🍄 Nintendo1984Nintendo R&D1EASY

Duck Hunt rebuild deck

EASY

On an LCD the shooting is a point-in-rectangle test, so the only real work is the dwell-and-dart interval that stops the bird reading as a bouncing rectangle, and the dog.

You will get essentially the whole thing.

On a modern screen the shooting is a point-in-rectangle test, so all of the actual work sits in two places: the dwell interval that makes a bird feel like an animal rather than a bouncing rectangle, and the dog. Agents will give you smooth sinusoidal flight paths unprompted, which are far easier to track and drain the game of everything. Spend your review time watching a single bird for a minute and adjusting the dwell numbers by feel. It is a three-hour build and about two of those hours are the dog.

Difficulty: EASY · 1 of 5
First playable: An evening
The original: 1 team-years
Released: 1984 · Nintendo
Genre: Light Gun Shooter

The one-shot build prompt

Build a click-to-shoot bird shooting game as a single self-contained HTML file. Canvas 2D, Web Audio, no dependencies.

Requirements:
- Three shots per round. They do not refill mid-round and reset only when the next birds launch.
- Bird flight is a random walk with dwell: choose one of eight directions, hold it for a randomised 400 to 1200ms, then choose again, biased away from whichever screen edge is nearest. Speed is a per-round multiplier starting at 1.0 and rising 0.15 each round. After 8 seconds a bird panics, turns straight up and exits. This dwell-then-turn behaviour is the entire difficulty curve, so keep the numbers as named constants at the top of the file and expect to hand-tune them.
- Hit detection is a plain point-in-rectangle test against the bird's current sprite bounds, padded by 4px. Register on mousedown, not click.
- A hit quota per round that rises every third round. Miss it and the run ends with a score summary.
- A dog that walks the grass line before each round, dives into the reeds, then rises holding your birds, or laughing at you when you hit nothing. The laugh is non-negotiable.
- Rounds, quotas and speed multipliers in rounds.json. Tap to shoot on touch devices.

Definition of done: I can miss all three shots on a pair of birds and be laughed at for it.

Before you start🧰 The toolkit — models, MCP servers, art and 3D

What you lose

The Zapper and the CRT it requires. The original reads a white flash off a scanline, so on an LCD it physically cannot work
The pack-in cartridge that shipped with the console, which is most of why it is famous
Nintendo's dog, who is doing all the emotional labour in this design

What to steal

Dwell-then-turn wandering instead of smooth paths

A sine wave reads as a machine. Hold a heading for a randomised beat and then choose a new one, and the identical sprite reads as an animal making decisions — which turns a target you track into a target you have to guess.

ScopeAn evening— build just this, not the game

Build a movement-model comparison toy for wandering creatures. Single self-contained HTML file, Canvas 2D, no dependencies.

- A dozen agents wander a bounded field. Each picks one of eight headings, holds it for a randomised 400 to 1200ms dwell, then picks again, weighted away from whichever boundary is nearest so they rarely hug the edges.
- The turn itself blends over 80ms, so a change of heading is sharp but not instantaneous.
- A second mode moves the same agents along smooth sinusoidal paths at matched average speed, toggled with a key.
- Sliders for dwell minimum and maximum, edge bias, turn blend and speed. Both failure modes must be reachable: dwell near zero should degenerate into jitter, dwell very high into straight lines.
- A fading two-second trail behind each agent, and click-to-hit testing that logs hit rate per mode.

Definition of done: my hit rate against the dwell model is measurably worse than against the sine model at identical speed.

Make it different

Not a clone — Duck Hunt 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.

Deniable Teletype

Duck Hunt, but text-only, in a terminal, set in Cold War espionage. Rendered in hand-drawn ink on paper.

ThemeCold War espionage

Angletext-only, in a terminal

Lookhand-drawn ink on paper

Build a browser game called "Deniable Teletype".

The pitch in one line: a light gun shooter in the spirit of Duck Hunt, but text-only, in a terminal, set in Cold War espionage.

WHAT THIS IS
Take the SHAPE of Duck Hunt — 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
Text-only, in a terminal. A monospace grid and nothing else. Forces the writing and the systems to carry everything, and the entire art budget goes to zero.
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
Cold War espionage. Nobody can be trusted including your own side, and the failure state is exposure rather than death.
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
Hand-drawn ink on paper. Rough stroked outlines with per-frame jitter so lines boil, a paper-grain texture over everything, and ink-bleed on impacts.

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.

Prior art — read before you build

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.

Did you build it?

0Share on X

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 1 team-years to the counter on the homepage.

Then try these

Or roll something nobody has built yet →

Questions

How hard is Duck Hunt to rebuild with an AI agent?

Yes — every game is buildable at some scope. The question is how hard, and Duck Hunt is EASY (1 of 5). You will get essentially the whole thing. On an LCD the shooting is a point-in-rectangle test, so the only real work is the dwell-and-dart interval that stops the bird reading as a bouncing rectangle, and the dog. Reckon on an evening to something you can actually play — not to something that matches the 1 team-years Nintendo R&D1 spent.

What makes Duck Hunt hard to rebuild?

On an LCD the shooting is a point-in-rectangle test, so the only real work is the dwell-and-dart interval that stops the bird reading as a bouncing rectangle, and the dog. That is why it sits at EASY rather than a tier either side of it. If you want the idea without the project, the transferable part is dwell-then-turn wandering instead of smooth paths — an evening of work.

How long does it take to build a Duck Hunt clone?

Wrong question, and it is worth saying why. Nobody rebuilds Duck Hunt — the original took Nintendo R&D1 on the order of 1 team-years, released in 1984 on Nintendo. What you can do is reach something playable and genuinely yours in about an evening, 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 Duck Hunt?

The Zapper and the CRT it requires. The original reads a white flash off a scanline, so on an LCD it physically cannot work. The pack-in cartridge that shipped with the console, which is most of why it is famous. Nintendo's dog, who is doing all the emotional labour in this design. 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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