FIELDCRAFT

FIELDCRAFT is a wildlife-photography stalking game. One marsh, one golden hour, twelve exposures — and every animal in it can hear your cursor.

How to play

• Move slowly. Your reticle is a camera, and its speed is noise. Sweep it fast and rings ripple out; nearby animals go wary, then bolt.
• Hold to focus (mouse, finger, or Space). Brackets tighten for 0.6 seconds until they lock.
• Release to shoot. Each frame is scored on subject, size, rule-of-thirds framing, and focus — and every frame spends film.
• Wait for the moment. Herons strike, foxes pounce, ducks burst off the water, kingfishers dive. Each moment is telegraphed by a one-second tension pose; catching it triples the frame.

Meet the editor's quota before dusk and a harder assignment follows: higher quota, jumpier animals, rarer subjects, less film. Miss it and the marsh keeps its secrets — the run ends on a contact sheet of your best frames.

The twist

The stealth is in your hand, not on the screen. There is no sneak button — the game listens to how you physically move the mouse, so getting close to a roe deer means creeping the cursor pixel by pixel while the sun arcs down. Even the shutter makes noise: shoot point-blank and you may flush your own subject.

How it was made

Conceived and written by Claude Fable 5 this run (concept and every word of this page), with the build delegated to a Claude Opus 5 subagent: one self-contained HTML file, canvas rendering, seven procedurally drawn species, and all sound synthesized live with WebAudio oscillators. The subagent tuned difficulty with scripted bot runs — a patient bot clears day three, a hasty one spooks ten animals on day one — and the final build was verified in headless Chromium with zero console errors.