🖥️ PC2016Blizzard EntertainmentBRUTAL

Overwatch rebuild deck

BRUTAL

The hard part is not game design at all.

Overwatch is what was left standing when Blizzard cancelled Titan, and the 300 team-years below counts only Overwatch's own run from 2013 to launch in May 2016 — Titan's much larger bill is not in that number. A prompt gets you the ability system in an afternoon and the component architecture is the right shape for it. It does not get you twenty-one characters readable in a half-second glance across a room, which is the craft, or netcode where a continuous beam and a hitscan headshot both feel fair to the person on the receiving end. That is why this is a NO where TF2 is a KINDA: TF2's best mechanic falls out of the physics for free, and Overwatch's falls out of an art department.

Difficulty: BRUTAL · 5 of 5
First playable: A project
The original: 300 team-years
Released: 2016 · PC
Genre: Hero Shooter

The one-shot build prompt

Build a hero shooter prototype: six heroes, one objective map, bots on the other team. three.js, local only.

Requirements:
- Abilities are components, not subclasses. A hero is a list of components plus a stat block, both in JSON, and the same Projectile, Beam, Barrier, Heal-over-time, Dash and Area-denial components are reused across heroes with different numbers. The moment a hero becomes a class with bespoke methods you have signed up for combinatorial bugs, and every hero after the sixth costs more than the one before it. This is the architectural decision the whole prototype rests on and it is very hard to retrofit.
- Every ability has its own cooldown, shown as a discrete icon, and cooldowns start on cast end rather than cast start.
- One ultimate per hero on a charge meter that fills from damage dealt, healing done and damage absorbed — never from kills. A player losing every fight must still be building toward something.
- Six heroes across three roles: two who deal damage in different geometries, two who keep people alive, two who take space. Include one deployable barrier that stops projectiles but not bodies, because geometry a player can create is the most interesting thing in the genre.
- Hero switching on respawn, retaining ultimate charge at a reduced percentage, so the counter-pick is a live decision rather than a lobby decision.
- One map with an objective that only ticks when contested by a single team.

Definition of done: I lose a fight, switch to a hero that answers whatever killed me, and the game becomes different rather than merely harder.

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

What you lose

Twenty-one launch heroes, each with a kit, a silhouette, a voice and a balance history
The character art and animation budget, which is where most of the money went and where most of the appeal lives
Favour-the-shooter netcode with rollback, so a beam weapon and a hitscan headshot both feel fair at 80ms
Matchmaking, ranked seasons, and the population needed to fill a twelve-player lobby in ten seconds

What to steal

Play of the Game: a scored replay buffer

Keep the last fifteen seconds of world state in a ring buffer, score every moment as it happens, then play back the highest-scoring window with a camera on it. It is about a hundred lines, it drops into anything with entities, and it is the difference between a project that ends and a project people send each other clips of.

ScopeA weekend— build just this, not the game

Single self-contained HTML file, Canvas 2D, no build step. Any small action game will do: top-down arena, one player, enemies. Every frame, write a snapshot of each entity's position, rotation and visual state into a fixed-size ring buffer sized for fifteen seconds. Separately maintain a per-frame score from notable events: hits landed, near misses, kills clustered in time, surviving at low health. When the run ends, find the fifteen-second window with the highest total score and replay it from the buffer, with a camera that frames the player and drops to half speed at the peak-scoring frame. The replay must read from the buffer and use the same draw code as live play, with no second renderer. Definition of done: I die, and the replay picks the moment I would have picked myself.

Make it different

Not a clone — Overwatch 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 Hands Off

Overwatch, but an auto-battler — you set up, it plays itself, set in a space opera. Rendered in flat vector minimalism.

Themea space opera

Anglean auto-battler — you set up, it plays itself

Lookflat vector minimalism

Build a browser game called "Starfall Hands Off".

The pitch in one line: a hero shooter in the spirit of Overwatch, but an auto-battler — you set up, it plays itself, set in a space opera.

WHAT THIS IS
Take the SHAPE of Overwatch — 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 auto-battler — you set up, it plays itself. The player only makes decisions between rounds. Combat resolves deterministically from board state and seed, so a replay is exact.
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
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.

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 300 team-years to the counter on the homepage.

Then try these

Or roll something nobody has built yet →

Questions

How hard is Overwatch to rebuild with an AI agent?

Yes — every game is buildable at some scope. The question is how hard, and Overwatch is BRUTAL (5 of 5). The hard part is not game design at all. The component-based ability system is an afternoon and the correct architecture; the product is favour-the-shooter rollback netcode where a beam and a hitscan headshot both feel fair at 80ms, and twenty-one silhouettes readable across a room. Reckon on a project to something you can actually play — not to something that matches the 300 team-years Blizzard Entertainment spent.

What makes Overwatch hard to rebuild?

The component-based ability system is an afternoon and the correct architecture; the product is favour-the-shooter rollback netcode where a beam and a hitscan headshot both feel fair at 80ms, and twenty-one silhouettes readable across a room. 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 play of the game: a scored replay buffer — a weekend of work.

How long does it take to build a Overwatch clone?

Wrong question, and it is worth saying why. Nobody rebuilds Overwatch — the original took Blizzard Entertainment on the order of 300 team-years, released in 2016 on PC. 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 Overwatch?

Twenty-one launch heroes, each with a kit, a silhouette, a voice and a balance history. The character art and animation budget, which is where most of the money went and where most of the appeal lives. Favour-the-shooter netcode with rollback, so a beam weapon and a hitscan headshot both feel fair at 80ms. 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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