Untergetaucht, part two: style shopping and real places

November 13, 2026

The first post ended on an open question: the new graphics had gone online after my last reaction, so whether they answered “unpolished” was still open. They did not, quite. This is what happened in the evening and night after it, from about half past three on 11 November to half past two on 12 November.

Chapter nine, Bombed Out, as the live game shows it: a top-down photographic rendering of a grey cobbled back yard with a bare tree, ash bins and furniture carried out of a fire; a wash house with laundry on the lines where Hanna stands with W A S D over her and the prompt E hide; on the right a field of rubble and broken beams where the house next door fell into its cellar. A policeman on the left throws a pale cone of sight. Goal text: Get the tin with your papers from behind the stove in Frau Nowak's kitchen, then get out to the street. — Bombed Out, 23 November 1943: the morning after the heaviest raid on Berlin so far. The yard, the wash house and the rubble are one rendered picture; Hanna, the policeman, his cone of sight and the keycaps are still drawn by the game.

Words, voices, music, a second world

The first note of the afternoon was about the text:

can we get rid of the cryptic-poetic wording? also the text at bottom that auto transitions is worst-practice... if it's unnecessary dialogue then why have it (or you could use elevenlabs for background noise voice acting) ... but if it's relevant info it shouldn't auto-disappear

So nothing anyone has to read is on a timer any more. The goal sits in the corner for as long as it is the goal; a note at the bottom stays while what it says is true; a page of story holds the scene still until you press E. What the guards say is no longer text at all: short German barks, recorded once with ElevenLabs and placed in the stereo field over the man who said them.

Then, a little after a quarter to seven: how about we add worlds? ... then I thought we can bring in more humanitarian disasters from history so it's not always WW2. feel free to pick any from today or the past. The second world is Maryland, 1856. Lucy, fourteen, enslaved on a farm on the Eastern Shore, runs the night she learns she is to be sold south: out of the quarters, through a marsh with a slave catcher's dogs behind her, to Thomas Garrett's back door in Wilmington and William Still's office in Philadelphia. Four chapters, and here the people speak English. On the title, left and right switch the story.

The first chapter of the 1856 world at night: three small brick cabins in a row, each with a fire glowing in its hearth, a lane above them where the overseer walks with a lantern that throws a cone of light, and a dark corn field beyond. Lucy is in the left cabin with the prompts C crouch, E take and W A S D. Note at the bottom: Aunt Rose is asleep. The overseer walks the lane outside with a lantern. Leave by the door on the north side when he has passed. — The quarters, Maryland, 1856. Still the drawn-in-code look of the first post.

An hour later Gemini had made four lighting looks (classic, warm, noir, volumetric), and the answer to them is the longest prompt of the night:

I like the colors on volumetric. the light sources itself are overly complex looking. the fog is nice outdoors but not while inside the building or over the building. warm is good but a bit too blue. noir feels right but is too dark practically. so yeah.... take all this and unify the lighting again based on the feedback. also gymnopedie is terrible for this game... and in-game there is no music. perhaps rather go with midi and then you have the full classical catalogue anyway. let's try not to go crazy with assets and focus on gameplay again. can we make the settings a bit more believable? both blueprints of buildings and settings. I am not asking for insane assets, just making the world feel believable.... usually details help like a dripping faucet, animals, etc... smoke...

One lighting model came out of the four. The music is now public-domain MIDI from the Mutopia Project played on the game's own little synth: Chopin preludes, Bach chorale preludes and Mendelssohn in Berlin; Stephen Foster, spirituals and Dvořák in 1856. Cats, rats, hens, dripping water and chimney smoke came in the same deploy.

Style shopping

Just after nine:

the game is great and the voices are cherry on top.... however the level design and world design have some things left to be desired... I think the quickest way for us to solve this is for you to use nano banana to create about 10 renderings of different visual styles... no need to give it any layout or so, just topdown stealth game set int 1940s Berlin or whatever else you think it needs... max cost 2$

A sheet of ten generated illustrations of the game's settings in different styles: a painted tenement yard at night with a girl crouching behind crates; a cut-away pixel-art tenement with orange lamplight; a pencil-shaded street corner with an advertising column; a miniature diorama of a bombed street; arches of a railway viaduct with crates; a hand-drawn cut-away plan of the children's home labelled Berlin 1943 Kinderheim; a churchyard wall at dusk; wooden cabins with lanterns in a corn field; a black-and-white ink drawing of a market with yellow lamplight; snowy huts in an allotment colony. All are seen from an angle, none straight down. — The ten styles, from Gemini's image model. Every one is a nice picture and none of them is a game seen from above.

Which was the next note: none of the renderings show topdown ... what helps I found is if you DO actually give it a sample level layout to stick to. when I first played it felt like commandos so that's a good point to work with. The next round went to OpenAI's image model, one church laid out as a level and rendered in many looks, and the brief narrowed to realistic 3D is actually nice as long as it stays topdown (for now) and that also gives us that commandos look ... this is about style shopping, so no need to render multiple levels.

Fifteen top-down renderings of the same church in its walled churchyard, in a grid of five by three: the same layout of nave, tower, graves, trees and the street with a parked lorry, in different light and finish, from dark night with warm street lamps to a pale snowy dusk and a nearly black-and-white version. — One church and its walled graveyard, in fifteen of the looks that were tried.

