Who needs AI psychosis? I gave myself VR psychosis

Developer and blogger Jacob wrote a first-person account of using Claude to generate and auto-deploy browser-based VR games, a workflow he describes as "vibe coding" that he says lets him ship games from a pub and run playtests within 10 seconds of play. The piece traces the effort from a balloon-popping iOS app built for his 5-year-old daughter Lyra, whose feedback was "Make it better. Make it less bad. It's boring," to a web-based pipeline he adopted because Apple's iOS constraints slowed iteration. Jacob argues iterative game generation is the fastest way to develop taste, which he calls "the most defensible skill" in an agentic engineering world.

Modern life is an impossible luxury. You have a king’s ransom of salt and spices in your home, clumpy from neglect. These were once worth their weight in gold https://artsandculture.google.com/story/spices-a-luxury-product-real-academia-de-gastronomia-espa%C3%B1ola/OQXxIzw5DtXFKg?hl=en , and abundance has relegated them to the slithy toves of ALDI. It took centuries of globalisation to transform spice into an everyday commodity. In the early 2000s, I read a tabloid profile of a lottery winner: “I might buy my son a video game” . The journalist guffawed, “you know you could pay a company to build him his own game ” A hilarious extravagance. And yet in the last ~year, something you can just do , the price collapsing from $millions down to $20/month. AI Psychosis has never been so cheap. When you’re set up properly… you can do some pretty bonkers stuff. I’ve become obsessed with vibe coding VR games, auto deploying them to the web, and playtesting to iterate. In short, I want to share my descent into VR psychosis with you. Can’t read? Just want to play some VR games? I got you covered: With a game, you know within 10 seconds if you’re into it. A compelling story and overarching goal are great: rescue the princess. But even more critical is an engaging primary gameplay loop : jump on a lot of Goombas along the way. Iterative game generation is the fastest way I’ve found to hone taste . In a new world underpinned by agentic engineering, it’s the most defensible skill of all. Here’s what you might get out of this somewhat meandering life story: - How I ended up regularly shipping VR games from the pub. - How to set up an auto-deploying web game generation pipeline. - A rapid, handsfree way to develop taste. Contents Fatherhood and Inspo Allow me to jump back a few months in this deeply untethered narrative. My first brush with this came not from nascent VR psychosis, but from wanting to be a fun dad. A fun dad in tech . Many parents guiltily give their kids access to electronics when they need a breather. My daughter, between spats of dodgy YouTube slop, is partial to a balloon popping game. On a whim, I thought to myself: this is total dogsh t. I could do much better than this . So I opened Claude and asked it to make a balloon popping iOS app with powerups . My fatherly vision of giving my daughter a flavour of this impossible dream: to become equal to a lottery winner, dictating the terms of a video game built before her eyes… might have missed the mark. Teamwork. User research. Bonding. Did my daughter start playing the upgraded version of her own accord? No. Did she like it more than the crap original? Also no. But I got some super useful lessons about performing user research on a 5-year-old: “Make it better. Make it less bad. It’s boring.” —Lyra, 2026. Thanks, Lyra. The Reluctant Web Developer Later that weekend, at a kid’s birthday party, while trying to desperately find testers to get in on the balloon action, I had a crushing realisation: I can’t iterate as fast while tied to iOS. Sitting in my home office, neglecting my kids, as I voice-prompt an agent to build a new power-up, is all well and good, but deeply limiting to iteration speed. Apple doesn’t exactly help themselves here either. The web, for all its faults, is by a drastic margin the easiest way to deploy things. Easier… after some annoying admin. My Automation Pipeline Indulge me with another tangent, so I can set the scene. It’s relevant, I’m trying to explain the level of handsfreeness we’re playing with in 2026. It was May 12th. My birthday. You can send me gifts here https://blog.jacobstechtavern.com/subscribe btw. I was at the pub. A friend reminded me of a bit I used to do when I was 18 which, for the record, I do not remember which I employed in my eternal quest to be really annoying. When I’d make an edgy joke, I’d obnoxiously open an app called “Privilege Checker”™ to l a checklist white, straight, cis, etc, etc , and, having checked my privilege, would deploy my moderately offensive joke. It’s all about the timing, you see? I chuckled at the alleged memory, and then, in my brooding, mysterious way, walked outside for a moment. I came back a few minutes later and shoved this web app in my friend’s face http://games.jacobstechtavern.com/privilege-checker . I can’t really take credit for this: I own no inference clusters, I have no complex pipeline, and I’m not personally touching Git on a Friday night. I just orchestrate moving parts