📱 Mobile2018InnerSlothVERY HARDAmong Us rebuild deck
VERY HARD
The authoritative server that never tells a client what it should not know is a fortnight of honest work; the product is eight friends on a voice call, and no prompt ships that.
You will get a good prototype. The product is what comes after.
It shipped on phones in June 2018 and sat almost unnoticed for two years before streamers found it, which tells you the code was never the bottleneck. The moment you make the server authoritative this stops being a weekend build and becomes a networking project with lobbies, reconnection, and a state machine that has to survive somebody's phone locking mid-meeting. Agents will cheerfully hand you a version where every client is told who the impostor is and call it finished, so check the wire rather than the screen.
- Difficulty
- VERY HARD · 4 of 5
- First playable
- A project
- The original
- 3 team-years
- Released
- 2018 · Mobile
- Genre
- Social Deduction
Build a browser social deduction game for 4-10 players: a Node server using ws, plus a static Canvas 2D client. No engine, no framework. Requirements: - The server is authoritative and must never send a client something that client should not know. Role assignment, kill range and cooldown, task completion and sabotage all validate server-side. Most importantly, cull by vision: do not transmit the position of any player outside the viewer's sight radius, because anyone can open the network tab. Darkness drawn on the client is not darkness. - Twenty-tick server. Interpolate other players between snapshots, predict your own movement locally and reconcile. - The map is JSON: rooms, collision polygons, a vent graph, task locations. One map is plenty. - Meeting state machine: a body report or emergency button freezes movement, then a discussion timer, a voting timer, a tally where ties resolve to skip, then ejection. Text chat only during meetings. - Win checks after every death and every meeting: impostors equal to crew, all tasks complete, or the sabotage timer running out. - Lobby with a join code, host controls for kill cooldown and impostor count, and reconnection within 30 seconds that restores your role. Definition of done: three browser tabs join a lobby, a kill happens, the body is reported and the vote ejects someone — and with the network log open on a crewmate tab there is no way to work out who the impostor was before the reveal.
- Eight friends on a voice call, which is the actual product and cannot be coded
- Servers, matchmaking, anti-cheat and moderation for strangers who are trying to ruin it
- Three maps of hand-designed sightlines, vent routes and camera blind spots
- A 2020-shaped cultural moment that will not happen twice
Per-observer knowledge filtering
Darkness drawn on the client is not darkness — it is the answer sitting in the network tab behind a black rectangle. Build the boundary where a viewer only ever receives what their senses justify and you have the correct shape for fog of war, hidden hands, detective games and every hidden-information feature you would otherwise ship broken.
ScopeA weekend— build just this, not the game
Build a hidden-information boundary as a single self-contained HTML file plus one inline Web Worker. Canvas 2D, no build step, no dependencies. - The Worker is the authority. It owns everything: a room layout with wall polygons, six agents wandering between rooms, and one agent secretly flagged. The page must never receive that flag under any circumstances. - Every 100ms the Worker builds a SEPARATE payload per observer. Another agent is included only if it is within the observer's sight radius and the segment between them crosses no wall polygon. Everything else is omitted from the payload entirely — not sent with a hidden flag, not sent greyed out, omitted. - The page renders only what arrived, and has a panel that pretty-prints the raw payload it received. - A key switches which agent you are observing. A cheat button renders the payload with all darkness and vision masking removed. Definition of done: with the cheat on and the payload panel open, I still cannot work out where the unseen agents are or which one is flagged.
Not a clone — Among Us re-themed and cut down to something you can finish. The angle is the important reel: it is what turns a project into a weekend. 5,880 ways to land.
Blackpowder No Reflexes
Among Us, but a puzzle version — same fiction, no reflexes, set in the Wild West. Rendered in CRT arcade with scanlines.
