📱 Mobile2014Hipster WhaleFIDDLY

Crossy Road rebuild deck

FIDDLY

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

Both hard parts are about forgiveness rather than difficulty: the one-deep input queue and the log-relative position. An agent will implement hops as instantaneous cell changes, which is playable and completely flavourless, so insist on the tween and the queue up front. Hipster Whale's real invention was not the hopping, it was the prize machine and the opt-in video ad that fed it. Three people shipped the whole thing in about twelve weeks, which is the narrowest effort gap in this batch.

Difficulty: FIDDLY · 2 of 5
First playable: A weekend
The original: 1 team-years
Released: 2014 · Mobile
Genre: Arcade Hopper

The one-shot build prompt

Build a grid-hopping arcade game in the browser: single HTML file, three.js via import map, orthographic camera at a fixed isometric angle, portrait, 60fps on a mid-range Android.

Requirements:
- The world is an endless strip of rows generated ahead of the player: grass with obstacles, roads with vehicles, rivers with logs and pads, and rails with trains that telegraph 1.2 seconds ahead via a warning light.
- Movement is discrete. Tap hops one row forward, swipe hops sideways or back. Each hop is a 180ms tween with a slight arc. Input arriving mid-hop is queued one deep and fires on arrival. Without that queue, fast players silently lose inputs and the game reads as unresponsive rather than difficult.
- On a river row the player's position becomes an offset relative to the log it landed on, so it drifts with the log. Evaluate drowning on hop arrival, not per frame, or landing near a log edge kills people at random.
- River rows need a solvability check at generation time: some reachable sequence of logs or pads must cross every stretch of water.
- The camera creeps forward continuously and kills anything it leaves behind. Idle too long on safe ground and a bird takes you.
- Row weights, vehicle speeds and spawn gaps in JSON.
- Everything is boxes. Do not attempt characters.

Definition of done: I can cross a four-row river by riding logs, and a sideways input queued during a hop is never dropped.

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

What you lose

The unlockable character roster, several hundred deep, each one carrying its own small joke
The prize machine and the ad economy that funded a free game without a paywall
Licensed crossover characters, which took business development rather than code
The voxel art direction, which is much harder to get right than 'make it boxes' implies

What to steal

A creeping death line instead of a timer

A countdown is a number players ignore until it reaches zero. A line advancing through the same space they occupy is pressure they read continuously and can push back against, and it self-balances for free: play well and you buy slack, dither and it takes the slack back.

ScopeAn evening— build just this, not the game

Build a creeping-death-line toy. Single self-contained HTML file, Canvas 2D, no dependencies, no build step.

- A field scrolling past a character who moves in discrete hops. No timer, no countdown, no clock anywhere in the interface.
- A kill boundary sits behind the character and advances continuously. Its speed is a base rate plus a term pulling it toward a target distance behind the player: fall behind and it closes faster, run ahead and it eases off, but it never stops and never reverses. That one equation replaces every timer you would otherwise write.
- The margin between boundary and character is the only pressure readout. Draw it as the boundary itself plus a shading gradient over the ground it is about to take.
- Sliders for base rate, catch-up strength and target distance, and a strip chart of margin against time.

Definition of done: standing still kills me within eight seconds with no counter on screen, and a strong run visibly widens my margin without ever letting me outrun the line.

Make it different

Not a clone — Crossy Road 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.

Multi-Cam No Reflexes

Crossy Road, but a puzzle version — same fiction, no reflexes, set in a sitcom apartment block. Rendered in anime cel-shade.

Themea sitcom apartment block

Anglea puzzle version — same fiction, no reflexes

Lookanime cel-shade

Build a browser game called "Multi-Cam No Reflexes".

The pitch in one line: a arcade hopper in the spirit of Crossy Road, but a puzzle version — same fiction, no reflexes, set in a sitcom apartment block.

WHAT THIS IS
Take the SHAPE of Crossy Road — 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 sitcom apartment block. A few rooms, recurring neighbours and problems that reset next episode — unless you let continuity bite.
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
Anime cel-shade. Hard ink outlines, flat colour fills, specular blobs on hair and metal, and camera cuts that feel like episode storyboards.

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 1 team-years to the counter on the homepage.

Then try these

Or roll something nobody has built yet →

Questions

How hard is Crossy Road to rebuild with an AI agent?

Yes — every game is buildable at some scope. The question is how hard, and Crossy Road is FIDDLY (2 of 5). You will get it, but one specific system will fight you. Two forgiveness details decide whether it reads as responsive or broken: a one-deep input queue during the hop, and the player's position stored relative to the log it is riding rather than in world space. Reckon on a weekend to something you can actually play — not to something that matches the 1 team-years Hipster Whale spent.

What makes Crossy Road hard to rebuild?

Two forgiveness details decide whether it reads as responsive or broken: a one-deep input queue during the hop, and the player's position stored relative to the log it is riding rather than in world space. 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 a creeping death line instead of a timer — an evening of work.

How long does it take to build a Crossy Road clone?

Wrong question, and it is worth saying why. Nobody rebuilds Crossy Road — the original took Hipster Whale on the order of 1 team-years, released in 2014 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 Crossy Road?

The unlockable character roster, several hundred deep, each one carrying its own small joke. The prize machine and the ad economy that funded a free game without a paywall. Licensed crossover characters, which took business development rather than code. 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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