that greater minds created. I’m just the glue. Specifically, the glue is my mouth. Voice Prompting Typing? Okay, grandad. Back to the nursing home with you. It’s crazy how much my workflow has changed since adopting voice-dictation tools. The vast majority of my day-to-day work is meanderingly mumbling into a microphone, and then code comes out the other side. This is great for fast, messy iteration and field research. You emit a stream of consciousness and get something useful out the other side. Assuming there’s a model capable of interpreting your genius. This is rad for the one-shot approach. But also great for iteration. I get solid results with Wispr Flow and Granola https://granola.ai/ . Wispr Flow is better for rapid live-testing loops where you’re tasting your own dog food and giving live shot-calling dictation. Granola is better for set-and-forget long-form user research. Claude Remote Control This works with Codex too, but I try to save my credits for important stuff. The /remote-control command, alongside caffeinate to stop your machine falling asleep , become the poor man’s OpenClaw. You can prompt Claude in a folder on your machine from the app. I say the poor man’s OpenClaw. It’s probably more like the poor man’s Mac Mini. I don’t quite feel dropping £799 is worth the luxury of not closing my clamshell. That said, once I got into the throes of VR psychosis, I got close. Unshackled from my home office, I can dictate commands to my agent from the pub. Naturally, my agent has git access, able to push straight up to my repo and deploy. Git, Vercel, and Cloudflare The 3 amigos. Frankly, if you held a gun to my head, and told me to explain what Vercel does or you’ll blow my brains out, my last words would be a curse upon Vercel. I kinda reckon it hosts web servers, but don’t take my word for it. With some slightly annoying admin, you can make it so every git push automatically goes through to Vercel and gets deployed. So… I guess it’s a CI service? Cloudflare is a DDoS protection service, which for some reason also does domain registration. I set up a CNAME for the subdomain games.jacobstechtavern.com https://games.jacobstechtavern.com/ that keeps my wildest ideas airgapped from my colleagues at Granola. This basically means for my jacobstechtavern.com https://jacobstechtavern.com/ domain, I can easily create subdomains, and Vercel routes the deployed web pages there. Vercel and Cloudflare work together in ways I simply cannot comprehend, but they steam a good ham. The point is that, now, the cost of deploying is zero. The cost of implementing is also zero. The cost of putting my thoughts into a computer is reduced to a moment of mumbling. Thus blurs the line between ideas in your head and working software in your hand. VR Psychosis Now I can explain the worst avoidable motion sickness I’ve ever given myself. The fan-made Attack on Titan VR game https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9BlCYydll4&t=71s . You fly around and kill big fellas with swords. There are many degrees of freedom in VR: 2 triggers, plus face buttons, in each hand, with 360° range of motion for each hand. The traversal mechanics in Attack on Titan VR involved shooting a cable at a wall. The other trigger reels you in, building momentum. The simple physics alone here allowed for incredibly dynamic motion. I couldn’t stop playing, for hours, acrobatically spidermanning through a city, until I was completely floored by the motion sickness that had been building up as my brain fell over trying to reconcile my senses of sight and balance. I digress. Traversal mechanics are fun. They are a huge component of a primary gameplay loop: the moment-to-moment enjoyment. See Mario 64: the devs spent half of development https://shmuplations.com/mario64/ working on 3D motion, making the space fun to move around in. They didn’t even begin building the levels in Peach’s Castle until they perfected the ability to jump about and handle the camera in a 3D space. The final moving part Now, a friend at work showed me something that he vibe coded that ties this all together. He put a VR headset on my head and showed me a fun little space where I could shoot little Granola logos at targets. We’ll find a business use case soon, I’m sure. He gave me an insight I didn’t know before: it turns out that it’s really easy to vibe VR games and deploy them online using Three.js, WebXR, and Vite. Whole VR games. It’s time to tie these threads together. Automated web deployment. Traversal mechanics. Vibe-coded web-based VR games. Building my own VR Games Everything I understand about game design comes from Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yh26jd9UqRw&t=365s . In short, your story, concept, and genre are deeply unimportant considerations compared to the main thing: the primary gameplay loop. Consider this hierarchy: - Primary Loop : Second-by-second action; the core mechanics the player repeats, Think shooting monsters in Doom or eating pills and avoiding ghosts in Pac-Man. - Secondary Loop : Minute-by-minute , short-term goals. This is the level of levels , or perhaps working through a day of planting and harvesting in Stardew