Show HN: I used Claude Code to address the HN comments on my 2019 game
victorribeiro.com
The thread had a lot of good feedback that I never got around to. This year I gave Claude Code the thread and the repo and worked through it:
- "Give the player full health every round" (four of you asked): done.
- "I wish there was a scoreboard, I wanted a screenshot of how far I got": the game-over screen now shows the round you reached and your best.
- "The gun sound is jarring": quieter, and M mutes it.
- "Enemies spawn on top of you and drag you around": bots now spawn at a safe distance, collisions are fixed, and there's a short grace period at the start of each round.
- "The bots all aim at the top-left corner, so camp bottom-right": this was a bug. Each bot only saw part of the game state. They now see every player, and aim, mutation and elitism are fixed too.
- "Kill the shooters first and the GA breeds pacifists" (by generation 8 they were running into walls): the fitness rewarded bots for living long, so your kill order picked who reproduced. It now rewards hitting you.
The biggest change came from a problem nobody quite named: evolution reset every time you died, so the bots never got far. Now there's one shared population on the server, and every round anyone plays moves it forward. Your browser only reports raw stats per bot; the server checks them, scores and breeds. It's PHP + SQLite on a small VPS, with a local fallback if the server is down.
It's at generation 1 right now. Whatever the bots are by tonight, you bred them.