Parking the Nuyina with Claude

Parking Mania Nuyina

On the Heard Island Voyage, like on the Denman voyage, I spent some spare time working on a javascript game. This one had a little more scope that the previous ones.

Parking Mania Nuyina is a throw back to the Parking Mania games I played in high scool. Parking Mania, as its title implies, is a game about parking cars in increasingly difficult parking spots. Parking Mania Nuyina similarly involves parking the RSV Nuyina in increasingly hard berths:

I wrote the most of the mechanics by hand on the voyage, the ship dynamics including steering, bow and stern thrusters, drag due to both wind and currents. Then I also started manually drawing Hobart’s shores. This was as far as I progressed before the voyage ended and I put the project on the back burner for more pressing projects.

However, this year I’ve started using AI to assist with coding, so rather than spending a lot of my limited spare time on this project, I decided to give Claude a crack at it to finish this project, especially I had access to the Claude Fable model for a few days.

Claude was given a number of tasks to complete:

• Write a python script to retrieve Open Street Map data and use that to create JSON data for drawing the terrain and for the shorelines collision boxes
• Improve the ship dynamics
• Create multiple levels docking at different berths around Hobart with different conditions

The last level involved sailing the RSV Nuyina under the Tasman Bridge to dock at Selfs Point, the cause of a lot of controversy in Hobart

As the ship is in Singapore dry-docking as this is being written, Claude next expanded the game to include three levels set in Singapore, this included the addition of:

• small Dhow sized vessels that try to avoid the Nuyina but can collide if you aren’t careful
• larger LNG and container vessels
• a difficult dry dock berth that requires very careful steering and thruster management

The last level is slightly different. This level involves getting the Nuyina safely into Atlas Cove at Heard Island in 70kt winds, with occasional massive wave. Inspired by some of the storms I experienced (90kt winds, waves averaging 14m and peaking greater than 17m in height) on the HIMI voyage I participated in.

On this level you fight a wind that whats to turn the vessel, and occasionally there is a rogue wave that you must point the vessel into in order to not capsize!

I’m somewhat mixed on the use of AI, on the one hand Claude is extremely productive, while the code that Claude has written for this project is with-in my own abilities, I can write out a task plan, send it to Claude, and go cook dinner etc or spend time in the evening with my family, coming back to check on Claude’s progress every 30 minutes or so.

This is obviously fantastic for productivity and for having a life outside of home projects, however the sense of satisfaction from a project is diminished compared to writing everything by hand. You can get far more done but you get far less done.

Attribution

Terrain data for all three regions (Hobart, Singapore, Heard Island) is derived from OpenStreetMap data, © OpenStreetMap contributors, available under the Open Database License (ODbL) 1.0. See https://www.openstreetmap.org/copyright for full attribution terms.

Data was fetched via the Overpass API and processed by tools/build_terrain.py into simplified coastline, quay, road, building, and vegetation geometry for gameplay.