Valley. - Tertiary Loop : Hour-by-hour macro-goals which tie gaming sessions together. Consider working through the narrative rescue the princess , or climbing a ranked ladder. When you’re experimenting with game design, the primary loop is the most important thing by far. Amazing level designs, fascinating concepts, or emotional storylines can’t carry a boring moment-to-moment. Fortunately, this primary loop is also the easiest to experiment with in the agentic world. Star Crusader https://games.jacobstechtavern.com/vr-assassin/ What gives you greater degrees of freedom than actual space? Star Crusader was based on the idea of total 3-dimensional freedom of movement. Duel-weilded guns shoot in front of you; jetpacks propel behind you. Total freedom of motion, within and between the gravity wells in a star system. I got very obsessed, very fast, iteratively building this out in bursts over the last several months. It’s not even hard work: I plug in, play, voice transcribe all my thoughts, and my agent will have the next round of improvements built and deployed in ~10 minutes. Iterating towards a secondary gameplay loop The core mechanic immediately felt compelling: moving across a planet with a jetpack and shooting enemies. But a million things felt a bit off, that took many iterations to iron out: - It was extremely easy to get disoriented and not sure what way you were facing; so I added a “re-orient” function that pointed your feet at the gravity well. - If you went into space, you could very easily get lost, so I designed a gyroscopic 3D wrist-mounted holomap that showed your orientation in the whole system. - There isn’t really a way to make scientifically-accurate acceleration fun you need to spend 50% of your journey to another world decelerating so I added a momentum-cancelling ability to the other face button that makes you feel insanely powerful when arriving on another world. - The least fun, most painful, iteration loop was working out how to tutorialise the progression systems: controls, upgrades, and mission selection. I can’t overwhelm players with a huge info dump, so drip-feeding mechanics while still keeping the introduction engaging was a fine balancing act. My storyline actually fell out of the necessity of an in-game character giving you these tutorials. - Even the Monday before I published this, combat still kind of sucked. A lot. It was impossible to manage position using rockets while also fighting enemies in front of you. Until I had a brainwave: in combat, you want rockets PERPENDICULAR to your guns, not behind them, so you can strafe perfectly in 3 dimensions. This suddenly unlocked WAY more interesting tactical gameplay and made the other primary gameplay loop suddenly exciting. After many iterations, here’s the basic secondary game play loop and progression system I ended up with: First, you wake up in a crater, and pick up a pistol. You have to fight a grumpy robot. He drops a jetpack, allowing you to escape the crater and explore the planet, an abandoned church-like world. You work through more combat encounters and start to upgrade your weapons. You battle the continent-sized rocket guardian on the other side of the planet. This bad boy drops the interplanetary rockets, with enough oomph to escape the gravity well and travel to other planets in the system, completing a few more missions, upgrading more weapons, and defeating more enemies. Between planets, you hear lore drops about cultists trying to resurrect… something. The penultimate boss drops the Spacetime Curvature Propulsion Drive. The acceleration here is insane, allowing you to flash across the star system in an eyeblink. This has a very cool lensing effect with chromatic aberration this was the only part of the implementation that wasn’t fully vibe-coded; I had to be extremely specific to get the optical effect I was looking for . You get one last instruction: “Leave the universe”. Accelerating in any direction quickly moves you beyond the familiar field of stars. In VR, seeing this for the first time gave me a real, profound sense of loneliness. The final boss is a galaxy-sized, satanic monster floating upon the endless void. After defeating the galaxy-sized devil, you have to find his home world and defeat the true final boss: “The Beast”, a human-sized enemy who silently battles you with an identical weapon and jetpack loadout. He ultimately drops a planet-destroying weapon, allowing you to blow up his home world. Then you get one final message: I won’t spoil what happens next. But you might guess. Play to find out. I didn’t intend to create this tertiary gameplay loop: a religious themed with a mysterious cult detective storyline: the original game was Star Contract: VR Assassin . The current story slowly evolved out of the gameplay and the progression. This is the way to make games. Start from the basics, get a compelling loop, and allow theme and story to serve the gameplay, not the other way around. I took a while to write about this, because the game evolved from a crappy traversal tech demo borne out of GPT-5.4 and 5.5, to a mediocre half-baked sorta-3D-game using Fable 5.0 and Sol, and finally with Astra