Build a browser game called "Blackpowder No Reflexes". The pitch in one line: a social deduction in the spirit of Among Us, but a puzzle version — same fiction, no reflexes, set in the Wild West. WHAT THIS IS Take the SHAPE of Among Us — its core loop, and whatever makes that loop good — and rebuild it as your own game in a different world at a smaller scope. Use your own names, art and audio, which you want anyway: a reskin of somebody else's game is less interesting than a new one that works the same way. THE ANGLE — this is the important constraint, honour it above everything else A puzzle version — same fiction, no reflexes. Keep the world and the tension, remove execution difficulty entirely. Every encounter has a correct answer discoverable by thought. This is what makes the project finishable. If a decision would push the scope back towards the original's, take the smaller option every time. THE THEME The Wild West. Distance, dust and long reloads. A single main street the whole design hangs off. The theme is not a coat of paint. Let it change what the mechanics mean — a reload, a health pack and a locked door should all be things that make sense in this world and nowhere else. LOOK CRT arcade with scanlines. Post-process pass with scanlines, barrel distortion, phosphor bloom and slight chromatic aberration at the edges. Keep it subtle enough to read text through. REQUIREMENTS - Runs in a browser with no build step. Canvas 2D unless the angle genuinely requires 3D, in which case three.js. - Fixed-timestep update loop with interpolated rendering, so it behaves the same at 60Hz and 144Hz. - Every tuning constant in one CONFIG object at the top, exposed as live sliders in a debug panel. You will find the feel by dragging those, not by prompting. - All content — levels, entities, balance numbers — in JSON or plain data files, never inline in the logic. - Audio generated with the Web Audio API rather than asset files. - Respect prefers-reduced-motion: keep the fades, drop the shake and the parallax. BUILD ORDER 1. The core loop with placeholder rectangles, at the reduced scope the angle demands. No theme, no art, no audio. Make it fun as rectangles first. 2. The angle's consequences. Cutting to bots, or to turn-based, or to one level changes the design rather than just shrinking it — find out how and rewrite step 1. 3. The theme, as content and data. 4. The look, applied last as a rendering layer over a game that already works. Start by writing a one-page plan: the core loop, what the angle removes and what that frees you to do properly, and what you are deliberately leaving out. Wait for me to approve it before writing code.
- ws — the WebSocket library the prompt builds on
- colyseus — authoritative multiplayer room server for Node
Half the time one of these already does what you wanted, and the other half it saves you a week of solving a problem someone documented in 1997.
One count per game. No account — it is tied to a salted hash of your IP, which is not stored in a form anyone can reverse. Every build adds 3 team-years to the counter on the homepage.
Then try these
Questions
How hard is Among Us to rebuild with an AI agent?
Yes — every game is buildable at some scope. The question is how hard, and Among Us is VERY HARD (4 of 5). You will get a good prototype. The product is what comes after. The authoritative server that never tells a client what it should not know is a fortnight of honest work; the product is eight friends on a voice call, and no prompt ships that. Reckon on a project to something you can actually play — not to something that matches the 3 team-years InnerSloth spent.
What makes Among Us hard to rebuild?
The authoritative server that never tells a client what it should not know is a fortnight of honest work; the product is eight friends on a voice call, and no prompt ships that. That is why it sits at VERY HARD rather than a tier either side of it. If you want the idea without the project, the transferable part is per-observer knowledge filtering — a weekend of work.
How long does it take to build a Among Us clone?
Wrong question, and it is worth saying why. Nobody rebuilds Among Us — the original took InnerSloth on the order of 3 team-years, released in 2018 on Mobile. What you can do is reach something playable and genuinely yours in about a project, and then keep going for as long as it stays interesting. Any figure that claims otherwise is measuring a prototype and calling it a game.
What do I lose by building my own Among Us?
Eight friends on a voice call, which is the actual product and cannot be coded. Servers, matchmaking, anti-cheat and moderation for strangers who are trying to ruin it. Three maps of hand-designed sightlines, vent routes and camera blind spots. Those are the parts a prompt will not hand you.
Which AI coding agent should I use to build it?
Any of Claude Code, Codex or Cursor will handle this prompt. Paste it as your first message, let the agent scaffold the project, then iterate on feel — the second, third and tenth prompts are where a game actually gets good. Work in an empty folder or a fresh git branch so you can throw it away cheaply.
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