Star Hop

Free in the browser, no sign-up: PLAY (https://www.star-hop.app/?utm_source=reddit&utm_campaign=claudeai) A week ago I posted here about a little browser game I'd vibe-coded months ago and handed to Opus 5.5 to improve. It's Star Hop, a one-tap game: your ship orbits a planet and you tap to jump to the next one. Reddit was honest with me. The top comment on my Czech post said it was fun for about 10 seconds. So I kept going with Claude Code: five releases in four days, 1.1 to 1.5. What changed in the game: - It now reveals itself step by step: one goal after the first flight, then cards, the daily challenge and ships, one at a time. - The daily challenge got a ghost: the flight of a real player who did slightly better than you today, replayed next to you. - A map of your whole flight after each run, and a Flight details screen for number nerds. - 1.5 added live races: send a friend a link and fly the same track, or race whoever is playing right now (if nobody is, a recorded flight or a bot, and a label says which). Plus a saucer that steals your combo from sector 3 on. How the work looks: - I run several Claude Code sessions in parallel, each on its own branch. Bigger features start as a plan in the repo, written so that a fresh session can build it without having seen the conversation. Feedback from comments goes into an ideas file first. - The game sends anonymous gameplay stats (you can switch them off in settings). Claude runs a review over them with 99 checks, from bugs to where new players quit, and the numbered findings become fixes. After 1.4 the share of new players who start a second run went from 57% to 68% (small sample). - This week I asked Claude to playtest 1.5 as a brand-new player. A script taps with a human reaction time, 150 to 380 ms after the aim line turns green, so it makes human mistakes. The verdict: the first minute is great, minutes 2 to 10 are overloaded, with about 28 concepts and 5 windows that open on their own in the first 8 flights. That's what 1.6 is about: a calmer start, and the 100 collectible cards turned into goals you pick and go for. - The promo video is mostly code too: Claude wrote a pipeline that renders it frame by frame in headless Chromium. The game's own renderer draws real bot flights, timed so the PERFECT catches land on the beat, the logo builds itself from the brand generator's geometry, and the music is synthesized in Python. No stock footage or music. One prompt that became a feature (originally in Czech): "What about adding really detailed analytics of the finished flight at the end, for geeks? As something you can click to open, not something everyone sees by default." It came from a Reddit comment and shipped as Flight details in 1.4. Free in the browser, no sign-up: https://www.star-hop.app/?utm_source=reddit&utm_campaign=claudeai Happy to answer questions about the workflow. And if you play, where did your first run end?