An on-rails 3D shooter in the Star Fox mould, with original characters and craft. Fly a fighter through a sunset ocean, a red-rock canyon and a night-time neon fortress, with three wingmen talking over the radio, then face MIZUCHI, a mechanical sea-dragon. Charge shots to lock on to several targets at once, roll to bounce back bullets, collect rings for shield, and pick from three difficulties. Open source under the MIT licence. The README credits Claude Code with Claude Opus 5.5 for the whole build.
NOVA LANCER is a 3D shooter where the plane flies itself down a fixed route and you steer it around the screen, shoot and dodge, the way the old Star Fox games worked. The route is one mission, called AZURE COAST on the title screen, and takes about three minutes before the boss, according to the README. You fly low over a sunset ocean with rocky islands and enemy fighters in formation, then through a winding red-rock canyon, then over a fortress city of neon towers at night, and the mission ends on a boss, a mechanical sea-dragon called MIZUCHI that rises out of the water. Three wingmen fly beside you and talk over the radio, each with a cartoon animal pilot in a small window: we saw a red panda (KOTA, Lancer 2) and a badger (GANTETSU, Lancer 3), and their mouths move as they speak.
It is here because of who the author says built it. The page's own repository, at github.com/tanuu5/nova-lancer, belongs to the GitHub user tanuu5, and its README says in its second line that it was made with Claude Code and Claude Opus 5.5 at the MAX reasoning level, from one request, in about an hour and forty minutes. The author is credited as director and Claude Code as developer. We cannot check any of that from the game; the notes below say exactly what the author wrote and where.
The README calls it an original work in the style of Star Fox, with all characters, craft, music and stages made for it, and says it has no connection with Nintendo's Star Fox series and uses none of that series' names, characters, music or materials. It is open source under the MIT licence. The repository has two commits, made 21 minutes apart during the night of 23 to 24 September 2026 (Japan time). One thing to know before you start: the title screen, menus, radio chatter and on-screen hints are in Japanese. The HUD labels (SHIELD, BOOST, HITS, SCORE, LASER, BOMB) and the pause and game-over headings are in English, and we give the controls in English below.
How to play NOVA LANCER
- Open it and wait for the loading bar. When the title appears, press any key (or click, or tap). A menu of four lines comes up: start the mission (labelled START), the difficulty (EASY, NORMAL or HARD), CONTROLS and SETTINGS. Pick START with Enter or the mouse. A short launch sequence plays first, and a hint bar tells you the movement and fire keys.
- Steer with W A S D or the arrow keys, or drag a finger at the bottom left of a touch screen. Fire with J, Space, Z or the left mouse button. A tap fires a normal laser. Hold the button and a charge builds; let go and it locks on to targets and sends homing shots at them, which is how you clear a formation. K, B, X or the right mouse button drops the smart bomb, and pressing it again sets it off early. L, Shift or C boosts, and I or V brakes. Tapping Q or E twice does a barrel roll that knocks enemy bullets away, and holding Q or E tilts the plane for a sharp turn. Esc or P pauses.
- Watch the SHIELD bar at the top left: enemy fire and rocks take it down, and flying through the glowing rings fills it back. There are three gold rings to collect (three empty circles under the bars fill in), and the README says that three of them raise your maximum shield and three more give an extra life. The counter beside the plane symbol is your lives, starting at three. When the shield reaches zero you lose a life and restart from the last checkpoint with a full shield; when the lives run out there is a GAME OVER screen with a Continue button whose own label says the score resets.
- HITS at the top right counts kills, and killing several targets at once earns bonus hits. The README describes a results screen at the end with a rank, medals and a saved high score, and its own screenshots show the fights; we did not reach that screen.
- The game pauses by itself when its window loses focus, which matters if you play it inside a frame on another page: click anywhere outside it and it stops until you click back in and resume.
Controls: Move with W A S D or the arrow keys. Fire with J, Space, Z or the left mouse button; hold it to charge a shot, then let go to send out locked-on homing shots. Smart bomb: K, B, X or the right mouse button (press again to set it off at once). Boost: L, Shift or C. Brake: I or V. Barrel roll, which bats enemy shots away: tap Q or E twice quickly; hold Q or E to bank and turn sharply. Pause: Esc or P. Sound starts after your first key press or click. Touch: drag at the bottom left to move, and use the buttons at the bottom right.
