🎮 PS32013Rockstar NorthVERY HARDGrand Theft Auto V rebuild deck
VERY HARD
A wanted level built as a search rather than a homing missile is genuinely the loop and genuinely promptable; a hand-placed city with a radio schedule and a decade of jokes in it is not.
You will get a good prototype. The product is what comes after.
This is a KINDA and it took some arguing. The heart of it — drive fast, collect stars, lose them — predates the city by two games, and the top-down originals shipped that loop with barely any world at all. An agent's default police AI is a homing missile with a siren attached, and the character of the whole thing changes the moment it becomes a search instead. Demand the debug circle in the first prompt, because without it you cannot distinguish a working search from a lucky one. Then be honest about what you have: a police-chase toy, which is a real and enjoyable thing, and not a city with a radio schedule and a decade of jokes in it.
- Difficulty
- VERY HARD · 4 of 5
- First playable
- A project
- The original
- 1,200 team-years
- Released
- 2013 · PS3
- Genre
- Open World Action
Build ONE city district: driving, on foot, and a police response. three.js, roughly a square kilometre. No missions, no story, no characters. Requirements: - A drivable car with an arcade handling model: rear-wheel drive, a slip angle that lets the back step out under throttle, weight transfer that pitches the body under braking, and a chase camera lagging behind the velocity vector rather than the car's facing. That camera lag is most of why driving feels fast. - The load-bearing system: the wanted level is a search, not a distance check. The police do not know where you are. They track a last-known position and a search radius that grows at a fixed rate while nobody has line of sight, snapping back to your true position the instant any officer sees you. Units path towards points sampled inside that circle, never towards you. You escape by staying outside it until a decay timer expires. Draw the circle in a debug view or you cannot tell a working search from a lucky one. - Escalation by star: one star is two patrol cars; three adds roadblocks at choke points in the road graph; five adds a helicopter that holds line of sight from above and shrinks the circle. - Ambient traffic spawned in a ring outside the view frustum, recycled behind you, on a fixed population budget. - Enter and exit vehicles; a minimap that draws the search circle. Definition of done: I park inside a multi-storey car park with the engine off, and watch the search circle drift past me.
- A hand-built city of thousands of placed props, interiors and sightlines, sitting on a road graph designed to make chases work
- Radio stations, ambient dialogue and satire — the reason nobody minds a four-minute drive
- Three interleaved campaigns with heists that branch on approach and crew selection
- The streaming engine that kept a square mile of that city alive inside the PS3's 256MB of system RAM
The character-switch pull-out — a camera move outward and back that spends exactly as long as the world underneath needs to load.
It converts your worst technical constraint into your most-screenshotted feature. Any expensive transition — a level change, a fast travel, a scene swap — can hide inside a deliberate camera or animation move, and players read it as confidence rather than latency. The rule that makes it work is that the visible motion never stalls: you extend the hold, never the ease.
ScopeA weekend— build just this, not the game
Build a single-file HTML page, Canvas 2D, top-down, that turns a loading pause into a camera move. Requirements: - Three characters on a large tiled map. Tiles within 600px of the active character count as loaded; everything else draws flat grey. - Tile loading is deliberately slow — a fake 150ms each, four in flight — so a cold neighbourhood takes two seconds. - Pressing 1, 2 or 3 starts a switch: the camera eases out to a wide view over 700ms, holds, then eases in on the target over 700ms. Start the destination's tile loads on the first frame of the pull-out, nearest-first. - The rule: the zoom-in must not begin until the destination's inner ring has loaded, and the pull-out must never stutter. If loading is slow, extend the hold. Never extend the ease. - Add a toggle that skips the camera move entirely, so you can feel the two seconds it was hiding from you. Definition of done: with the transition on I never see a grey tile, and with it off I always do.
Not a clone — Grand Theft Auto V 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
Grand Theft Auto V, but text-only, in a terminal, set in Cold War espionage. Rendered in claymation with baked light.
Build a browser game called "Deniable Teletype". The pitch in one line: a open world action in the spirit of Grand Theft Auto V, but text-only, in a terminal, set in Cold War espionage. WHAT THIS IS Take the SHAPE of Grand Theft Auto V — 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 Claymation with baked light. Soft rounded geometry, a fingerprint-style normal texture, stop-motion timing at 12fps for characters while the camera stays at 60. 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 1,200 team-years to the counter on the homepage.
Then try these
Questions
How hard is Grand Theft Auto V to rebuild with an AI agent?
Yes — every game is buildable at some scope. The question is how hard, and Grand Theft Auto V is VERY HARD (4 of 5). You will get a good prototype. The product is what comes after. A wanted level built as a search rather than a homing missile is genuinely the loop and genuinely promptable; a hand-placed city with a radio schedule and a decade of jokes in it is not. Reckon on a project to something you can actually play — not to something that matches the 1,200 team-years Rockstar North spent.
What makes Grand Theft Auto V hard to rebuild?
A wanted level built as a search rather than a homing missile is genuinely the loop and genuinely promptable; a hand-placed city with a radio schedule and a decade of jokes in it is not. 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 the character-switch pull-out — a camera move outward and back that spends exactly as long as the world underneath needs to load. — a weekend of work.
How long does it take to build a Grand Theft Auto V clone?
Wrong question, and it is worth saying why. Nobody rebuilds Grand Theft Auto V — the original took Rockstar North on the order of 1,200 team-years, released in 2013 on PS3. 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 Grand Theft Auto V?
A hand-built city of thousands of placed props, interiors and sightlines, sitting on a road graph designed to make chases work. Radio stations, ambient dialogue and satire — the reason nobody minds a four-minute drive. Three interleaved campaigns with heists that branch on approach and crew selection. 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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