🎯 PS52020Team AsobiBRUTALAstro's Playroom rebuild deck
BRUTAL
The product is a controller you do not have — the Gamepad API gives you one crude rumble motor where the game uses a voice-coil array and adaptive triggers.
The hard part is not game design at all.
Included specifically because it is the clearest example of a game you cannot vibecode: the product is a hardware feature. The Gamepad API gives you dual-rumble, which is to DualSense haptics roughly what a doorbell is to an orchestra. Build it for the controller design exercise, which is genuinely interesting, and accept that the good version needs a PS5.
- Difficulty
- BRUTAL · 5 of 5
- First playable
- A weekend
- The original
- 30 team-years
- Released
- 2020 · PS5
- Genre
- Platformer
Build a 3D platformer tech demo whose theme is haptic feedback. three.js, gamepad-first, using the Gamepad API's dual-rumble actuator. Requirements: - Haptics as the core design, not polish. Build a haptic event system where every surface and action has a defined rumble signature: metal grating is a fast high-frequency buzz, sand is a low broad rumble, glass is a sharp tick, ice is near-silence. Footstep haptics must be driven by the animation event, not a timer. - Different traversal modes each with a distinct haptic identity: walking, a rocket-boost hover with a rising low rumble, a spring-jump with a sharp double pulse, and a rolling ball mode with continuous surface-dependent feedback. - Character controller: capsule kinematics with coyote time, jump buffering, variable jump height, and a hover with a fuel meter. - Collectibles that are physical puzzles rather than pickups — a hidden object revealed by a rumble that intensifies as you approach, so the haptics are literally a game mechanic. - Materials system where surface type drives haptics, footstep audio, particle colour and decal type from one shared data table. - Feel budget: every single interaction gets squash-and-stretch, an anticipation frame, and a particle. This game is 90% polish by design — treat that as a requirement, not a nice-to-have. - Graceful degradation to audio-only cues when no gamepad with haptics is connected. Definition of done: I can identify the surface I am standing on with my eyes shut.
- The DualSense haptics and adaptive triggers, which are the entire reason this game exists
- Thirty years of PlayStation history as the theme, which you have no rights to
- Nintendo-grade animation polish on every single interaction
- A hardware feature that has no browser equivalent
Three input forgiveness windows
The polish everyone credits to animation is mostly three timers: coyote time, an input buffer, and a jump you can cut short. They cost an evening, they are invisible when present and intolerable when absent, and they belong in anything with a jump, a dodge or a parry.
ScopeAn evening— build just this, not the game
Build a jump-feel test bench in a single self-contained HTML file. Canvas 2D, no build step, no dependencies. - A capsule character, a few platforms and ledges, run and jump only, fixed timestep with an accumulator. - Three forgiveness systems, each with its own slider and its own on/off switch: coyote time (a jump is still granted for N ms after leaving ground), input buffering (a jump pressed up to N ms before landing fires on touchdown), and variable height (releasing the button while rising multiplies upward velocity by a factor). - Asymmetric gravity: a separate, higher multiplier while falling than while rising, also on a slider. - A debug strip along the bottom scrolls the last two seconds of button presses and grounded state, with a coloured mark on every jump that was granted by coyote time or by the buffer rather than by a clean grounded press. - One key toggles all forgiveness off at once. Definition of done: with everything off I miss ledge jumps I was certain I made, with it on I do not, and the strip names which window rescued each one.
Not a clone — Astro's Playroom 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.
Matchday Play By Mail
Astro's Playroom, but asynchronous multiplayer — no live server, set in pro sports. Rendered in claymation with baked light.
Build a browser game called "Matchday Play By Mail". The pitch in one line: a platformer in the spirit of Astro's Playroom, but asynchronous multiplayer — no live server, set in pro sports. WHAT THIS IS Take the SHAPE of Astro's Playroom — 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 Pro sports. Rules of a real sport as the combat system, a crowd that reacts, and a season structure even if you only ship one match. 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 Claymation with baked light. Soft rounded geometry, a fingerprint-style normal texture, stop-motion timing at 12fps for characters while the camera stays at 60. 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 30 team-years to the counter on the homepage.
Then try these
Questions
How hard is Astro's Playroom to rebuild with an AI agent?
Yes — every game is buildable at some scope. The question is how hard, and Astro's Playroom is BRUTAL (5 of 5). The hard part is not game design at all. The product is a controller you do not have — the Gamepad API gives you one crude rumble motor where the game uses a voice-coil array and adaptive triggers. Reckon on a weekend to something you can actually play — not to something that matches the 30 team-years Team Asobi spent.
What makes Astro's Playroom hard to rebuild?
The product is a controller you do not have — the Gamepad API gives you one crude rumble motor where the game uses a voice-coil array and adaptive triggers. 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 three input forgiveness windows — an evening of work.
How long does it take to build a Astro's Playroom clone?
Wrong question, and it is worth saying why. Nobody rebuilds Astro's Playroom — the original took Team Asobi on the order of 30 team-years, released in 2020 on PS5. 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 Astro's Playroom?
The DualSense haptics and adaptive triggers, which are the entire reason this game exists. Thirty years of PlayStation history as the theme, which you have no rights to. Nintendo-grade animation polish on every single interaction. 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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