🕹️ PS42015PsyonixBRUTALRocket League rebuild deck
BRUTAL
Local car-football is a genuinely great weekend, and everything left after that is deterministic physics netcode at 120Hz across continents, which is a specialism rather than a task.
The hard part is not game design at all.
Genuinely promptable, and the local version is a great weekend — car-ball physics is much simpler than it looks because Psyonix chose predictability over realism everywhere. It is a KINDA for one reason: Rocket League is a competitive online game, and physics netcode at this precision is one of the harder problems in the industry.
- Difficulty
- BRUTAL · 5 of 5
- First playable
- A project
- The original
- 50 team-years
- Released
- 2015 · PS4
- Genre
- Sports
Build a car-soccer game with arcade vehicle physics. three.js plus a physics engine, local split-screen or hot-seat first, networking second. Requirements: - Car physics that are deliberately arcade, not simulation: raycast wheels rather than colliders, strong artificial downforce, instant-response steering with a speed-scaled turn radius, and a handbrake drift with a much lower lateral friction coefficient. Predictability beats realism — a player must know exactly where the car will be. - Boost: consumable meter, constant forward force, higher top speed while active, pads on the field that refill it. Boost is the entire economy of the game. - Aerial control: while airborne, the car has full pitch/yaw/roll on the sticks, and jump gives a second dodge-impulse in the input direction within 1.5 seconds. Dodging must convert directional input into a strong horizontal impulse plus a flip animation — this is the mechanic the entire skill ceiling is built on. - Ball: a sphere with high restitution, low friction, and an artificially heavy mass relative to the car so hits feel solid. Add a small ball-cam magnetism and a hit-force curve tuned so a fast car sends it a satisfying distance. - Ball-cam toggle: camera frames the car and ball together, which is how the game is actually played. - Arena with curved corner walls the cars can drive on, goals with a detection volume, a match timer, and overtime. - Feel: supersonic trail at top speed, boost flame and audio pitch, screen shake on ball contact, and a slow-motion replay on a goal. Definition of done: I hit the ball in mid-air after a dodge, and it goes exactly where I expected.
- Netcode good enough for a physics game at 120Hz across continents
- Car and ball physics tuned over a decade to be perfectly predictable
- Matchmaking, ranks, and the population that makes a competitive game exist
- Ten years of a skill ceiling nobody has reached
Raycast wheels instead of wheel colliders
A rigid body plus four downward rays gives you suspension, grip and ground contact in about forty lines, and it never wedges itself on a kerb the way a mesh collider does. Every arcade vehicle you have ever enjoyed is this, plus a shameless amount of fake downforce.
ScopeA weekend— build just this, not the game
Build a vehicle-feel toy: one car on an uneven ground plane. Single HTML file, three.js from a CDN import map, no build step. Write the vehicle yourself — do not use a physics engine's built-in vehicle controller. The car is one rigid body plus four suspension raycasts pointing down from the corners. Each ray finds the ground and applies a spring force proportional to compression, minus a damper term times compression velocity. Steering rotates the front two ray directions. Drive force is applied at the contact points along each ray's forward vector. Lateral friction is a capped force opposing sideways slip at each contact, and that cap is the number you will spend the day tuning. Add downforce that scales with speed, far more than a real car would have, and a handbrake that drops the rear lateral cap to a quarter. Expose spring rate, damping, grip caps and downforce as live sliders. Definition of done: hitting a bump at speed makes the body lean and settle, and the car never snags on the geometry.
Not a clone — Rocket League 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.
Orbital Teletype
Rocket League, but text-only, in a terminal, set in deep space. Rendered in N64 fog and vertex colour.
Build a browser game called "Orbital Teletype". The pitch in one line: a sports in the spirit of Rocket League, but text-only, in a terminal, set in deep space. WHAT THIS IS Take the SHAPE of Rocket League — 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 Deep space. Vacuum, delay and no help coming. Sound only travels through the hull. 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.
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 50 team-years to the counter on the homepage.
Then try these
Questions
How hard is Rocket League to rebuild with an AI agent?
Yes — every game is buildable at some scope. The question is how hard, and Rocket League is BRUTAL (5 of 5). The hard part is not game design at all. Local car-football is a genuinely great weekend, and everything left after that is deterministic physics netcode at 120Hz across continents, which is a specialism rather than a task. Reckon on a project to something you can actually play — not to something that matches the 50 team-years Psyonix spent.
What makes Rocket League hard to rebuild?
Local car-football is a genuinely great weekend, and everything left after that is deterministic physics netcode at 120Hz across continents, which is a specialism rather than a task. 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 raycast wheels instead of wheel colliders — a weekend of work.
How long does it take to build a Rocket League clone?
Wrong question, and it is worth saying why. Nobody rebuilds Rocket League — the original took Psyonix on the order of 50 team-years, released in 2015 on PS4. 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 Rocket League?
Netcode good enough for a physics game at 120Hz across continents. Car and ball physics tuned over a decade to be perfectly predictable. Matchmaking, ranks, and the population that makes a competitive game exist. 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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