Spaceshooter 3 — A Dev Log (v1.0)

How a browser shoot-'em-up went from empty folder to feature-complete in eleven days — every line of code written by Claude, every decision made by the engineer.

Spaceshooter 3 is a fast, endless, vertical-scrolling roguelike you play right in your browser. Dodge, blast, and survive escalating waves — then stack bullet powerups into combos that make your single weapon do gloriously ridiculous things. It was built between June 22 and July 2, 2026, entirely in conversation with Claude (Opus 4.8, via Claude Code).

The method mattered as much as the model. Almost every version began the same way: a /grill-with-docs session — the engineer being interviewed hard about the design before any code existed, with the decisions written down as ADRs and the game's vocabulary pinned in a living CONTEXT.md. Claude proposed and wrote; the engineer set the scope, interrogated the plan, tuned the balance, filed the issues, and made the final call on every feature. The 16 ADRs and the glossary in this repo are the paper trail of that control.

Each version below shows what shipped, the session(s) behind it, and the credits those sessions consumed (token value at Opus 4.8 list prices — the build ran through Claude Code, so these are value estimates, not invoices).

Genesis — the whole game in one sitting

Jun 22–23 · 3 sessions · ≈ $91

The project opened with a single /grill-with-docs session whose brief was blunt: "Create a roguelike shoot-'em-up in space using these assets, pure JS with PixiJS — main menu, waves, upgrades, the works." After the grilling settled the shape, Claude built it in one marathon run — app shell, parallax starfield, the combat loop, the full enemy roster and mini-boss, XP and the 3-card upgrade prompt, the bullet-modifier framework (Multishot, Pierce, Homing, Explosive, Burn, Bounce), HUD, persistence, menus, and audio hooks. That one session alone accounts for ≈ $90 (692K output tokens, 122.7M cache reads) — the signature of a long session re-reading the growing codebase turn after turn. Two short follow-ups wired up a GitHub Actions build-and-ship pipeline.

By the end of day two, the game was playable end to end. Everything after this is the refinement era — one release at a time, each grilled first.

The versioned arc

v0.1.0 — Feel · Jun 26 · 5 sessions · ≈ $71

The engineer spent a day sharpening the core. Sessions, in order: reworking Homing to lock the first enemy and hold it; making Bounce spawn full inheriting clones instead of weak scatter; a large asset refactor to the pixel-art pack (the $44 session — a sweeping change across the codebase); a decorative hit spark on every impact; and the headline — swapping to relative mouse steering so the ship is nudged by mouse motion and eases to a stop. This is the release where the game started to feel right.

v0.2.0 — The Mine · Jun 26 · 5 sessions · ≈ $24

Five tight sessions: collapsing rarities to a clean five-tier scale (gray→orange), keeping Pointer Lock through the upgrade menu with a drawn menu cursor, a gamer-friendly README, a HUD-on-resize fix, and the star of the release — the Mine, a flying explosive (from wave 6) that locks one course at spawn and is only a threat if you fail to dodge it.

v0.3.0 — The Boss · Jun 27 · 1 session · ≈ $12

A single focused session added the Boss: a marquee capstone every 10th wave that drifts, then dashes sideways while firing a curtain of bullets, smearing the shots into a sweeping wall you must read and dodge.

v0.4.0 — Balance & polish · Jun 27 · 4 sessions · ≈ $14

The Asimovian display font, and a balance pass driven off GitHub issue #10 — the engineer explicitly asked to work the issue without closing it, tuning every powerup weight, rarity, and max-upgrade count by hand. (Two of the four sessions were near-zero-cost touch-ups.)

v0.5.0 — Legibility · Jun 27 · 2 sessions · ≈ $8

A cosmetic pass (3× bigger XP pickups, an "UPCOMING WAVE" banner) and enemy HP bars that appear on first damage — "subtle but clear," per the brief.

v0.6.0 — The Warden · Jun 27 · 2 sessions · ≈ $24

First, capstones embedded into normal waves (a mini-boss from wave 15, bosses from 20 escorted by more enemies). Then the Warden (built off issue #13) — a shielded descent enemy whose orbiting ring of destructible nodes you must out-time or break, since the weapon only fires straight up.

