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Two nights ago, I decided to give Claude Code an actual challenge. I dropped a decrypted copy of Bloodborne 1.09 for PS4 into a directory, started 5 agents and told it to decompile it an recompile as a wasm playable game in the browser. I woke up to this:

I told the agents to take screenshots and keep a blog of the progress. It's been two days. I'll keep this thread with the blog highlights.

On the first 6h we got to the main menu, the character creation, and the game would crash on map loading. After another chunk of work, we got to this:

The agents were able to navigate the map (they built a little navmesh helper that allowed them to play the game (you could hear the sounds and get to the in game menus or prompts), but the 3D render was, well grey.,

The menus though, were kinda working...

Eventually it built a local (non-browser) renderer and it got to this (both are the same location, an hour or so apart).

It decided to work on a save/restore/replay system. The Dream at that stage:

After 24h it got to this in the browser (~7-10fps). It had gamepad support, sounds, enemies, etc...

After another hour, this is what the Chrome version showed:

A few more screenshots of the browser version at this point. Notice the bad materials (blue, green, the exploding sun).

After 36h, this is the current status: All the rendering artifacts it found are gone, the game still runs at 7-10 FPS (the actual PS4 game caps at 30 FPS). The replay mechanism auto-plays the game quite a bit and doesn't crash.

15 FPS now.

Morning updates. As part of being able to debug the game, Claude is having to actually play the game. I wonder if we're going to end up with a full game replay. Here is Claude on a boss fight, running in Chrome, full speed.

On PS4 the game is hard capped at 30 FPS. I've suggested Claude that he could try to get rid of that limitation. I guess it can. Hunter's Dream is already running at ~35 FPS.

Also, we've moved to two different maps. Hemwick Charnel Lane and Forbidden Woods.

The game now loads all areas, including the DLC, 30 or very close to 30 fps across the board.

Claude decided that is faster to cheat and set the boss' lifeto zero than trying to fight it. I guess porting Bloodborne is still easier than playing Bloodborne.

Claude patched the game to cap at 60fps. And now the game runs at minimum 40fps. I've had to help with some creative solutions, since we found a bug in how Chrome decides to do GC with shard arrays, which was triggering 1000s of GCs. The game now runs all to way to the end.

The SharedArrayBuffer GC thing is the buried lede here. A human porting this would profile the hot path, pool buffers, and never generate enough churn to trip 1000s of GCs. Five agents throwing decompiled code at a runtime hit edge cases that careful manual work routes around by accident.