Click Fullscreen above the game for the largest play area. If the game does not load, use Open in new tab to play it directly from our copy.
Why it's worth your time
Where the Claude credit is, exactly. In the repository README (the file that also serves as the game's description), the credit is in the top lines: "Claude Code x Claude Opus 5.5 (MAX)", one request, about 1 hour 40 minutes. A section near the end says planning and direction are the author's and development is by Claude Code (Claude Opus 5.5, reasoning level MAX), and quotes the one-sentence first request, which asks whether a Star Fox-like game could be made with Three.js or something else, at the richest quality possible. It says the music and sound effects and the radio portraits were given to two sub-agents working in parallel while the main session built the 3D part, and that it was checked by running the game from start to finish with a self-playing test plane and a way to step the game one frame at a time. The commits carry the credit too: both of them end with a Co-Authored-By line naming Claude Opus 5.5. The README was updated to say so in the second commit, on 24 September 2026 at 03:28 Japan time (18:28 UTC on the 23rd); the game page on GitHub Pages was last changed at that same minute.
The README also gives a table of what the author says the build used: about 312 API calls (219 for the main session, 51 for music and sound effects, 42 for the portraits), about 1.2 million output tokens, roughly 148 million tokens processed in total (98 percent of them re-reads from cache), and about 9,600 lines of code in 16 JavaScript files plus HTML and CSS. We did not verify any of these numbers, and we cannot see the sessions they come from, so how the game was actually made is the author's account and not something we could confirm. The code and the commit trailers agree with it in shape (a single generated page, 16 JavaScript files, two commits), but a trailer line can be typed by anyone. The "Made with Claude" and "Made with Claude Opus 5.5" tags here rest on the author's README and commits.
It really is one page. The whole game, the 3D library (three.js) included, is a single 840 KB HTML file that the author builds from 16 JavaScript source files, and the README says it also works if you download it and open it from your disk. There are no image or audio files at all: the README says the terrain, sea, sky, planes and boss are made by code, and that the music, sound effects and the beeping radio voices are synthesised in the browser as it runs. The one thing the page fetches from elsewhere is its lettering: it asks Google Fonts for four typefaces (Russo One, Oxanium, M PLUS 1 and DotGothic16, which the README lists as open-licence fonts). We ran the original with Google blocked and it still reached the title screen. Our copy has the fonts inside it, so it makes no request to any other site, and that is checked below.
What playing it showed (Chromium, with a real graphics chip, on a Mac, at 1280 by 720, our copy, scripted keyboard and mouse input, 24 September 2026). The title screen ran at about 58 frames a second, and a two-second count in the middle of a fight gave about 50. The README says the game lowers its own drawing resolution on slower machines. Playing on NORMAL with a crude bot that just drifted around and tapped fire, we saw the ocean and the canyon (with a hint about using the smart bomb on big ships) in the page itself, and the fortress city in the development build described next. The bot lost all three lives in about five minutes with a score of a few thousand and hits in the high twenties, so it is not a pushover on NORMAL, and each lost life restarted from a checkpoint with a full shield, as the game says. It never got as far as the boss by flying.
We did see the boss, but only through a shortcut: the author's own development build (built from the repository's source with the author's build script, not the page you play) has a console command that jumps the plane to the boss. There MIZUCHI's introduction plays out, with cinema bars across the top and bottom, the radio portrait of a robotic dragon head and a line of Japanese speech, and the fight itself starts. We did not beat it, and so we have not seen the MISSION COMPLETE screen, the rank or the medal the README describes.
Mouse, keyboard and touch all work. With the mouse, 25 left clicks took the score from 0 to 900 in one test, a right click changed the bomb display, and Esc paused. On an emulated iPhone 13, upright (390 by 664) and sideways (750 by 342), the page fits without scrolling, the movement pad and six buttons appear once the mission starts, dragging the pad shifted its knob, and tapping FIRE scored hits in the upright test (0 to 100 after twenty taps). It ran at 60 frames a second in both. Two rough edges: on the sideways phone screen a tap on the very bottom of the title screen can land on the menu line that has just appeared, which opened the controls screen in our test, and the touch hints are in Japanese. We did not try a real handset. The controls screen and the README also list a gamepad (stick to move, A to fire, B to bomb, R2 to boost, L2 to brake, L1 and R1 twice to roll); we did not try one.
