📱 Mobile2012KingBRUTALCandy Crush Saga rebuild deck
BRUTAL
The match-three engine is an afternoon; the product is twenty-two thousand levels tuned against measured player fail rates and a decade of live-ops instrumentation, and you have no players to measure.
The hard part is not game design at all.
Match-three is a solved problem and an agent will hand you a working engine in an afternoon. What it cannot hand you is the reason this printed money for a decade: a particular level exists in a particular place because someone measured that players who quit there come back if the previous level was generous. King is still shipping roughly forty-five new levels every Wednesday. Watch the cascade state machine in review, because agents let input through mid-fall and the bug hides until someone plays quickly. It launched on Facebook in April 2012 and the phone version followed that November, which is why the social-pressure hooks feel bolted to a web game.
- Difficulty
- BRUTAL · 5 of 5
- First playable
- A project
- The original
- 350 team-years
- Released
- 2012 · Mobile
- Genre
- Match Three Puzzle
Build a portrait-orientation match-three puzzle game as a single self-contained HTML file. Canvas 2D, Web Audio, no build step, no dependencies. Target 60fps on a mid-range Android in a mobile browser. Requirements: - A 9x9 board of six coloured tokens, sized to viewport width with a safe area for the HUD. Touch-drag or tap-tap to swap adjacent tokens; an illegal swap animates halfway and springs back over 180ms. - The resolution loop is a strict state machine and input is locked until it settles: detect, award specials, clear, gravity, refill, detect again. Cascades must resolve completely before the board accepts another touch. This is where every naive implementation breaks, and it only breaks for fast players. - Special tokens are decided by the SHAPE of the match at detection time, before anything clears. Four in a line makes a line-clearer aligned with the match, five in a line makes a colour bomb, an L or T of five makes a bomb clearing 3x3. - Board generation must produce no pre-existing matches and at least one legal move. After every settle, re-check for legal moves and reshuffle in place if none exist. - Levels in a JSON file: goal type (score, clear N of a colour, drop items to the bottom row), move limit, blocked cells, available colours. - Feel: 90ms swap tween, tokens fall with ease-out at 1600px/s squared, pitch rises a semitone per cascade step. Definition of done: a five-step cascade resolves without accepting input mid-fall, and the board reshuffles when I strand it.
- Twenty-two thousand hand-designed levels, each one balance-tested against real player fail rates
- The live-ops calendar: events, boosters, timed challenges, and a Saga map engineered to make stalling feel temporary
- The monetisation model, which is the actual engineering achievement and took a decade of measurement
- The voice going 'Delicious!' at you, which is worth more than any of the code
A blocker that spreads while you dither
A move limit is a rule imposed from outside the board; a blocker that spreads while you hesitate is pressure living inside it, and players fight that rather than resenting it. The load-bearing part is the roll-back check — pressure that can hand out a dead board is not difficulty, it is a bug with a theme.
ScopeA weekend— build just this, not the game
Build a spreading-blocker sandbox. Single self-contained HTML file, Canvas 2D, no dependencies, no build step. - An 8x8 grid of five coloured tokens with swap-to-match rules. It exists only to host the blocker. - Blockers occupy a cell, cannot be matched or swapped, and stop tokens falling through them. They have two layers, and clearing a match adjacent to one removes a layer. - After every settled move, one blocker seeds into an empty neighbour of an existing blocker. The choice rule is swappable: uniform random, toward the largest open region, or toward the corner furthest from the player's last match. - The rule that keeps it honest: after seeding, verify a legal move still exists and at least one blocker is still reachable. If not, roll the seed back and try elsewhere. - A heat overlay drawing each empty cell's chance of being seeded next, plus a growth-rate slider in seeds per move. Definition of done: ignoring the blockers for ten moves costs me the board, and roll-back means I am never handed a position with no legal move.
Not a clone — Candy Crush Saga 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.
Starfall One Run
Candy Crush Saga, but a roguelike run instead of a campaign, set in a space opera. Rendered in silhouette against one light.
Build a browser game called "Starfall One Run". The pitch in one line: a match three puzzle in the spirit of Candy Crush Saga, but a roguelike run instead of a campaign, set in a space opera. WHAT THIS IS Take the SHAPE of Candy Crush Saga — 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 roguelike run instead of a campaign. Twenty to forty minutes, procedurally assembled from hand-authored chunks, permadeath, and a meta-progression drip. Replaces authored content volume with combinatorics. 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 A space opera. Big politics, bigger ships, and faster-than-light travel treated as ordinary infrastructure rather than as a miracle. 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 Silhouette against one light. Everything renders pure black against a lit background, with depth from four parallax layers of increasing blur, grain and a heavy vignette. 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.
- MDN game development docs — grids, tweens, game loops
- Phaser — tweening and object pooling handed to you
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 350 team-years to the counter on the homepage.
Then try these
Questions
How hard is Candy Crush Saga to rebuild with an AI agent?
Yes — every game is buildable at some scope. The question is how hard, and Candy Crush Saga is BRUTAL (5 of 5). The hard part is not game design at all. The match-three engine is an afternoon; the product is twenty-two thousand levels tuned against measured player fail rates and a decade of live-ops instrumentation, and you have no players to measure. Reckon on a project to something you can actually play — not to something that matches the 350 team-years King spent.
What makes Candy Crush Saga hard to rebuild?
The match-three engine is an afternoon; the product is twenty-two thousand levels tuned against measured player fail rates and a decade of live-ops instrumentation, and you have no players to measure. That is why it sits at BRUTAL rather than a tier either side of it. If you want the idea without the project, the transferable part is a blocker that spreads while you dither — a weekend of work.
How long does it take to build a Candy Crush Saga clone?
Wrong question, and it is worth saying why. Nobody rebuilds Candy Crush Saga — the original took King on the order of 350 team-years, released in 2012 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 Candy Crush Saga?
Twenty-two thousand hand-designed levels, each one balance-tested against real player fail rates. The live-ops calendar: events, boosters, timed challenges, and a Saga map engineered to make stalling feel temporary. The monetisation model, which is the actual engineering achievement and took a decade of measurement. 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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