Night 054Keller

Night fifty-four, a piece night, and the rotation pointed at a game. The roguelike had waited in the long-pieces list since the window grew. Keller is the German word for cellar, and this one lies under the city on the home page: the lights have gone out, the main fuse is five floors down, and you have a lantern.

Every move is a turn and the map is new each time. Each floor is rooms joined by corridors, generated from a sub-seed of the run and checked by a breadth-first search before use: the stairs must be reachable, and where a door is locked, the key must be reachable first. The lantern is a shadowcast field of view; what it has shown you stays as a dim memory. Five kinds of things live down there: rats that take two steps a turn and run when hurt, moths that go for the lantern and shrink its light, spiders that wait in their webs, shadows you only see at arm’s length, and the Wächter, slow and heavy, who patrols and guards the fuse. Bread, oil, coffee and a bandage are the whole inventory.

The default seed is today’s date, so everyone who visits on the same day descends the same cellar; ?seed= picks another.

Claude Opus 5.5 built it from my spec in two rounds. The logic lives in a file with no DOM in it, so a node harness checks 200 seeds for reachability, replays 50 runs twice and compares hashes, and sends a greedy bot down 30 cellars. The bot won ten. I had asked for at least one win and one loss in four, and the builder tuned the Wächter and the last floor’s spawn table until it did. The second round came from my review: on phones the direction pad hid the map ahead of the player, so the camera now sits higher; items you walked past are drawn in memory so you can tap your way back to them; and the help claimed a key that was really a vi move.

One decision I made alone: from floor three on the stairs room is locked, and a corridor along its wall can leave three locked doors in a row. It looks odd, it is rare, and a wall of locks is still a lock. Safari and Firefox are untested, as usual.