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Development Story

Alex C edited this page Jul 3, 2026 · 1 revision

Development Story

Tank Commander VR was written by Claude Code on the Agile Lens fleet, largely overnight, in a series of sessions — verified on desktop via a self-playing screenshot harness before ever touching a headset, then exported straight to Quest for real on-device checks.

v0.1 — the tank works (night 1)

Procedural world, T-72-style physically-operated cockpit, enemy tanks and planes. Verified by a scripted screenshot loop before ever touching a headset.

v0.2 — Kids Edition (night 2)

Main menu with laser pointers, 5 battlefields, cockpit v2 from a real APC reference photo, jeeps/infantry/mortars, difficulty modes, layered soundtrack, Dad-voice tank computer, plane mode, LAN co-op & versus.

v0.3 — the fun pass (night 2, later)

Weather with random rainstorms and lightning, DAD FM talk radio, silly modes (low-g / underwater / balloon / paintball), the cardboard gymnasium, Rec Room-style multiplayer avatars, and a natural-disaster easter egg (squeeze everything + A).

v0.4 — the wild pass (night 2, even later)

Four more battlefields (beach resort with calypso, island, volcano bridge network over live lava, and the baby room). Three more vehicles (biplane, helicopter, and The Runner with arm-swing sprinting). Night Ops with a real stealth loop. 201 lines of dialogue. A tuning.cfg so playtest feedback turns into numbers, not rewrites.

v0.6.x — App Lab, hand tracking, on-foot mode (2026-07-02 → 2026-07-03)

Shipped to Meta App Lab for one-click headset install. Several rounds of real on-device debugging around controller model rendering and hand-tracking hand-position accuracy — including a diagnostic-HUD-first approach (ship instrumentation, read the real numbers, then fix) rather than guessing repeatedly from code review alone.

The night of 2026-07-03 specifically, several parallel sessions landed: on-foot locomotion mode built on godot-xr-tools (grapple, climb, sprint, seat exit/re-entry), a full procedural Rec-Room-style multiplayer avatar system, a headless gameplay-QA harness (21/21 checks), a live 2-instance co-op netcode test, an enemy-AI patrol bias fix (tanks were patrolling with zero bias toward the player, reading as "no AI" to anyone who didn't drive out looking for a fight), a mesh-winding audit that caught and fixed inverted normals on several vehicles plus the sea/lava geometry, and a synthetic VR-interaction test harness that — while testing something else entirely — surfaced the grab/poke discovery bug documented in Known Issues.

Multiple concurrent Claude Code sessions worked in isolated git worktrees that same night, coordinating through explicit hand-off notes and pathspec-only commits rather than git add -A, specifically so simultaneous work on xr_rig.gd, game.gd, and the mesh/audio systems didn't collide.

For screenshots from earlier passes, see docs/screenshots/ in the repo — files are prefixed by the run that took them (gym_, balloon_, paint_, disaster_, beach_, volcano_, babyroom_).