What it saves. The code keeps your sound, shake, quality and difficulty settings and your best score in the browser's local storage, under keys named novaLancer.settings.v1 and novaLancer.best.v1, and shows BEST at the bottom left of the title screen. After our runs, which ended in game overs and no result screen, nothing had been stored yet. There are no cookies, no accounts and no analytics in the code, and no network calls other than the font request, which our copy does not make. Sound starts on your first key press, click or tap, as browsers require. We did not listen to it, so we cannot describe how the music or the radio voices sound.
Language. The title screen, menus, difficulty and settings labels, the radio dialogue, the on-screen hints (such as which button to press for a barrel roll) and the pause text are in Japanese, with English for the HUD labels, the key names and headings such as PAUSE, GAME OVER and MISSION COMPLETE. There is no language option in the settings screen (sound volumes, inverted up and down, screen shake and picture quality are what it offers). You can play without reading it, as the controls here and the HUD cover the mechanics, but you will miss the radio's warnings and jokes.
The copyright question, plainly. The plane, characters and stage are described by the README as original to the game, with no Star Fox material used, and it credits three.js (MIT) and the four Google Fonts (SIL Open Font Licence). Our mirror carries the MIT licence file from the repository next to the game page. If you are a rights holder and have a concern, use the contact in this site's footer.
How it was made and where it lives
Published on GitHub Pages from a public repository. The author publishes as tanuu5. Original: https://tanuu5.github.io/nova-lancer/. The Play button above runs our own unmodified copy, so the game keeps working here if that page goes down — which on free hosting usually has nothing to do with the author. Nothing about the game itself is changed, and the original stays linked from every page.
If you like NOVA LANCER, try these
For another flight-and-shoot game in three dimensions, SKYBREAK is a velocity trial. Komorebi: A Forest Flight is a calm flight through a forest with none of the shooting. Another open-source game whose author credits Claude Opus 5.5 in the repository is Turbo Kart Rally, a three.js kart racer, and Palmera Bay is a sunset drive with the same credit.
Frequently asked questions
- Is it free, and do I need to install anything?
- It is free and open source under the MIT licence, and runs in the browser: no install, sign-in or payment. It needs a browser that can draw WebGL.
- Is it in English?
- Only partly. The HUD labels and the headings are in English, but the menus, the radio dialogue and the hints are in Japanese, and there is no language setting. The controls on this page are all you need to play.
- Does it work on a phone or tablet?
- Yes, in our emulated iPhone 13 tests: touch controls appear (a movement pad and six buttons) and it ran at 60 frames a second. We did not try a real phone. A keyboard or mouse plays much better.
- How long is it?
- One mission. The README says about three minutes plus a boss fight. There are three difficulty levels and a score with a rank at the end, so it is meant to be replayed.
- Who made it, and was it made with Claude?
- The GitHub user tanuu5 published it, and their README says it was made with Claude Code and Claude Opus 5.5 (MAX) from a single request in about 1 hour 40 minutes, with the author directing. Both commits also carry a Co-Authored-By line naming Claude Opus 5.5. We cannot see how it was actually made, so this is the author's word.
- Is it connected to Star Fox?
- The README says it is inspired by that style of game but is original, and that it uses no names, characters, music or materials from Nintendo's Star Fox series.
- Does it save my progress or use my network?
- It saves your settings and best score in your browser (per its code). After it has loaded it makes no network requests in our copy; the original page asks Google Fonts for its lettering.
- Can I lose?
- Yes. Shield damage costs a life, you restart from a checkpoint, and after the last life you get a Game Over with a Continue button that resets your score.
- Does it work in a frame on another page?
- Yes. We embedded our copy in a page on a different address, keys reached it once it was clicked, and it paused when we clicked outside the frame.
- Is NOVA LANCER free to play?
- Yes. Everything on Floating Arcade is free, with no account, ads or downloads.
- Can I embed this game on my own website?
- Yes — copy the snippet below. The embedded player links back here, which is how we ask to be credited.
Embed NOVA LANCER on your site
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