🖥️ PC2007Infinity WardBRUTAL

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare rebuild deck

BRUTAL

The hard part is not game design at all.

This is two products in one box and neither one is promptable. The campaign is a set-piece machine that works because roughly a hundred people spent two years placing triggers by hand, and the multiplayer is a reward-psychology system bolted to a networking stack that Infinity Ward operated at a scale you will not. What a prompt hands you cleanly is the reward layer, and an agent will build the killstreak ladder in an afternoon and it will feel good — which should tell you how much of this genre is bookkeeping rather than ballistics. Insist on the single event bus in your first paragraph, because retrofitting one after you have wired XP into six call sites is a rewrite.

Difficulty: BRUTAL · 5 of 5
First playable: A project
The original: 200 team-years
Released: 2007 · PC
Genre: Military Shooter

The one-shot build prompt

Build a military shooter with a multiplayer-style reward layer, played against bots. three.js, one small three-lane map, respawns on, no networking.

Requirements:
- Every gameplay event goes through one event bus: kill, assist, headshot, objective, streak reached, level up. XP awards, killstreak triggers, challenge progress, the announcer and the hit feed all subscribe to that bus, and none of them read game state directly. Get this wrong and the reward layer is unmaintainable inside a day. This is the architecture of the genre — the shooting is the easy part and the plumbing is the game.
- Killstreak ladder at three, five and seven kills without dying: a sweep that reveals enemies on the minimap, an airstrike you paint on the map, and a helicopter that engages on its own. The streak resets on death with no partial credit.
- Loadouts in JSON: two weapons, a grenade, one perk from each of three tiers. Weapons are hitscan with damage falloff by distance, per-weapon recoil recovery, and an aim-down-sights transition time that is your main balance lever.
- Bullets penetrate thin surfaces with a per-material damage reduction, so cover is soft and a plywood wall is a decision rather than a full stop.
- Bots that push the objective, use cover imperfectly on purpose, and vary reaction time by difficulty.
- Progression: XP per event, a level curve, unlocks gating weapons and perks.
- Feel: narrow FOV while aiming, hit markers, a kill feed, a two-second killcam.

Definition of done: I hit a five-kill streak, call the airstrike, and the XP ticker, the challenge popup and the announcer all fire off the same event.

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

What you lose

The campaign, which is several hundred hand-placed scripted triggers doing an impression of a war
Weapon feel: animation, layered audio and recoil tuned by people who do nothing else
Dedicated servers, lag compensation, and matchmaking that keeps a lobby full at 2am
The progression treadmill, balanced across every level and every unlock in between

What to steal

A reward ladder that resets on death

Compounding rewards that vanish the moment you die change how somebody plays mid-match without touching a difficulty setting. At zero you are reckless; at four you have quietly become a careful person, and the game never had to ask.

ScopeAn evening— build just this, not the game

Single self-contained HTML file, Canvas 2D, no build step. Top-down arena, one player, enemies that spawn continuously and shoot back. The mechanic is the streak: a counter that increments per kill and resets to zero on any death. Three thresholds grant escalating and qualitatively different rewards. One is passive (every enemy revealed on a minimap for twenty seconds), one is player-triggered (a strike you place with the mouse), one is autonomous (a friendly drone that fights on its own for twenty seconds). Each reward is single-use, consumed when triggered, and none of them survive a death. Show the current streak and the distance to the next threshold at all times, and flash the threshold hard as it lands. Definition of done: I reach the third threshold, notice I have started playing cautiously to protect it, and then lose all three at once.

Make it different

Not a clone — Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare 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.

Metro No Reflexes

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, but a puzzle version — same fiction, no reflexes, set in a superhero city. Rendered in soft pastel indie.

Themea superhero city

Anglea puzzle version — same fiction, no reflexes

Looksoft pastel indie

Build a browser game called "Metro No Reflexes".

The pitch in one line: a military shooter in the spirit of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, but a puzzle version — same fiction, no reflexes, set in a superhero city.

WHAT THIS IS
Take the SHAPE of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare — 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
A puzzle version — same fiction, no reflexes. Keep the world and the tension, remove execution difficulty entirely. Every encounter has a correct answer discoverable by thought.
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
Soft pastel indie. Desaturated pastels, round characters, gentle bloom, and UI handwriting that stays legible at small sizes.

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 200 team-years to the counter on the homepage.

Then try these

Or roll something nobody has built yet →

Questions

How hard is Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare to rebuild with an AI agent?

Yes — every game is buildable at some scope. The question is how hard, and Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare is BRUTAL (5 of 5). The hard part is not game design at all. Two un-promptable products in one box: a campaign that is several hundred hand-placed triggers, and a multiplayer that is dedicated servers, lag compensation and a matchmaker keeping lobbies full at 2am. Reckon on a project to something you can actually play — not to something that matches the 200 team-years Infinity Ward spent.

What makes Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare hard to rebuild?

Two un-promptable products in one box: a campaign that is several hundred hand-placed triggers, and a multiplayer that is dedicated servers, lag compensation and a matchmaker keeping lobbies full at 2am. 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 a reward ladder that resets on death — an evening of work.

How long does it take to build a Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare clone?

Wrong question, and it is worth saying why. Nobody rebuilds Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare — the original took Infinity Ward on the order of 200 team-years, released in 2007 on PC. 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 Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare?

The campaign, which is several hundred hand-placed scripted triggers doing an impression of a war. Weapon feel: animation, layered audio and recoil tuned by people who do nothing else. Dedicated servers, lag compensation, and matchmaking that keeps a lobby full at 2am. 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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