my 4th run

I found it rather hard to avoid the cats however, because they seemed to attach to the balloon even if they didn't collide with it. I only managed to reach the ocean once, after that I tried to do it without losing much money, but found that almost impossible.
Overall it was a fun game to begin with, but it got a bit tedious after a few attempts, but I enjoyed it. Good entry.
Sometimes the cat would stick to my balloon even when they were quite far from it. Also it would be nice to be able to move the camera with the mouse because sometimes the camera gets stuck in the mountain and it looks kinda weird. And lastly when you get stuck in a mountain the hurt sound goes on continuously and it's not really pleasant to the ear.
Overall the game works well and is quite fun, good job !