cc-dino

The offline dinosaur, above the Claude Code prompt.

Run /dino, click the board, and jump cacti while Claude works on your request. When Claude finishes the turn the run pauses and the status line says so, so you never miss a reply. Playing costs no tokens: the plugin answers every key and click itself, without asking the model.

A clone of the genre, not affiliated with or endorsed by Google.

Requirements

• Claude Code 2.1.269 or later with CLAUDE_CODE_ENABLE_FUNCTION_HOOKS=1 set. Function hooks are in early access and the API can change between releases.
• An interactive terminal session. Nothing draws in claude -p, the desktop app or mobile.
• A terminal that reports the mouse: one click is what gives the board the keyboard.
• A terminal font with block-drawing characters.

Install

1. Turn function hooks on. Add this to ~/.claude/settings.json (create the file if it does not exist, or merge the env key into what is there). Without it the plugin installs fine but does nothing.

   {
     "env": {
       "CLAUDE_CODE_ENABLE_FUNCTION_HOOKS": "1"
     }
   }
   

   This also loads the hooks module of any other installed plugin that ships one. For a single session instead, prefix the command: CLAUDE_CODE_ENABLE_FUNCTION_HOOKS=1 claude.

2. Install from GitHub. The repo is its own marketplace:

   claude plugin marketplace add manfye/cc-dino
   claude plugin install cc-dino@cc-dino
   

3. Start claude — an interactive session, not claude -p — and run /dino.

4. Click the board, then press space. The click is what gives the game the keyboard; until then your keys go to the prompt. Esc gives the keyboard back.

To remove it:

claude plugin uninstall cc-dino
claude plugin marketplace remove cc-dino

To try it without installing, or to hack on it, clone and load it for one session:

git clone https://github.com/manfye/cc-dino
cd cc-dino
claude --plugin-dir .

The repo's own .claude/settings.json sets the variable for sessions started inside the folder.

Controls

| | | |---|---| | space, ↑, w, Enter, or a click | jump — and start the next run after a crash | | ↓, s | duck, for about 0.6s (a terminal reports no key release, so a duck is timed) | | p | pause | | r | start again | | Esc | give the keyboard back to the prompt |

/dino stop or the close button closes the board. /dino reset clears the best score.

The run

• Small cacti, tall cacti and three-wide clusters, all jumped.
• Pterodactyls from 200 points: a low one is in the dino's chest and has to be ducked or jumped, a high one only catches a dino on its way up.
• The world speeds up with distance and stops at 2.4 cells a frame; the gap ahead scales with the speed, so a fast run still leaves room to land and jump again.
• Night every 700 points — the border turns blue and stars come out, and the counter blinks at every hundred.
• The best score is kept in the plugin's store, so it survives restarts and every session shares it.
• The board fits the band it is given, and the jump is fitted to the board: on a short terminal it goes exactly as high as there is room for, since a dino drawn past the top row is a dino you cannot see. Its airtime is the same either way, so the gaps between cacti do not change with it. Below nine rows there is no room for a jump worth making, and the board says so instead.

How it works

It is a mod: a plugin whose behaviour is a hooks module of TypeScript running inside Claude Code's process, rather than shell commands in settings.json.

• hooks/register.tsx is the hooks module. It registers /dino on session.start, answers it on command.run, draws the band on ui.render for AbovePrompt, pauses the run on turn.complete, and keeps the best score in $.store — taking a finished run's score off ui.message.
• hooks/boards/dino.tsx is a surface module, mounted as a Client element. It runs on the drawing thread with its own 33 ms frame clock, keyboard and mouse, and posts a finished run's score back to the hooks module.
• hooks/games/dino.ts is the rules — gravity, spawning, collision — as pure functions over a plain state object, so they can be simulated without a terminal.

Smoothness

The dino is drawn from a bitmap of half-rows, not from characters: a terminal row holding the sprite's upper half is ▀, its lower half ▄, both █. So the sprite moves in half cells, and a jump draws 11 distinct positions where whole cells would give 6.

The bitmap is five columns by four half-rows, which is about square once the terminal's 2:1 cell is accounted for — the room a tyrannosaur's silhouette needs:

  hr3   . . . # #        snout                 ▄█▀
  hr2   . . # # .        head and neck       ▀▀█▄
  hr1   # # # . .        tail and body
  hr0   . . # # .        legs

The two leg frames differ in hr0 alone, so the run cycle is a foot lifting rather than the whole body bobbing. The hit box covers the three columns of body, head and legs; the tail overhangs two cells further left and is not hittable, since a tail that ends a run is a hit the player cannot read off the sprite. The frame clock runs at 33 ms for the other half of it. The game constants are per-frame and therefore tied to FRAME_MS — at twice the frame rate a velocity halves and an acceleration quarters — so hooks/games/dino.ts derives the obstacle gap from the jump's airtime rather than from a hand-tuned cell count, and the tuning survives a change of frame rate.

The hit test rounds the dino's feet to the nearest cell instead of flooring them, so the half cell the board can draw but the test cannot see is an error in the player's favour.

The other half of smoothness is not clipping: the region holds two border rows, the sky, the ground and the status line, and a board that asks for more than that loses the top of every jump.

Two things that will bite you if you write one of these:

• Never name a local h in a surface module: every JSX tag compiles to a call of h.
• module= on a Client must be a string literal — the engine reads the path off the source, not off the running value.

Developing

claude plugin validate .                          # manifest, hooks, and the $ calls each module makes
CLAUDE_CODE_ENABLE_FUNCTION_HOOKS=1 claude -p "/plugin-types"   # writes .claude/types/claude-code.d.ts
npm i -D typescript && ./node_modules/.bin/tsc -p tsconfig.json

.claude/types/claude-code.d.ts is the real API reference; it is regenerated per release and is not checked in.

License

MIT