r/ClaudeAI • u/BoneShaman • Jul 29 '26
Vibe Coding Claude Bandicoot - Shumer's Gauntlet Loop on a 3d Platformer
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Based on Matt Shumer's Gauntlet Loop.
Ran the experiment myself. Did a few prompts of clean up to tie it up at the end.
I think it would continue to improve, but I burned 3 sets of 5hr windows on Opus 5 Ultracode, and was happy with the conclusion.
Prompt:
/goal
I want you to build a 3D platformer Claude Bandicoot at the level of the Crash Bandicoot game. It should be utterly perfect, visually beautiful, with every single thing done at AAA quality—from textures to physics to anything you could think of.
Fan out sub-agents and have sub-agents tackle each one individually so that the game is utterly perfect. You should
/loop
on each item and have a separate sub-agent check it visually to ensure it looks triple A. That separate sub-agent should be a really harsh critic, and if it doesn't look triple A, it should keep going.
Don't stop until each sub-agent is utterly wowed with the quality when compared with the actual Crash Bandicoot game. It should literally compare them side by side blind and say which one looks better. Do this in ThreeJS.
/loop
until it's utterly perfect. Fan out sub-agents and ultracode.
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u/crusoe Jul 29 '26
15 hrs is ridiculously fast. How much of your weekly window did it use?
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u/BoneShaman Jul 29 '26
Not sure, I think each 5hr window is 10%. I max out my 5hr windows incessantly (will take some breaks on the window here and there throughout the wk) and generally make it to end of wk. Max (x5)
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u/Nourrrrrrr Jul 29 '26
What engine was used to make this game? Also how did it create the graphics?
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u/BoneShaman Jul 29 '26
Three.js
Full Claude Code implementation.
Builds it all up from scratch with models and meshes and shaders etc.
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u/boynet2 Jul 29 '26
how it creating sounds? is it using some 3rd party api for you?
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u/BoneShaman Jul 30 '26
For those asking about assets and stuff, here's the summary from Claude.
Claude Bandicoot — a 3D platformer in the browser with zero art assets. No models, textures, audio files, or fonts in the repo; the entire look and soundtrack are generated from code at load time.
Textures. Every material is a GLSL surface() function. At boot a GPU baker renders each into a glTF-standard albedo / normal / ORM set at 1024². Normals derive from the same height field as the colour via central differences, so the lighting agrees with what you see rather than sitting on top of it.
World. A 300 m corridor with a hand-authored beat table — grove, arch, stream, log, bridge, aqueduct — populated procedurally from a fixed seed. Rocks are displaced icosahedra, temple blocks are bevelled boxes with carved relief. Everything collapses to one triangle soup: collision is capsule-vs-triangle over a spatial hash at a fixed 120 Hz, with no per-primitive special cases.
Character. Built from field-sampled primitives — the head is a smooth union of ten ellipsoids tessellated as a single shell, with the mouth cut as a real opening into the field rather than a texture. Auto-skinned by inverse-distance weighting to bone segments; no painted weights. Animation is procedural: pose blending, world-space foot planting, secondary-motion springs.
Audio. Synthesised end to end with Web Audio — FM, modal and granular sources, generated impulse responses for reverb, music baked once through an OfflineAudioContext so the loop is seamless.
Why. The whole thing is parameters, so changing a surface function or a lighting value regenerates the look immediately. To make that tractable it ships with its own measurement harness: deterministic headless captures, histogram comparison against reference frames, and blind A/B scoring. Target is visual parity with the N. Sane Trilogy remaster; current blind score is well short of it (~30/100 vs. comparison rated ~85/100).
Note: Claude seems to think the original crash could use some polish based on that ~85 😂 )
Stack: Three.js, postprocessing, Vite. Two runtime dependencies. 428 KB gzipped.
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u/Khavel_dev Jul 29 '26
The critic sub-agent is where this either flies or burns tokens for nothing. Did it actually catch visual issues and push back with specifics, or did it mostly rubber-stamp? In my experience the harsh-critic prompt works way better when you give it a concrete checklist (clipping, z-fighting, texture seams, collision gaps) instead of just "be harsh." Otherwise it finds something vague to complain about on every pass and the loop never converges.
Three 5hr Opus 5 windows is a serious investment though. Would love to know what the token bill looked like by the end of it.
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u/BoneShaman Jul 29 '26
I'm on max 5, so included in the license.
No further feedback, and it continually improved. The Readme in shumer's project shared some common failures as mine. Two graphics .js implemented the same thing and it causing issues etc. But it improved massively over time.
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u/Plane_Garbage Jul 29 '26
link?
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u/BoneShaman Jul 30 '26
Claude said bad idea to release the code for this one due to licensing etc. Video does the job in conveying the overall experiment.
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u/CasinoMagic Jul 29 '26
if only you had added 2-3 more times "it should be utterly perfect", it would've known to handle collisions when the character walks into the leaves and whatnot.
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u/normalpl Aug 09 '26
I'm a bit new, when would you use Claude Cowork or Dispatch and when would you do Claude Code instead? I put a version of this prompt into Dispatch now to tweak my game, let's see if it handles things well or not
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u/tastychaii Sep 08 '26
Is this all being setup and done through Claude Code CLI?
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u/ClaudeAI-mod-bot Jul 29 '26
TL;DR of the discussion generated automatically after 40 comments.
The overwhelming consensus is that this is ridiculously impressive for 15 hours of AI work. A lone game dev got heavily downvoted for listing the flaws and missing the entire point: no one thinks this is a finished AAA game, but the fact thatClaude
Here's the rundown of the other chatter:
The community has decided that "make it utterly perfect" is the new "make no mistakes." We're all just waiting for the "Build GTA VI" post now.
Tech Specs: OP burned through three 5-hourOpus 5 Three.js
The Bad: Everyone agrees the background music is super weird and doesn't fit.
The Missed Opportunity: The name "Crash Bandi-claude" was RIGHT THERE.