🕹️ PS42015FromSoftwareVERY HARDBloodborne rebuild deck
VERY HARD
The frame-accurate dodge is a small contract an agent will honour if you name the tick; Yharnam is not, because the shortcut topology is the design document and you have to draw it yourself.
You will get a good prototype. The product is what comes after.
The combat contract is small and an agent nails it if you name the fixed tick and the i-frame span up front; skip that and you will spend a week chasing a dodge that fails for reasons you cannot reproduce. Spend your review time on the frame overlay, not the visuals. What one prompt cannot produce is Yharnam — the level is the game, and a corridor with a lamp at each end is a much worse genre wearing the same coat. Draw the shortcut graph yourself before you prompt anything.
- Difficulty
- VERY HARD · 4 of 5
- First playable
- A project
- The original
- 200 team-years
- Released
- 2015 · PS4
- Genre
- Gothic Action RPG
Build one soulslike level segment and one boss. three.js plus a physics library, or a 2.5D Canvas view. One path, one shortcut, one boss arena. No hub, no classes, no crafting. Requirements: - Everything runs on a fixed 60Hz tick and every action is authored as frames on that tick. The dodge is thirty frames long with invulnerability on frames four to fifteen; enemy attacks deal damage on named active frames. If the two sides are not on the same clock the dodge feels random, and a soulslike with a random dodge has no game in it. Put a frame counter in a debug overlay and leave it there. - Stamina drains on attack, dodge and sprint, refills after a 0.7s delay, and never gates walking. The punish window is your recovery frames, not your stamina bar. - Aggression economy: healing is slow and interruptible, and the fastest route back to full is hitting something. Design every enemy so retreating is worse than pressing. - Checkpoint loop: a lamp that restores health and respawns every non-boss enemy. Death drops your currency where you fell; dying again on the way back deletes it permanently. - Topology before geometry: a path that folds back on itself and opens a one-way gate to the lamp. Draw the graph first. - One boss with six attacks, each readable purely from wind-up length, plus a second phase adding two more. Definition of done: I die to the boss eight times, learn the wind-ups, and win using no more than two heals.
- Yharnam — a level whose interconnection and shortcut loops are the actual design document
- Seventeen bosses in the base game, whose readability comes from animation rather than from numbers
- The art direction and the sound design, where most of the dread actually lives
- Trick weapons that transform mid-combo into a second full moveset, and the build variety that follows
Rally — damage taken stays recoverable for a few seconds, and you win it back by hitting something
It inverts the incentive on getting hit: the safe response becomes the expensive one, and the fight accelerates at exactly the moment a player would normally back off. Drops into anything with a health bar — a shmup, a boss rush, a card game's damage phase — and costs about forty lines.
ScopeAn evening— build just this, not the game
Single self-contained HTML file, Canvas 2D, no build step. Build a one-arena duel with a two-layer health bar. Requirements: - Player and one enemy, both with attack, dodge and health. Keep the combat crude; the health bar is the experiment. - When the player takes damage, current health drops immediately but a rally pool of the same amount is recorded. Draw it as a lighter segment sitting to the right of current health. - The rally pool drains to zero over five seconds on a curve that is slow for the first second and fast afterwards, so there is a real decision window rather than a reflex test. - Every point of damage the player deals inside that window converts rally back to health at 1:1, capped by the pool. Landing a hit does not extend the window. - Add an interruptible healing item with a 1.2 second commit, so healing and rallying compete for the same seconds. Definition of done: I win a fight at near-full health by trading hits, then lose the same fight by backing off.
Not a clone — Bloodborne 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.
Primeval Hands Off
Bloodborne, but an auto-battler — you set up, it plays itself, set in prehistory. Rendered in blueprint technical drawing.
Build a browser game called "Primeval Hands Off". The pitch in one line: a gothic action rpg in the spirit of Bloodborne, but an auto-battler — you set up, it plays itself, set in prehistory. WHAT THIS IS Take the SHAPE of Bloodborne — 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 An auto-battler — you set up, it plays itself. The player only makes decisions between rounds. Combat resolves deterministically from board state and seed, so a replay is exact. 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 Prehistory. No language, no metal, no map. Communication and tools must be invented by the player rather than issued to them. 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 Blueprint technical drawing. White line-work on a blue ground, dimension lines and callout labels on live objects, and a grid that is diegetic rather than decorative. 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.
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 200 team-years to the counter on the homepage.
Then try these
Questions
How hard is Bloodborne to rebuild with an AI agent?
Yes — every game is buildable at some scope. The question is how hard, and Bloodborne is VERY HARD (4 of 5). You will get a good prototype. The product is what comes after. The frame-accurate dodge is a small contract an agent will honour if you name the tick; Yharnam is not, because the shortcut topology is the design document and you have to draw it yourself. Reckon on a project to something you can actually play — not to something that matches the 200 team-years FromSoftware spent.
What makes Bloodborne hard to rebuild?
The frame-accurate dodge is a small contract an agent will honour if you name the tick; Yharnam is not, because the shortcut topology is the design document and you have to draw it yourself. 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 rally — damage taken stays recoverable for a few seconds, and you win it back by hitting something — an evening of work.
How long does it take to build a Bloodborne clone?
Wrong question, and it is worth saying why. Nobody rebuilds Bloodborne — the original took FromSoftware on the order of 200 team-years, released in 2015 on PS4. 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 Bloodborne?
Yharnam — a level whose interconnection and shortcut loops are the actual design document. Seventeen bosses in the base game, whose readability comes from animation rather than from numbers. The art direction and the sound design, where most of the dread actually lives. 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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