Try it live Description
"The master leads you to the door; the walking-through is yours." The author was the kid who kept losing and wished someone would teach instead of taking over the controls. Clawdy is the gift for that kid: a game where you never drive. You coach a small rover through a flooding desert arena, hunting amber energy cores (coaching through a coding agent is planned for later), and then the controls go dark and it competes alone.
Coaching is concrete. Watch a practice run, call a route at a junction, scrub the replay back to the mistake, and approve what the rover should learn. Each approval is a real gradient update on a small neural policy, not a saved prompt. Because the teaching changes the weights, the rover carries it into a held-out layout where nobody can help. The replay is the receipt, and it is honest: teaching and learning grow together, and the coach learns from the replay too.
Teach to the student. Pick a chassis, Scout, Hauler or Raider, and spend a build budget on speed, battery and bump strength. Publish your trained brain to the league and challenge other players. A server runs the ladder on hidden layouts, so the browser never reports its own score, and every match gets a public replay to share. Skirmish adds a signature rule for each chassis.
On the tools side, Tripo generated the three chassis, the rival hauler and the amber energy core, and the champion rover model came from Mint. World Labs' Spark renders the Gaussian-splat bursts on every bank and collect; Marble made the first arena before it was replaced by Blender terrain with an exact collider. Print your champion exports a print-ready STL with HeyGears print settings (nothing has been printed yet).
The author is candid about the limits: the champion beats three house bots by wide margins but loses to the weather bot 35–45, so the student surpassing the master is still the goal. Skirmish is unbalanced (the Hauler leads), and the ladder has seen little live use. The repository predates the event, and the arena simulation, physics, coaching-to-training loop and in-browser policy trainer existed before it; all Tripo assets and the Forge pipeline, the Spark effects, held-out evaluation, cloud ladder and league, Skirmish rules and the STL print kit were built during the hackathon.
How Tripo was used
Tripo P1 text-to-3D generated the rival vehicle, the energy core and the three chassis on screen.
- Vehicles and props: the rival hauler rover, the amber energy core and the Scout, Hauler and Raider chassis bodies. Choosing a chassis swaps both the rendered body and its simulation traits.
- Forge: signed-in players can pick from fixed chassis and paint menus and have Tripo generate a unique rover body on the server, with credits reserved atomically and refunded automatically if a generation fails.
