🎮 PS32012thatgamecompanyVERY HARDJourney rebuild deck
VERY HARD
The sand shader and the Verlet scarf are well documented and an agent writes them fine; the product is a two-hour authored landscape lit so the mountain is always the answer, scored cue by cue to a walk nobody can time.
You will get a good prototype. The product is what comes after.
Technically this is more approachable than it looks — the sand shader and verlet scarf are both well-documented and an agent writes them well. It is a NOT REALLY because Journey is an authored emotional arc plus a multiplayer design that took thatgamecompany three years and nearly bankrupted them. You can prompt the technology. You cannot prompt the restraint.
- Difficulty
- VERY HARD · 4 of 5
- First playable
- A project
- The original
- 25 team-years
- Released
- 2012 · PS3
- Genre
- Adventure
Build a wordless exploration prototype with expressive sand rendering and cloth. three.js, third-person, no UI at all. Requirements: - Sand shading is the visual thesis: a custom material with view-dependent glitter (high-frequency noise sparkling only near the specular direction), soft normal-mapped ripples, subsurface warmth in shadow, and sun-facing rim light. Dunes deform where the player walks, with tracks that fade over time. - Sand-surfing: on a downhill slope past a threshold, the controller switches to a low-friction slide with a spray particle trail and a rising audio layer. This transition must be automatic and must feel like a reward. - A scarf as a verlet-integrated cloth strip with 20 segments, wind, and self-collision avoidance. Its length is the jump resource: flying consumes scarf, and touching glowing cloth restores it. The resource is visible on the character, never in a HUD. - Flight: hold to rise while scarf remains, with a floaty gravity and slow descent. - Communication is one button that emits a chirp: a particle ping, a musical note whose pitch varies, and a light that recharges nearby cloth. No text, no voice, no names. This single verb is the entire social design. - Companion: one AI (or networked) figure that mirrors your chirps and follows loosely, never labelled, never introduced. - Audio: procedural layering where wind, sand and score intensity respond to speed and altitude rather than triggering on events. - No HUD, no menus, no tutorial text. Every affordance must be taught by light and camera framing. Definition of done: I understand what to do without a single word on screen.
- The anonymous multiplayer design, which took years of iteration to get right
- Austin Wintory's score, which the game is essentially built around
- Sand rendering that was a genuine graphics research contribution
- Emotional pacing across a two-hour arc with no words at all
One button that does three jobs at once
A single verb that expresses, lights the world and calls a companion beats three buttons doing one thing each, because the player learns one action and then discovers the second and third uses themselves. That discovery is the design; adding buttons is how you lose it.
ScopeA weekend— build just this, not the game
Build a one-verb communication toy as a single self-contained HTML file. Canvas 2D, Web Audio, and no text on screen at any point. - Top-down: a player figure, a companion figure, and dim objects scattered across a small area. - There is exactly one button. Pressing it does three things simultaneously: emits an expanding ring and a musical note whose pitch rises the more recently you last pressed; lights every dim object caught inside the ring for a while; and gives the companion a target, since it moves toward the last place it heard you. - The companion answers with its own note, a fourth above yours, after a short delay. Two people pressing get call and response for free. - Lit objects are the only route markers, so the button is also how you lay a path. - No HUD, no tutorial, no labels, no words. Camera framing and light do all the teaching. Definition of done: someone told nothing at all presses the button, then uses it to lead the companion across the area.
Not a clone — Journey 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.
Verdant Offline
Journey, but against bots — no netcode at all, set in a solarpunk city. Rendered in flat vector minimalism.
Build a browser game called "Verdant Offline". The pitch in one line: a adventure in the spirit of Journey, but against bots — no netcode at all, set in a solarpunk city. WHAT THIS IS Take the SHAPE of Journey — 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 Against bots — no netcode at all. Everything runs locally. No server, no lobby, no lag compensation. Bots use a small behaviour tree with a tunable reaction time. This single cut removes the hardest engineering in most multiplayer games. 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 solarpunk city. Abundance rather than scarcity, and conflict that comes from competing goods rather than from enemies. 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 Flat vector minimalism. Pure geometry, no textures, three colours plus white. All feedback carried by motion and scale rather than detail. 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 25 team-years to the counter on the homepage.
Then try these
Questions
How hard is Journey to rebuild with an AI agent?
Yes — every game is buildable at some scope. The question is how hard, and Journey is VERY HARD (4 of 5). You will get a good prototype. The product is what comes after. The sand shader and the Verlet scarf are well documented and an agent writes them fine; the product is a two-hour authored landscape lit so the mountain is always the answer, scored cue by cue to a walk nobody can time. Reckon on a project to something you can actually play — not to something that matches the 25 team-years thatgamecompany spent.
What makes Journey hard to rebuild?
The sand shader and the Verlet scarf are well documented and an agent writes them fine; the product is a two-hour authored landscape lit so the mountain is always the answer, scored cue by cue to a walk nobody can time. 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 one button that does three jobs at once — a weekend of work.
How long does it take to build a Journey clone?
Wrong question, and it is worth saying why. Nobody rebuilds Journey — the original took thatgamecompany on the order of 25 team-years, released in 2012 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 Journey?
The anonymous multiplayer design, which took years of iteration to get right. Austin Wintory's score, which the game is essentially built around. Sand rendering that was a genuine graphics research contribution. 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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