v0.7.0 — The Bomber · Jun 27–29 · 2 sessions · ≈ $14

A README screenshots section, then the Bomber (also from issue #13) — the Mine's re-aiming cousin and the first animated enemy, telegraphing and bursting toward your current position on a cadence, never escaping the field.

v0.8.0 — Sound & Fury · Jun 29 · 2 sessions · ≈ $19

The game found its voice: full SFX, a looping music track, and independent Music / SFX volume controls that persist across sessions. (The engineer's first attempt was continued in a second, larger session — the $17 bulk of the work.)

v0.9.0 — Debris & the Fortress · Jun 29 – Jul 2 · 3 sessions · ≈ $22

It opened with the engineer auditing Claude's work — asking whether WaveManager.pickKind() had an out-of-balance selection — before building the SpaceStation (a slow fortress that rakes horizontal bullet combs out both flanks) and the cosmetic Debris shower on clean kills.

v1.0.0 — Relentless · Jul 2 · 1 session · ≈ $8

A deliberately small-scope finale: from wave 25 on, every wave carries a mini-boss, and boss waves field a boss and a mini-boss together — tuned to stay hard-but-beatable so a run can never soft-lock. Feature-complete, and shipped.

Session log (verified)

Reconstructed from the session transcripts — each entry is what the session actually did (files touched, ADRs recorded, releases cut), not just its opening ask. The pattern repeats: grill the design, record it, implement, test, ship.

Genesis — Jun 22–23

• S1 · Jun 22 · $90 — The founding session. Grilled the entire design in one sitting (controls, all six modifiers and Bounce's clone mechanics, stat caps, lives, the five rarities, XP vs. pickups, wave pacing, the mini-boss, i-frames), captured it as CONTEXT.md + DESIGN.md + ADRs 0001–0002, broke the plan into GitHub issues, then implemented issues #1–#9 one at a time — merging each to main only after you tested it — and closed with a relentless balance pass on issue #10, tuning fire rate, enemy speed, and the level curve while playing. (42 files, 75 commands.)
• S2 · Jun 23 · $1 — Rebuilt the itch.io deploy workflow (npm build → zip dist → run on push to main, with a SHA version fallback); fixed an eslint: not found CI error.
• S3 · Jun 23 · $0 — Fixed a YAML syntax error in the deploy workflow.

v0.1.0 — Jun 26

• S4 · $4 — Reworked Homing to lock the closest enemy at birth and hold it until gone; ADR-0004.
• S5 · $7 — Redesigned Bounce (via domain-modeling) to spawn a full-powered clone on each hit — random direction, no pierce, cap 3, skipping its source enemy; ADR-0005.
• S6 · $44 — The big asset refactor to the pixel-art pack: PNG-only, 1920×1080 kept, player/enemies scaled 2×, background fixed to cover from frame one, 2-layer parallax (stars + nebula).
• S7 · $3 — Added the decorative Hit Spark on every bullet contact (scale 1.0, no tint, play-once).
• S8 · $14 — The headline: relative mouse steering under Pointer Lock (raw input + fallback, smoothing kept, default sensitivity halved, lock released in menus); ADR-0006; tagged v0.1.0 and wrote the release notes.

v0.2.0 — Jun 26

• S9 · $3 — Rarities refactored to the five-tier gray→orange scale (ADR-0007); art credit changed to Lil Cthulhu.
• S10 · $7 — Kept Pointer Lock through the upgrade menu with a custom cursor (click-only, manual hover, UpgradePrompt owns the hit-test); ADR-0008; fixed a menu-vanishes-on-resume bug.
• S11 · $2 — Wrote the gamer-friendly README.
• S12 · $2 — Fixed the HUD/XP bar drifting to mid-screen on resize.
• S13 · $10 — The Mine (wave 6): locks one course at spawn, detonates on death/contact for AoE, spawns top and sides; tuned speed/spawn/blast; tagged v0.2.0.