The pick, at a quarter to ten: yeah lets just go with the commandos style realistic 3D, and five minutes later, after a detour through cartoon touches, never mind let's just stick with ralistic 3D forget about the stylized stuff.... on levels where the render keeps messing up we could also retrofit the level to the rendering.

A backdrop from the game's own block-out

The way it works now: the game draws its own map as flat coloured blocks (walls, floors, furniture, doors, from the same data it plays on), the image model renders that from straight above with the roof cut away and evenly lit, and the picture is cropped back onto the map. A fit check lays the walls over the rendering in magenta, so you can see where the picture strayed from the plan. Walls, sight lines and hiding places stay the map's own invisible data. Doors are left out of the rendering: the doors are also bad to have pre-rendered... so probably everything that visually changes state should not be rendered or cut out after or overdrawn by the dynamic graphic.

The block-out of the back yard chapter: flat slate-blue areas for the buildings, two grey fields for two courtyards joined by a narrow passage, a beige strip of gravel, and small flat shapes for bins, a carpet rack, bushes, a hedge and a bench. — The back yard as the game hands it over: flat blocks.

The same back yard rendered as photographic cobblestones, bins, bushes and a hedge, with the walls of the map laid over it as translucent magenta bands and a fine grid, lining up with the edges of the rendered yards. — The rendering with the fit check over it.

Three chapters have a rendered backdrop now: the children's home, the back yard and Bombed Out. The first one came back with a note: the Kinderheim is incredibly dark btw not sure what you rendered or if you apply light effects on top of the rendering (which of course makes 0 sense). It was lightened that night.

Chapter one, the children's home, with its rendered backdrop: a dormitory of iron beds with sleeping children, Hanna standing between the beds, a kitchen next door with a stove, a sink and a lit lamp on the table, and a long corridor with a chest below. Goal text: Get out of the dormitory. — The children's home after the lightening. Chapter one is the tutorial, played as the night the Gestapo come.

Not levels, places

Shortly after midnight the request changed from the look to the layout: instead of designing a “level” perhaps you can focus on creating a believable location (think room sizes, furniture placement, etc.. ruins, ...) and just kind of lay it out as black and white blocking for the image AI. Bombed Out is the one chapter built that way and put online: a side wing with Frau Nowak's kitchen, a yard of fourteen by fourteen metres, a burned-out front building, the house next door fallen into its cellar, and a street with a fire engine and a field kitchen.

The rest got a review, chapter by chapter. Part of it:

level 1 is ok, let's leave it. level 2 is acceptable. level 3 is mechanic wise strong but if you were to tell me how big the rooms are and where things are placed you would quickly see its not believable as an apartment or any type of normal building. level 4 the streets ok but wtf is the rest. lvl 5 same idea, what about this is supposed to be a market. ... if level 13 is supposed to be anhalter bahnhof then why not have it look like it. lvl 14 is that what a barn looks like? not believable. ... look if we have all these real places it should be real easy for you to deduct believable level blueprints right?

Four agents redrew thirteen chapters at one tile to the metre. The next look at them found the same fault one level up: why would lvl 3 be so big if the optimal path is only in a tiny section? ... if the buildings dont matter then dont give them interiors ... perhaps we should first build some level blueprints and put the missions on top of them this one time, cause it seems that the other way around is too confusing.

So it is blueprint first now. A blueprint is one real place with nothing of the mission on it: every object is a block with its word written on it, every building Hanna never enters is a labelled roof, and the map is only as big as the play needs, with two or three ways from start to goal. Fourteen were drawn by half past two that night.

A blueprint of the barn chapter on a metre grid: the farmhouse and the horse stable as dark slate roofs along the village street with a milk lorry at the goal; a farmyard with a dung heap, a pump, geese, a dog and two wagons; a cow stable with seven cows; and across the bottom a barn with hay piled to the roof on one side, rye sheaves on the other, a threshing floor in between and barred field doors. Start is marked in the field below. — The Barn as a blueprint: a real farmyard, every object a block with a word. Not in the game yet.

built: Claude Code, 11 November from mid-afternoon to 12 November about 02:30; part one was 11 November
chapters: 16 in Berlin, February 1943 to May 1945; 4 in Maryland, Delaware and Pennsylvania, 1856
pictures: three chapters on a rendered backdrop (OpenAI's gpt-image-2), the rest drawn in code; style shopping and backdrops cost about $6 in image calls that day, 39 to OpenAI and 34 to Gemini
sound: guards' barks voiced with ElevenLabs; public-domain MIDI from the Mutopia Project on the game's own synth
made with: plain JavaScript on a canvas, about 8,000 lines live, no build step

Play Untergetauchtkeyboard, gamepad or touch; left and right on the title for 1856

Still rough

This one stops in the middle. The fourteen blueprints are waiting for my review on the laptop; until they pass, the live game keeps its old maps for everything but the three rendered chapters, and most of those old maps are the ones the review above called not believable. Then the missions go on top and each place gets its rendering. The redraw also caught a mistake in the history: Anhalter Bahnhof only had trains to the south, so the farm Hanna takes a train to cannot be near Oranienburg, and in the redrawn version it moves to the Anhalt line near Luckenwalde. The 1856 world is still in the drawn look, and of its four chapters the review called two believable-ish, one super weird and one nope. Thomas Garrett and William Still are real people; the history in both worlds was written by an agent, not checked by a historian.