🎯 PS52022FromSoftwareVERY HARD

Elden Ring rebuild deck

VERY HARD

You will get a good prototype. The product is what comes after.

The combat prototype is worth building and an agent gets you a working stamina-roll-lock-on loop faster than you expect. It will also express the i-frames in milliseconds on the first pass and you must catch that. Where it fails you is the moveset: an agent writes eight attacks with near-identical timing curves, and the entire fight lives in the variation between them. That tuning pass is yours and it is the long part. The open world is not a scoping problem, it is a different profession.

Difficulty: VERY HARD · 4 of 5
First playable: A project
The original: 800 team-years
Released: 2022 · PS5
Genre: Action RPG

The one-shot build prompt

Build ONE boss arena from an open-world action RPG. Not the world, not the map — one arena, one player, one boss. three.js, third person.

Requirements:
- Fixed 60Hz simulation on an accumulator, rendering interpolated. Every timing below is in ticks, never milliseconds, or the dodge window changes with the player's monitor.
- Every action is a committed animation state with explicit startup, active and recovery tick counts. Nothing cancels early. A late input during recovery queues and fires on the first free tick — an 8-tick buffer is the whole difference between heavy and broken.
- Roll: 30 ticks, invulnerable on ticks 3 through 16, direction locked at input.
- Weapon hit detection as a capsule swept between last tick's and this tick's blade transform. A per-frame overlap test lets a fast attack pass straight through a rolling player, and every tester will call it lag.
- Stamina as one pool shared by attack, roll and sprint, regeneration pausing 40 ticks after every spend, so aggression and safety compete for the same number.
- Lock-on with a soft-follow camera that keeps both framed.
- One boss, eight attacks, each with a distinct wind-up and recovery length, so some are punishable and some are bait. Give it poise so mid-combo hits do not stagger it.
- Death: respawn at a checkpoint, enemies restored, currency left where you fell and deleted if you die again before retrieving it.

Definition of done: I lose twenty times and can name which attack I misread on every one of them.

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

What you lose

The map. Hundreds of hand-placed encounters across an open world, and the placement is the product
Legacy dungeons — vertically interlocking layouts that fold back on themselves, which took years of iteration to get right
An animation library of hundreds of unique attacks, each hand-timed so that its wind-up is the tell
The asynchronous multiplayer layer — messages, bloodstains, summons, invasions — which is most of the atmosphere and none of the combat

What to steal

Attacks identifiable purely from wind-up duration, with no colour, icon or audio cue

It is the cheapest legibility trick in action design and it drops into anything with a threatening enemy — a boss, a security guard, a boxing sim, a tower defence elite. Build it once and you stop reaching for red flashes forever.

ScopeAn evening— build just this, not the game

Single self-contained HTML file, Canvas 2D, no build step. A training-dummy boss that never moves and a player who can only dodge.

- The boss has four attacks. The only thing distinguishing them is wind-up length: 350ms, 550ms, 800ms, and 1200ms with a deliberate hold near the top. No colour changes, no icons, no sound.
- Each has a different active hitbox: overhead (short, in front), sweep (wide arc), thrust (long and thin), slam (radial). Draw hitboxes only on active frames.
- Dodge is a 500ms roll, invulnerable from 50ms to 300ms, counted in fixed 60Hz ticks.
- Randomise attack selection but never repeat the same one twice in a row.
- HUD: the last ten attempts as ticks and crosses, plus the wind-up length of whatever just killed you.
- Tune the poses until you can call the attack at 60% of its wind-up. If you cannot, the silhouettes at 60% are not different enough yet.

Definition of done: I dodge ten in a row with the sound off.

Make it different

Not a clone — Elden Ring 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.

Gumshoe Endless

Elden Ring, but an endless survival mode instead of levels, set in a noir city. Rendered in N64 fog and vertex colour.

Themea noir city

Anglean endless survival mode instead of levels

LookN64 fog and vertex colour

Build a browser game called "Gumshoe Endless".

The pitch in one line: a action rpg in the spirit of Elden Ring, but an endless survival mode instead of levels, set in a noir city.

WHAT THIS IS
Take the SHAPE of Elden Ring — 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 endless survival mode instead of levels. One arena, escalating waves on a data-driven timeline, a run timer and a score. Replaces level design with a difficulty curve.
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 noir city. Rain, venetian blinds, and information as the only currency. Everyone is lying by omission and the player must notice which parts.
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
N64 fog and vertex colour. Heavy distance fog, per-vertex lighting rather than per-pixel, bilinear-blurred low-resolution textures, and a wide-open draw distance hidden by the fog.

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 800 team-years to the counter on the homepage.

Then try these

Or roll something nobody has built yet →

Questions

How hard is Elden Ring to rebuild with an AI agent?

Yes — every game is buildable at some scope. The question is how hard, and Elden Ring is VERY HARD (4 of 5). You will get a good prototype. The product is what comes after. The combat prototype arrives faster than you expect and then stops being the problem: what is left is hundreds of hand-placed encounters and an animation library where each attack's wind-up is its tell, which is a profession rather than a scope. Reckon on a project to something you can actually play — not to something that matches the 800 team-years FromSoftware spent.

What makes Elden Ring hard to rebuild?

The combat prototype arrives faster than you expect and then stops being the problem: what is left is hundreds of hand-placed encounters and an animation library where each attack's wind-up is its tell, which is a profession rather than a scope. 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 attacks identifiable purely from wind-up duration, with no colour, icon or audio cue — an evening of work.

How long does it take to build a Elden Ring clone?

Wrong question, and it is worth saying why. Nobody rebuilds Elden Ring — the original took FromSoftware on the order of 800 team-years, released in 2022 on PS5. 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 Elden Ring?

The map. Hundreds of hand-placed encounters across an open world, and the placement is the product. Legacy dungeons — vertically interlocking layouts that fold back on themselves, which took years of iteration to get right. An animation library of hundreds of unique attacks, each hand-timed so that its wind-up is the tell. 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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