🖥️ PC2019HempuliHARDBaba Is You rebuild deck
HARD
The full re-scan rule parser is one lovely afternoon of code; the game is two hundred levels whose solution is a sentence you did not know was legal, and being that clever once is hard enough.
You will get the loop working. Then the real work starts.
The rule parser is a genuinely lovely afternoon of code, and it is why this earns a yes: a full re-scan every tick is both correct and comfortably fast at 20x20. Where agents fall over is the push chain, which they write recursively and half-apply, so a blocked push still nudges the first block. Insist the whole chain resolves before anything mutates. Then you will spend three days making six decent levels and understand exactly where the two years went.
- Difficulty
- HARD · 3 of 5
- First playable
- A weekend
- The original
- 2 team-years
- Released
- 2019 · PC
- Genre
- Grid Puzzle
Build a grid puzzle game where the rules are physical word tiles sitting on the board. Single self-contained HTML file, Canvas 2D, no build step. Requirements: - Tile grid, one move per arrow key. Everything is an object: characters, walls, and the text tiles themselves. - After every move, rebuild the entire ruleset from scratch by scanning all rows and columns for adjacent NOUN IS PROPERTY or NOUN IS NOUN triples. That scan is the only source of truth. Never patch rules incrementally when a word shifts — this is the one thing to get right before anything else works. - Push chains resolve all-or-nothing: walk the line of pushables along the direction of travel; if the far end is blocked, nothing moves. Text tiles are always pushable. - Properties: YOU, STOP, PUSH, WIN, SINK, DEFEAT, FLOAT. Zero YOU objects loses the level; multiple YOU objects all move in the same tick. - NOUN IS NOUN transforms every instance. A noun declared to be itself cannot be transformed by any other rule. Resolve movement, then transformation, then check the win condition. - Undo is a stack of full board snapshots on Z, unlimited depth. R restarts instantly. - Levels are JSON: a 2D array of tile ids plus a name. Ship ten, ordered so the parser teaches itself. Definition of done: I can push a word out of a STOP rule, walk through the wall it was protecting on the next move, then press Z twice and get both the rule and my position back.
- Two hundred-odd handmade levels where the answer is a sentence you did not know was legal
- The difficulty curve that teaches an entire parser without one tutorial popup
- Arvi Teikari's chunky sprites and the bleepy soundtrack that makes a rules engine charming
Push chains that gather, then commit
Walk the chain, decide, then apply — the same two-phase shape as a database transaction, and the reason a blocked push does not leave the first crate nudged half a tile. Agents reach for recursion that mutates as it descends, which survives until the fifth crate, so make atomicity the spec rather than the bug report.
ScopeAn evening— build just this, not the game
Build a grid-pushing toy in a single self-contained HTML file. Canvas 2D, no build step, no dependencies. - A 16x16 grid holding a player, walls, and plenty of pushable crates, some marked heavy — a chain containing more than three heavy crates is refused. - One move per arrow key, resolved in two strict phases. Phase one WALKS the line of occupied cells in the direction of travel, collecting the chain, and terminates on an empty cell (commit), a wall (abort), the grid edge (abort) or the heavy rule (abort). Nothing mutates during the walk. - Phase two applies moves only on commit, far end first. - No recursive function may write to the board while descending. On abort the board must be bit-for-bit identical to before the key press — assert this with a cheap hash comparison in a debug mode. - A debug key highlights the chain the last press collected and prints commit or abort with the reason. Definition of done: five crates backed against a wall do not shift a single pixel, and the same five with one empty cell beyond them all move exactly one cell.
Not a clone — Baba Is You 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.
Open Ticket Offline
Baba Is You, but against bots — no netcode at all, set in solo travel. Rendered in Game Boy four-shade green.
Build a browser game called "Open Ticket Offline". The pitch in one line: a grid puzzle in the spirit of Baba Is You, but against bots — no netcode at all, set in solo travel. WHAT THIS IS Take the SHAPE of Baba Is You — 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 Against bots — no netcode at all. Everything runs locally. No server, no lobby, no lag compensation. Bots use a small behaviour tree with a tunable reaction time. This single cut removes the hardest engineering in most multiplayer games. 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 Solo travel. Trains, hostels, language barriers and a fixed budget. The journey is the level design. 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 Game Boy four-shade green. A strict four-colour palette, 160×144 internal resolution scaled up with nearest-neighbour, and no anti-aliasing anywhere. 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 2 team-years to the counter on the homepage.
Then try these
Questions
How hard is Baba Is You to rebuild with an AI agent?
Yes — every game is buildable at some scope. The question is how hard, and Baba Is You is HARD (3 of 5). You will get the loop working. Then the real work starts. The full re-scan rule parser is one lovely afternoon of code; the game is two hundred levels whose solution is a sentence you did not know was legal, and being that clever once is hard enough. Reckon on a weekend to something you can actually play — not to something that matches the 2 team-years Hempuli spent.
What makes Baba Is You hard to rebuild?
The full re-scan rule parser is one lovely afternoon of code; the game is two hundred levels whose solution is a sentence you did not know was legal, and being that clever once is hard enough. 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 push chains that gather, then commit — an evening of work.
How long does it take to build a Baba Is You clone?
Wrong question, and it is worth saying why. Nobody rebuilds Baba Is You — the original took Hempuli on the order of 2 team-years, released in 2019 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 Baba Is You?
Two hundred-odd handmade levels where the answer is a sentence you did not know was legal. The difficulty curve that teaches an entire parser without one tutorial popup. Arvi Teikari's chunky sprites and the bleepy soundtrack that makes a rules engine charming. 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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