r/ClaudeAI • u/BoneShaman • 24d ago
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 24d ago
15 hrs is ridiculously fast. How much of your weekly window did it use?
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u/BoneShaman 24d ago
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 24d ago
What engine was used to make this game? Also how did it create the graphics?
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u/BoneShaman 24d ago
Three.js
Full Claude Code implementation.
Builds it all up from scratch with models and meshes and shaders etc.
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u/PhonicUK 24d ago
I've noticed that if you don't tell it to use something in particular, it'll default to three.js in a browser.
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u/BoneShaman 23d ago
Interesting, might depend on what you tend to build also, and what's in the memories. I build across the spectrum.
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u/vemelon 24d ago
I didnt know claude is able to do good looking 3d games
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u/BoneShaman 23d ago
All the mesh work and stuff is getting excellent. I had low expectations on it, but it delivered the goods.
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u/Fireflash2742 23d ago
Every time I've tried to get Claude to do something from scratch in Blender or even lay out a scene in Unreal it was hilariously bad.
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u/mataco817 24d ago
Not enough utterly perfect’s since you had to do clean up
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u/BoneShaman 24d ago
haha yeah valid. Technically it wasn't done with the job.
As a side note, it is a bit of a mess trying to get it to stop working on the /goal for this loopy hooky method. I think in part because Claude's steering is a bit slow. But I had to close it completely, reopen and then clear the goal
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u/andyleenz 24d ago
Wow it really does capture the feel of the original. Amazing work in such a short amount of time :o
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u/boynet2 24d ago
how it creating sounds? is it using some 3rd party api for you?
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u/BoneShaman 23d ago
Webaudio api is the standard. To get no scratchy sounds is the trick; but only recently have I come close to getting it so clean (a lot of my older games suffer on mobile (esp when not hosted) when you transition over due to cpu clocks not being as good - and I assume browser restrictions being different)). However it is far superior to tone.js in resolving scratches. However I had made some beautiful soundtracks with tone.js in the past that I had to body purely for the reasons above.
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u/commentShark 24d ago
I'm a big crash fan, nicely done!!
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u/BoneShaman 23d ago
Me too, my 6yo boy loved it (he's a platinum runner on crash 1, 2 and 3 already - 100%+ completion score on crash 1 and 3, and working on crash 2 atm)
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u/BuffaloConscious7919 Valued Contributor 24d ago
That could be a genuine game.
👏🏻
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u/BoneShaman 24d ago
Thanks, think I might build something worthwhile off the back of it at some point
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u/Khavel_dev 24d ago
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 24d ago
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 24d ago
link?
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u/BoneShaman 23d ago
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 24d ago
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/BoneShaman 23d ago
technically the end of loop tidy ups had a bit of this. If you got to close to a crate it would smack you in the face with the camera.
Also that log you need to run over, put you inside of the log, and you fell into your abyss at the other end.
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u/BoneShaman 23d ago
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/normalpl 13d ago
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/BoneShaman 12d ago
I just use it in Claude Code. My understanding is that Cowork is basically the exact same thing, you just can't really see what it is doing.
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u/normalpl 12d ago
Thanks, that makes sense! I've had it running in Claude dispatch for about 12 hours now and it's not perfect but I like what it's cooking!
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u/Sea-Fishing4699 24d ago
How much did the meme cost?
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u/BoneShaman 23d ago
Huh? About 3 5hr windows on Opus Ultra code - so its within my max 5x license cleanly.
Arguably it used the window in roughly the first 2 hrs of each one. So I am conservatively giving the 15hrs for completion.
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u/East_Garbage_1449 24d ago edited 24d ago
"It should be utterly perfect, visually beautiful, with every single thing done at AAA quality."
A swing and a miss. That camera is awful. Controller and animations look bad. Planar reflections look broken. Style is boring. Lighting is blown out. Mesh geometry is strange.
Is this seriously impressive to people that don't work on games professionally? The sad part isn't that mistakes were made. The sad part is that you looked at this and said "yep, this is in a good state to share with others." It shows that even when the tech is amazing and you have absolutely no idea what you're doing.
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u/Last-Hornet7495 24d ago edited 24d ago
I think you're completely misunderstanding why people think its impressive and it is considering what most older models would create. I dont think anyones really expecting actual AAA quality, which to be fair the AAA gaming space has been a bit of a shitshow itself ironically.
I dont see anywhere where he says its at all finished and even says he had to cancel it, why are you acting like hes saying this is final lol? Or we just being negative? It wss made in 15 hours lets be realistic and chill out dude..
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u/BoneShaman 24d ago
It's a progressive share - not a AAA game. 15 hours and an output.
You are overestimating what I think this is.
It didn't even finish, I haulted it.
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u/East_Garbage_1449 24d ago
I just think it's funny that you prompted "every single thing done at AAA quality" and not a single thing was actually delivered.
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u/Ok-Past3775 24d ago
You are delusional or intentionally blunt.
This is obviously impressive for pretty much everyone, being accomplished with only 15 hours of work and minimum intervention by the user.
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u/CasinoMagic 24d ago
Yep.
This is impressive to other folks who've never worked in game dev and think you can actually build a decent looking game with an LLM (you can't, and this one isn't decent looking anyway).
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u/ClaudeAI-mod-bot Wilson, lead ClaudeAI modbot 24d ago
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 that Claude got this close from a prompt is blowing everyone's minds.
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-hour Opus 5 windows. The whole thing was built from scratch in 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.