🖥️ PC2022poncleFIDDLY

Vampire Survivors rebuild deck

FIDDLY

Nothing is hard until the screen fills, at which point a missing spatial hash and any allocation in the game loop collapse the frame rate at exactly the minute the run gets good.

You will get it, but one specific system will fight you.

The best value-per-hour build on this entire list. The mechanics are simple enough that one prompt genuinely produces the loop, and the loop is so strong that a rough version is already fun. Spend your review time on the spatial hash and the object pooling — that is the only place this can fail, and it fails at exactly the moment the game gets good.

Difficulty: FIDDLY · 2 of 5
First playable: A weekend
The original: 2 team-years
Released: 2022 · PC
Genre: Roguelite

The one-shot build prompt

Build a survivors-like auto-battler roguelite. Canvas 2D or PixiJS, single-page, 60fps with 2000+ entities.

Requirements:
- The player only moves. All weapons fire automatically on their own cooldowns. Never add an attack button.
- Enemy spawning from just off-screen in waves defined by a timeline: minute 0 slow zombies, minute 3 fast bats, minute 7 a swarm, minute 10 an elite, on a 30-minute run. Data-drive this timeline as JSON.
- Performance is the design constraint: object pools for enemies, bullets and pickups with zero allocation in the game loop, spatial hash grid for collisions (never O(n^2)), and a single sprite batch draw. Target 2000 enemies at 60fps and profile it.
- Six weapons with genuinely different geometry: an aura, a projectile that pierces, a boomerang, a spread shot, an orbiting satellite, a lightning strike on a random nearby enemy. Each has levels 1-8 modifying damage, area, cooldown, projectile count.
- Level-up on XP gems: pause, offer four random upgrades from the available pool, resume. This screen is the whole loop — make it snappy, keyboard-navigable, and never repeat a maxed weapon.
- Feel: hit-stop of 40ms on big hits, damage numbers that arc and fade, screen shake scaled to damage, and a gem-vacuum when you pick up a magnet.
- Death screen showing DPS per weapon and a run timeline.

Definition of done: at minute 15 the screen is a wall of enemies, my build deletes them, and the frame rate holds.

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

What you lose

Weapon evolutions and the unlock web, which is the actual long-tail content
Balance across 20+ weapons where every build stays viable
The audio design, which does an enormous amount of the dopamine work
Ten thousand enemies on screen without dropping frames

What to steal

orthogonal stat modifiers, never edited base values

You do not author twenty weapons, you author six weapons and eight orthogonal modifiers and let the multiplication produce the builds. Keeping the pipeline pure — base row untouched, every modifier removable by source — is also the only reason a temporary buff can expire without quietly corrupting your numbers over a long run.

ScopeA weekend— build just this, not the game

Build a stat pipeline where upgrades are orthogonal modifiers rather than edits to base numbers. Single self-contained HTML file, Canvas 2D, no build step.

- Three weapons that fire automatically, each defined by a base stat row: damage, cooldown, area, projectiles, pierce, speed.
- Every effective stat is recomputed each frame in a fixed order: base, flat adds, summed percentage adds, multiplicative factors, clamp. The base row is never mutated.
- Each modifier carries a source id and an optional expiry, so a 10-second buff, a permanent pickup and an aura from a nearby object can be added and removed in any order.
- Eight generic modifiers, none weapon-specific: +area, -cooldown, +projectiles, +pierce and so on. The combinatorics are the content, not the weapon count.
- Debug panel: for the hovered weapon, list every active modifier, its source, and the running value after each pipeline stage.

Definition of done: applying, expiring and reapplying the same buff in any order returns the exact starting number, and one modifier visibly changes all three weapons.

Make it different

Not a clone — Vampire Survivors 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.

Metro Play By Mail

Vampire Survivors, but asynchronous multiplayer — no live server, set in a superhero city. Rendered in isometric voxel.

Themea superhero city

Angleasynchronous multiplayer — no live server

Lookisometric voxel

Build a browser game called "Metro Play By Mail".

The pitch in one line: a roguelite in the spirit of Vampire Survivors, but asynchronous multiplayer — no live server, set in a superhero city.

WHAT THIS IS
Take the SHAPE of Vampire Survivors — 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
Asynchronous multiplayer — no live server. Players take turns hours apart against stored state. You get real multiplayer with none of the real-time netcode.
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 superhero city. Powers that are verbs, a city built to be traversed with them, and collateral damage the player has to care about.
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
Isometric voxel. A 2:1 isometric projection over a voxel grid, with correct depth sorting and ambient occlusion baked at chunk boundaries.

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 2 team-years to the counter on the homepage.

Then try these

Or roll something nobody has built yet →

Questions

How hard is Vampire Survivors to rebuild with an AI agent?

Yes — every game is buildable at some scope. The question is how hard, and Vampire Survivors is FIDDLY (2 of 5). You will get it, but one specific system will fight you. Nothing is hard until the screen fills, at which point a missing spatial hash and any allocation in the game loop collapse the frame rate at exactly the minute the run gets good. Reckon on a weekend to something you can actually play — not to something that matches the 2 team-years poncle spent.

What makes Vampire Survivors hard to rebuild?

Nothing is hard until the screen fills, at which point a missing spatial hash and any allocation in the game loop collapse the frame rate at exactly the minute the run gets good. That is why it sits at FIDDLY rather than a tier either side of it. If you want the idea without the project, the transferable part is orthogonal stat modifiers, never edited base values — a weekend of work.

How long does it take to build a Vampire Survivors clone?

Wrong question, and it is worth saying why. Nobody rebuilds Vampire Survivors — the original took poncle on the order of 2 team-years, released in 2022 on PC. What you can do is reach something playable and genuinely yours in about a weekend, 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 Vampire Survivors?

Weapon evolutions and the unlock web, which is the actual long-tail content. Balance across 20+ weapons where every build stays viable. The audio design, which does an enormous amount of the dopamine work. 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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