📱 Mobile2009RovioHARDAngry Birds rebuild deck
HARD
Matter.js hands you the physics in an evening, so the entire game is levels, and without a level editor in the same prompt you will hand-edit JSON coordinates and quit at level four.
You will get the loop working. Then the real work starts.
The physics is free — Matter.js does it and an agent wires it up in an evening. The KINDA is that Angry Birds is a level-design product, and the honest deliverable from one prompt is an engine plus a level editor. Ask for the editor in the same prompt; without it you will hand-edit JSON coordinates and give up on level four.
- Difficulty
- HARD · 3 of 5
- First playable
- A weekend
- The original
- 8 team-years
- Released
- 2009 · Mobile
- Genre
- Physics Puzzle
Build a physics-based projectile puzzle game in the Angry Birds mould. Matter.js for physics, Canvas for rendering. Requirements: - Slingshot: drag back from the launch point, show a dotted trajectory preview, release to fire with impulse proportional to drag distance, clamped. The preview must be computed by stepping the physics forward, not by a parabola formula, so it stays accurate. - Destructible structures assembled from wood, stone and glass bodies with different density, friction and restitution. Each body has health, takes damage from impact force above a threshold, and shatters into smaller debris bodies when destroyed. Cap total bodies so the sim stays at 60fps. - Three projectile types with an ability triggered by a second tap mid-flight: one splits into three, one accelerates straight down, one explodes. - Camera: follows the projectile in flight with a slight lead, then pans back to the slingshot once everything sleeps. Detecting "everything has settled" via the physics engine's sleep states is what makes the pacing work. - Level format as JSON: body positions, types, and target positions. Include a level editor page that lets me drag bodies and export the JSON — you will need it, since levels are the actual work. - Scoring: points per target and per block destroyed, minus unused projectiles, mapped to one to three stars. - Feel: chunky impact sounds by material, dust puffs at contact points, and a slow-motion moment on the final target. Definition of done: a tower collapses in a way that surprises me, and the trajectory preview matches where the bird actually goes.
- Hundreds of hand-designed levels, which is the whole product
- The character design and the licensing empire that came with it
- Deterministic physics — your three-star solution may not replay identically
- Level tuning where every level has exactly one satisfying solution
Preview by running the real simulation
The aim preview and the actual shot must be the same code, or they will quietly disagree the first day you add drag or a bounce. A pure fixed-step integrator you can run forward on a copy of the state buys you the preview, the replay and enemy lookahead for the price of one function.
ScopeAn evening— build just this, not the game
Build a launch-and-predict toy in a single self-contained HTML file. Canvas 2D, no build step, no dependencies. - Write one pure function step(state, dt) returning the next projectile state: gravity, quadratic air drag, and restitution bounces off a handful of static line segments and circles. dt is fixed at 1/120 and decoupled from the render loop with an accumulator. - Drag back from a launch point to aim, with impulse proportional to drag distance and clamped. - The dotted trajectory preview is produced by copying the current state and calling that SAME function 240 times, plotting every eighth result. There must be no closed-form parabola anywhere in the file. - On release, fire for real through the same function. - Keep the previous actual flight path drawn as a faint line for comparison. - Sliders for gravity, drag and restitution that the preview picks up immediately with no extra code. Definition of done: the fired path lands exactly on the previewed dots, including after the first bounce, and still matches after I change gravity mid-session.
Not a clone — Angry Birds 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. 24,360 ways to land.
Brasswork Turn Order
Angry Birds, but turn-based instead of real-time, set in steampunk. Rendered in glitch datamosh.
Build a browser game called "Brasswork Turn Order". The pitch in one line: a physics puzzle in the spirit of Angry Birds, but turn-based instead of real-time, set in steampunk. WHAT THIS IS Take the SHAPE of Angry Birds — 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 Turn-based instead of real-time. Time only advances when the player acts. Removes every timing, netcode and animation-blending problem and turns reflexes into decisions. 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 Steampunk. Visible mechanism everywhere. Anything that moves does so because a gear you can see is turning it, and pressure is a resource. 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 Glitch datamosh. I-frame tears, colour channel offsets, freeze-frame smears on damage, and UI that corrupts under stress. 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.
- Matter.js — the 2D physics engine to build this on
- Box2D — the reference implementation of this genre
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 8 team-years to the counter on the homepage.
Then try these
Questions
How hard is Angry Birds to rebuild with an AI agent?
Yes — every game is buildable at some scope. The question is how hard, and Angry Birds is HARD (3 of 5). You will get the loop working. Then the real work starts. Matter.js hands you the physics in an evening, so the entire game is levels, and without a level editor in the same prompt you will hand-edit JSON coordinates and quit at level four. Reckon on a weekend to something you can actually play — not to something that matches the 8 team-years Rovio spent.
What makes Angry Birds hard to rebuild?
Matter.js hands you the physics in an evening, so the entire game is levels, and without a level editor in the same prompt you will hand-edit JSON coordinates and quit at level four. That is why it sits at HARD rather than a tier either side of it. If you want the idea without the project, the transferable part is preview by running the real simulation — an evening of work.
How long does it take to build a Angry Birds clone?
Wrong question, and it is worth saying why. Nobody rebuilds Angry Birds — the original took Rovio on the order of 8 team-years, released in 2009 on Mobile. 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 Angry Birds?
Hundreds of hand-designed levels, which is the whole product. The character design and the licensing empire that came with it. Deterministic physics — your three-star solution may not replay identically. 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.
One email when new games go on the list. No other reason to email you, ever.