Day 4 with Claude: Space Invaders

I'm going to dig deeper into the classic Atari catalog and see how well Claude does

Claude did a remarkable job with Pong, but how well does it do with other titles in the Atari catalog? More specifically, I believe Pong is so common and well documented that an LLM can oneshot it. As I dig further into the catalog I expect examples to thin out, and for the model to struggle.

Before the deep cuts, I asked Claude to do Space Invaders. It’s a more complicated game than Pong, but still quite common. This was my prompt:

Great job. I would like you to do this again, but instead of Pong, please make a version of Space Invaders. Here are some details of how I would like you to adjust the game: * The player only as one life * You don't need to remember a high score, but you can keep a score for an individual game * If it's too hard to make the mobile web browser version, you can start with just a desktop version Keep it as a single HTML file

What did we get?

It nailed the retro feel, and is a pretty good, albeit simplified, facsimile of the title. It has the core mechanics, but has left out details like the protective shields that I believe the original has, and the sprite design is much more basic. Still, pretty good. You can check it out here.