v0.3.0 — Jun 27

• S14 · $12 — The Boss (wave 10, 3× scale): drifts, then accelerates into a sideways dash while firing a 5-shot twin-line burst that outlasts the dash, never hitting the walls; HP scales per appearance; ran a fast-boss test, then reverted bossEvery to 10 and released v0.3.0.

v0.4.0 — Jun 27

• S15, S16 · $0 — Empty sessions, no work recorded.
• S17 · $6 — Implemented the Asimovian font across every UI surface with a fallback chain and same-batch loading.
• S18 · $7 — Balance pass on issue #10 (kept open): rarity = weight (12/8/4/2/1, gentled), retiered several modifiers, capped Homing/Pierce, removed the Spread modifier entirely (ADR-0010) and folded its fan into Multishot; ADR-0009; released v0.4.0.

v0.5.0 — Jun 27

• S19 · $3 — Cosmetic pass: 3× XP pickups, an "UPCOMING WAVE" banner, loading/nebula touches.
• S20 · $5 — Enemy HP bars — a thin flat-red bar (0xe05a4a) revealed on first damage, no numerals, no fade; released v0.5.0.

v0.6.0 — Jun 27

• S21 · $5 — Embedded capstones into normal waves (mini-boss from 15, bosses from 20 with escorts); ADR-0011; closed issue #11, opened #13.
• S22 · $20 — The Warden (from issue #13, grilled + modeled): slow descending shooter behind a breakable rotating shield of nodes (cut from Debris-Sheet), with explosive-bypass / burn / pierce rules; also gave all Gunners a 3-round burst from wave 15; ADR-0012; released v0.6.0.

v0.7.0 — Jun 27 / 29

• S23 · $0 — Added a README screenshots section.
• S24 · $14 — The Bomber (issue #13): the first animated enemy, re-aiming to the player's current position, clamped to the field; tuned hitbox and dodge; released v0.7.0.

v0.8.0 — Jun 29

• S25 · $2 — The audio design session (grill + domain-model only; no code).
• S26 · $17 — Implemented that design in full: SFX for every event, looping music, independent Music/SFX volumes (menu + pause), persisted settings; new audio.ts / settings.ts / AudioControls.ts; ADR-0014; released v0.8.0.

v0.9.0 — Jun 29 / 30 / Jul 2

• S27 · $1 — An audit: you asked whether WaveManager.pickKind() had an out-of-balance selection (analysis, no code).
• S28 · $12 — The SpaceStation fortress (wave 20+): slow descent, telegraphed pure-horizontal bullet rake out both flanks; ADR-0015; tested from wave 20, then reverted the start level.
• S29 · $10 — The Debris shower on clean kills (random fragments, slower ease + fade), backed by a debris-scan script; released v0.9.0.

v1.0.0 — Jul 2

• S30 · $8 — The relentless endgame: from wave 25 every wave embeds a mini-boss, boss waves field both; scoped small against the prior releases; ADR-0016; a wave-verification script; released v1.0.0.

Credits used

The entire build ran on Claude Opus 4.8 via Claude Code, across 30 sessions and eleven days:

In aggregate that's 3.43M output tokens and 348M cache-read tokens — the huge cache reuse being the fingerprint of long, context-heavy coding sessions that re-read the same files and CONTEXT.md turn after turn. A complete, released game for the token value of a nice dinner for four. (This dev log was written in a separate ~$14 session, not counted above.)

Tools used

• Claude (Opus 4.8) via Claude Code — all code, from the app shell to the endgame tuning.
• PixiJS 8, TypeScript, Vite — render, language, build.
• ESLint + Prettier on a pre-commit path; GitHub Actions to build and publish the ZIP to itch.io.
• /grill-with-docs (grilling + domain modeling) as the standard workflow: grill the design first, record it as ADRs, keep the vocabulary in CONTEXT.md. That discipline — the engineer steering, Claude implementing — is what kept ten releases coherent with each other.

Asset credits

All code was LLM-generated; the art and audio were not. With thanks to:

• Art — Lil Cthulhu
• Sound effects — Phoenix1291
• Music — Creative Core Studio (Mr.Cat)

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