Day 1 of Building a Spore-Style creature game with Claude

Day 1 was procedural animation: a four-legged creature, Pip, walking over hills with no hand animation. It's the same approach as Spore's 2008 SIGGRAPH paper: a gait generator places the feet, and a simple constraint solver poses the legs. **What happened:** * The first version "worked": the code ran and the creature moved. But in the clip it looked floaty, like it was dancing on air * Instead of tweaking numbers, Claude added a self-test that counted step types. 97% of steps were frantic catch-up steps: the legs were nearly straight, so feet kept hitting the edge of their reach, plus there was a loop where a foot aimed for a landing spot it could never reach. * The fix was bent knees and strides sized to what each leg can actually reach. Catch-up steps fell to 0.2%. That's the before/after in the video. **What's working for us:** 1. **Measure before fixing.** Every bug gets a test or a diagnostic first. Guessing at fixes for "it looks weird" goes in circles. 2. **The human…