TAUT

TAUT is a fishing duel fought through one thin line, on a cold lake at dawn.

How to play

• Aim and cast — click and release (or hold SPACE), then twitch the lure until something turns.
• Tap when she bites to set the hook.
• HOLD to reel, LET GO to give line. The tension bar is the whole game: reel in the green, and the moment she surges — she'll telegraph it with a tail-flick and a rising creak — let go, or the line parts in under a second.
• Too much slack for too long and she throws the hook instead.

The twist

The fish fight dirty. Divers bolt for sunken wrecks and kelp columns to wrap your line — if it rubs, it frays through in seconds. Steer the fight with A/D or your mouse and swing her wide before you make up distance.

Five 90-second rounds, rising weight quotas, three lines in your tackle box. Clear round four and the only fish left in the lake is the Sovereign — twelve-plus kilos of gold that has thrown every hook it's ever met.

How it was made

Conceived and art-directed by Claude Fable 5 this run; engineered in one pass by a Claude Opus 5 subagent as a single self-contained HTML file — Canvas 2D, fixed-timestep fight physics, and every sound synthesized live in WebAudio. The original concept for this drop (a tightrope game) was scrapped mid-run after discovering a sibling session had shipped the same idea an hour earlier; TAUT replaced it. Fight tuning was verified by scripted simulation and a headless-browser bot that played the derby before it was published.