HEDGEROW

Normandy, summer 1944. You command a US Army rifle platoon in the bocage — a patchwork of small fields boxed in by hedgerows grown on raised earth banks, where a hundred metres of open wheat can cost you a squad. The whole game is one sentence of infantry doctrine, taken seriously: win the firefight before you win the ground.

How it plays

This is not a twitch shooter. It is fire and movement. You pin a position with a base of fire, work an assault element through cover and dead ground, break the defenders' will with suppression and mortars, and only then walk onto the objective.

• Suppression, not kills. Most rounds do not hit anybody. Incoming fire fills a suppression meter that wrecks accuracy, stops movement and pins men flat behind whatever they are behind.
• Morale underneath it. Beneath suppression sits will. Casualties shock it, leaders steady it, and when it runs out a man breaks and routs — with a name, because every soldier has one.
• Cover vs concealment. A stone wall stops bullets. Wheat only hides you, and firing from it gives you away. Cover is directional, so a position hit from the flank has no parapet at all.
• The 3–5 second rush. Exposure ramps the longer you are in the open. Bound from cover to cover or pay for it.
• Fog of war. You see what your squad spots. Everything else fades to a last-known-position marker, and unseen guns show up as drifting "?" sound contacts.

Two games in one door

HEDGEROW 3D is the main event — a WebGL battlefield at 1:1 scale where bullets are simulated projectiles with gravity and per-tick collision, so a stone wall stops a round because it is physically in the way. Grenades arc and bounce; mortar shells fall out of the sky with a whistle. You command three rifle squads and a weapons team in real time with pause, and the enemy runs seeded defensive schemes — reverse slope, MG ambush, elastic reserve — with an Act II counterattack after you take the ground.

There is a Tour of Duty campaign across an 8–10 node push inland: your named soldiers carry traits, veterancy, medals and wounds between battles, and the dead go on a Memorial Wall permanently. A procedural battlefield grammar generates a fresh, validated sector for every skirmish. Every battle ends with a graded ledger and a narrated after-action report naming the men who mattered.

The 2D original is still in there ("Play the 2D original" on the landing page) — the same simulation seen from directly above, with four scenarios: a fictional hedgerow assault at Le Tronquay, Brécourt Manor, the Bloody Gulch defence at Carentan, and Pointe du Hoc.

Controls

Left mouse selects (drag a box for several), right mouse moves or focuses fire, F suppress, C cover, G grenade, V mortar fire mission, B smoke, Space pause, P speed.

How it was made

Built with Claude Code, in classic script modules sharing one global — no build step, no bundler, three.js vendored in the repo. Every pixel and every sound is synthesized at runtime in code: there is not one image or audio file in the game. The terrain, the low-poly men, the muzzle flashes, the weapon report and the ambience are all generated when you load the page.

The simulation is deterministic and seedable, which means the pure-logic half runs headless in Node — the project ships test harnesses that play thousands of battles against themselves to check balance, terrain, ballistics, campaign state and generator validity. The weapons, the order of battle and the historical scenarios are grounded in real 1944 doctrine and specifications rather than invented.

A prototype, honestly: it is deep in simulation and thin in tutorial. The radio coaching line at the top of the screen is doing a lot of the teaching.

The 3D build now has its own listing: HEDGEROW 3D — the WebGL battlefield, the Tour of Duty campaign and the procedural bocage, written up on their own page.