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Untergetaucht, a stealth game without weapons

On Sunday evening, 8 November, the same line went to Codex, to Claude and to Gemini, each in its own folder:

videogame: 1940s Berlin. you are a 14yo on the run, hiding, sneaking, doing everything to escape and not get detected. 2D topdown. lots of puzzles and ideas where to hide, mechanics to sneak.

Codex had a first chapter after four minutes, and got its first correction three minutes later: no UI... it needs to be full screen and the game needs to explain itself. Gemini got a sharper one: this is not a game, it's a map overview. game needs to be fullscreen, no UI and the game needs to explain itself while you are playing just like older games did. Claude's version had twelve chapters by eight o'clock, and that is the one that kept going.

The opening: a dark top-down back yard of cobblestones and slate roofs at dusk, a hedge and two bushes on the left, a gravel strip on the right where a small figure stands with the keys W A S D drawn over her. Over the middle, in a large serif, the title Untergetaucht and under it, spaced out, BERLIN 1943 – 1945
What the page opens on: the first chapter itself, with the title over it. The first key starts.

Fourteen chapters, February 1943 to May 1945

You are Hanna, fourteen, one of the roughly 7,000 Berlin Jews who went into hiding, untergetaucht, after the Fabrikaktion of 27 February 1943. The first chapter is that evening, in a back yard in Prenzlauer Berg; the last is 2 May 1945 in Kreuzberg. In between: a market day at Marheinekeplatz, the Blockwart's round, the goods yard at Görlitzer Bahnhof, the village church in Dahlem, an air raid, a bombed house, the Anhalter Bahnhof, a barn near Oranienburg, the cellars under a Kreuzberg block. There are no weapons. You sneak, hide, listen and wait.

Chapter one at dusk: the back yard from above, a guard on the left throwing a grey cone of sight towards the hedge, Hanna on the gravel strip on the right with W A S D over her. At the bottom, in italic serif: They came for the factories this morning. Mama and Papa were at Siemens.
Chapter one. The story is a line of what she thinks, at the bottom.
Market Day in daylight: grey cobbles, rows of wooden crates, two market tables, a wide pavement and slate roofs with chimneys. Hanna in the lower left with W A S D over her. Text: Frau Bergmann cannot feed a girl who does not exist. No ration cards, no bread.
Market Day, March 1943.
Night at the village church in Dahlem: gravestones and crosses in dark grass, a stone wall, a guard at the churchyard gate whose lamp throws a pale cone down the path, another light cone inside the church. Hanna in the lower left. Text: On Sundays people here put ration cards into the collection bag. Their own. For people like me.
The Collection, Dahlem, August 1943.
Night at a farm: a rye field, a dark path, a barn with straw bales and a lamp that throws a dashed circle of light. Hanna at the edge of the field on the left. Text: Along the field path, the last farm before the village. Ask for Marta, the nurse said.
The Barn, near Oranienburg, August 1944.

Told in the world

Early on 10 November the brief was improve this project as best you can / extend it, and the next night: continue... then take the best ideas from ../on-the-run-gemini and merge it here.... then delete that folder and all of its gemini context / transcripts. From Gemini's version came sound masking (the S-Bahn passing overhead covers your footsteps, so does the church bell), fuse boxes, coal soot as camouflage, a tin drummer toy to throw, the Litfaßsäule to hide in, and rain. Then I played it:

ok I am already stuck on the second level after going through the freshly opened door. also the game feels too ui based still... it should explain itself by playing... the menu should be as minimal as possible with all storytelling being done in-game. otherwise it's essentially fun so let's keep exploring

and, while that was being fixed: I am not using the mouse in gameplay so if we can avoid using mouse that would be perfect... I almost never play PC and trackpads are terrible for gaming so let's do keep it keyboard only.

So there is no title screen, no briefing and no card between chapters. A keycap appears on the thing it works on when Hanna is in reach (E hide, E pull the fuse, a padlock on a door with no key), and over her head when a key matters right now: C crouch when a guard is close, Q throw a stone when there is someone to distract. They fade once you have used them. The ring at her feet is the noise she makes. An arc over a guard fills as he notices her, and what he mutters says what gave her away: Schritte?, Die Tür?. Throwing is keyboard too: hold Q, steer the landing spot with WASD, let go.

Caught on Market Day: the screen washed red, two guards at the top with red exclamation marks and speech bubbles Da! Die da! and Halt!, a red cone on Hanna between the crate stacks, a third man further right with a question mark. Text: A hand on my collar.
Being caught is a moment, not a screen: the words, a stamp, back to the last checkpoint.
Hiding in a crate: the view striped by dark vertical slats, a crate outlined in blue with the prompt E come out above it, a guard's cone in the upper left corner. Text: The bakery is being watched. The milkman told Frau Bergmann; the Blockwart's wife told the milkman.
Inside a hiding place you see through the slats, and the sound goes muffled.

These two are from the game's own browser test, run on the build that went online; the five above are the live page.

The graphics

Around three in the morning on 11 November it went online at its own address, and at a quarter past four I had played it again: ok very playable I like it... for the amount you worked the graphics are very unpolished though. The next hour was a new renderer: the floor drawn at screen resolution instead of stretched, walls with a front face seen slightly from the south, pitched roofs in slate, tar paper or red tile depending on the chapter, people who walk with a hat per uniform, a colour grade and grain. It went online at five to five. Everything is drawn in code; the game has no image files.

built
8 November evening (the same prompt to Codex, Claude and Gemini), then Claude Code on the nights of 10 and 11 November; online since 11 November
chapters
14, from 27 February 1943 to 2 May 1945
controls
keyboard only (no mouse anywhere in play), or a gamepad, or touch
tests
a stealth bot that proves a route exists on which nobody notices her, and walks it with every guard awake; a headless browser test with about a hundred checks
made with
plain JavaScript on a canvas, about 6,500 lines, no build step, no image assets
Play Untergetauchtkeyboard, gamepad or touch

Still rough

The new graphics went online after my last reaction, so whether they answer “unpolished” is still open. The stealth bot gets through twelve of the fourteen chapters unseen; the other two are built around things it does not do (walking upright among people on the market, throwing a stone to draw a watchman away), so for those the proof is still a human. Hanna and the people around her are composites; the history in the texts (the Fabrikaktion, the Greifer, the helpers' circle in Dahlem, the cellar breakthroughs) is real, and was written by an agent, not checked by a historian.