A Reddit user has spent two weeks turning an ordinary monitor into a shooting range, and they did most of the coding with Claude Code, Anthropic's AI coding tool.
The project is called ScreenPlink. It showed up on the ClaudeAI subreddit this week, posted by a user going by vkorost, who described building it as a dry-fire laser trainer where the monitor itself is the target. You aim a laser trainer pistol at the screen, or fit a laser cartridge into your own gun, and a webcam positioned beside the monitor does the rest.
"A webcam sitting beside the monitor watches the screen rather than you, the app works out which pixel you hit, punches a bullet hole there, and the target falls," vkorost wrote in the post. That's the trick: the camera isn't tracking the shooter's movement or aim, it's watching for the flash of the laser landing on the display, then rendering the hit and knocking the target down in real time.
The game isn't a single static target either. ScreenPlink ships with several modes, and it supports two-player play, which is the kind of detail that will land hardest with anyone who grew up aiming a plastic light gun at a CRT during a PlayStation session. The webcam-and-laser setup is a modern stand-in for that old hardware, minus the console and minus the compatibility headaches that come with running light-gun games on current displays.
It's free. The whole project is open-source and posted on GitHub under the ScreenPlink name, so anyone with a laser pointer, a webcam and a spare monitor can try building their own range without paying for anything beyond the hardware they likely already own.
Part of a pattern
ScreenPlink is the second webcam-plus-Claude project to surface in a matter of days. Just before it, another user used Claude to take photos of a Samsung TV's screen while it was running, reportedly to work around restrictions on the set. Taken together, the two projects point to a small but growing habit among hobbyist coders: pointing a camera at a screen and letting an AI model handle the logic of what happens next, rather than wiring up custom sensors or hacking the display's own software.
None of this is coming from Anthropic itself. Claude Code is a general-purpose coding assistant, and ScreenPlink is an independent hobby build that happens to have used it as a development tool over a two-week stretch. Anyone curious about trying it has to supply their own laser trainer or cartridge, their own webcam, and enough desk space to keep the camera from catching their own reflection in the glass.
GDFiled by The Games Desk
Consoles, handhelds, PC gaming and the platforms and hardware behind them.
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