I could get the basic graphics to look non-horrific and iterate faster on the progression systems. Even so, I had to carefully balance graphical fidelity and not melting my meagre Quest 2 . Many but not all graphical stutters can be solved by “code it more efficiently make no mistakes”. What this really gave me was a strong sense of the real difficulty in game design: it’s extremely easy to create a tech demo where you have a simple primary loop to play with a mechanic. But the secondary gameplay loops, like level design and progression systems, take a lot of thinking, testing, and taste . Speaking of tech demos, I have a few more fun, very half-baked concepts I was mucking about with… Rampart https://games.jacobstechtavern.com/vr-rampart/ Rampart https://games.jacobstechtavern.com/vr-rampart/ The idea for this was simple: what if there was a tower defence game where you were just “some guy” on one of the towers, a cog in the wheel of the kingdom’s defence as creatures advanced along a long road? Level one begins with a crappy bow and arrow, and most monsters getting past you. Eventually you can hire an intern and improve your weapons, to start pulling your weight. FrostFlame https://games.jacobstechtavern.com/vr-frostflame/ FrostFlame https://games.jacobstechtavern.com/vr-frostflame/ This is a crimefighting game where you have fire and ice powers in each hand. These work as both combat skills using the triggers and traversal abilities using the bumpers . You gain vertical air with fire, and skate around the city on ice, Frozone-style. Star Miner https://games.jacobstechtavern.com/vr-star-miner/ Star Miner https://games.jacobstechtavern.com/vr-star-miner/ This was a slightly Motherload https://motherload.fandom.com/wiki/Motherload -inspired space mining game, where you dig into a planet’s terrain using a lava chainsaw and a blaster, looking for relics and upgrading your gear. The destructible terrain was directly inspired by Donkey Kong Bananza https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donkey Kong Bananza . At some point, I’ll introduce a final boss fight with Satan. Balloon Thunderdome https://games.jacobstechtavern.com/vr-balloon-blitz/ One last-minute entrant. I realised I could take the phenomenal gameplay of my upgraded balloon popping game, mix it with the jetpack traversal of Star Crusader, and create a fun party game. Once I can be bothered to set up multiplayer servers. Hold on… balloons… popping game… Whoops, I forgot about my kids It’s easy to become untethered to reality when you’re in the throes of VR Psychosis. After vanquishing satan at the void beyond the universe, and nuking every planet in the system, I returned to the void, and my Quest 2 battery died, taking me to a similar kind of void. I slowly regained consciousness amid the piles of Monster Energy™ cans and week-old clothing. What was I thinking about… Oh yeah, my kids, who ostensibly this work was originally for. Admittedly, most of the above obsession was entirely for me. But I realised that I could scale back a little and find something that works. Something creative and non-mind-destroying. Found a scaled back version that worked for us: drawing games together, then voice-noting what they need to do, then plugging them into astra for deployment https://games.jacobstechtavern.com/kidgames/ . Critically, I needed to just direct scale: nudge my daughter’s stream-of-consciousness brain-dump towards some gameplay, and insist on single-space-bar-button controls I got pretty emotionally invested in this activity, because I spent a lot of my childhood drawing video game dungeons on paper with Joe Bertram, and something that literally turns them into playable experiences would have seemed like unbelievable magic to me. Last Orders 🍺 This month felt a little like the wild-west nostalgic Flash games heyday of Miniclip https://www.miniclip.com/ and Newgrounds https://www.newgrounds.com/ of the 2000s. It’s just so easy to make stuff. But it feels like nobody’s doing it, maybe because deployment is still annoying. I hope maybe this article helps a bit. Vibe-coding reduces the energy needed to go from an idea to a working POC. Once you have a hands-free pipeline set up, this activation energy drops to zero, and you can deploy a fully functional site between pub chats. The setup can be done by anyone: 1. Voice transcription. 2. Remote-control agents. 3. The power of the Open Web™ 4. Deployment pipelines via Git, Vercel, and Cloudflare. 5. A cheap Oculus Quest and built-in browser. 6. Record yourself playing and iterate GOTO step 1 . But even though the software is essentially free, you will eventually run into the cold, hard reality of a 5-year-old telling you to “make it less bad”. Pure-technical, non-product-minded developers are kind of BTFO in the agentic era, but speed of iteration, taste, empathy, and the ruthless ability to let go of great ideas are just as important characteristics as ever. I got some pretty nice VR psychosis from this mini-obsession, and got a decent head start on some primary gameplay loops. But it taught me a lot about how hard it is to make something compelling. I’ll be at the pub if anyone needs me.