🎯 PS52020Bluepoint Games and Japan StudioVERY HARDDemon's Souls (2020) rebuild deck
VERY HARD
Stamina, roll i-frames and backstabs all come out fine, but this is a remake, so the deliverable is definitionally the art, plus a shortcut graph an agent will flatten into a tube with three doors in it.
You will get a good prototype. The product is what comes after.
To be clear, this is Bluepoint's 2020 remake, not FromSoftware's 2009 original. It earns a KINDA on the same grounds as Doom: five discrete levels rather than an open world, and the prompt above builds one of them end to end. Souls-on-death, equip-load rolls and backstabs are all promptable. Spend your review time on the shortcut graph, because an agent builds levels as corridors and corridors have no topology — a linear tube with three doors in it. What you cannot ask for is the art, which in a remake is definitionally the deliverable.
- Difficulty
- VERY HARD · 4 of 5
- First playable
- A project
- The original
- 200 team-years
- Released
- 2020 · PS5
- Genre
- Action RPG
Build ONE level of a level-based action RPG. The level, not the game: an entrance archstone, a boss fog gate, and three locked shortcuts that fold the path back on itself. three.js, third person. Requirements: - Define the level as an explicit directed graph in a data file — nodes are rooms, edges are traversals, each shortcut edge starts disabled. Then assert in code that unlocking each shortcut cuts the shortest path from the archstone to that point by at least 60%. This is the load-bearing bit: a shortcut that does not measurably shorten the run is scenery, and an agent will happily give you three of those. Print the path lengths on unlock. - Souls-on-death: a single recoverable bloodstain, overwritten the moment you die again. One slot, never a list. - World state persistence on rest: enemies respawn, but opened doors, kicked-down ladders and one-time pickups do not. Serialise it so a reload is identical. - Equip load determines roll type — fast, medium, fat — with different i-frame counts and recovery, counted in fixed 60Hz ticks. - Backstabs as a positional check: attacker facing within 30 degrees of the target's facing, inside a small rear cone, at contact range. The same test drives ripostes after a parry. - Six enemies, placed deliberately: one above a staircase, one behind a corner, two guarding a shortcut lever. Definition of done: I open the last shortcut and the walk from the archstone to the fog gate takes fifteen seconds instead of four minutes.
- Five worlds of level design that FromSoftware spent years learning how to build, rebuilt asset-by-asset by Bluepoint
- Enemy placement, which is the real difficulty and is authored metre by metre against sightlines and corners
- Every model, texture and lighting setup remade at PS5 fidelity — this remake is, definitionally, the art
- The online layer: bloodstains, messages, blue and black phantoms, and the fact that other people are quietly in your world
World tendency — a hidden per-area scalar that shifts with how you behave and changes what the area contains
A world that quietly remembers your last few hours is worth more than any explicit difficulty slider, and it costs one number per area. Drops straight into a survival game, a management sim, a dungeon crawler, anything with places you return to.
ScopeAbout a week— build just this, not the game
Single self-contained HTML file, Canvas 2D. Three small top-down areas joined by a hub, simple melee combat, nothing fancy. - Each area carries a hidden tendency value from -3 (black) to +3 (white), starting at 0. It is per-area, never global. - Dying in an area pushes that area toward black. Killing its mini-boss pushes it toward white. - Tendency changes the world, not a stat readout. At black: enemies hit harder, drop more, and one extra elite spawns at a fixed spot. At white: a shortcut door is open, an NPC stands near the entrance, and a rare item is on the floor. - Never display the number. Communicate it only through consequences — the lighting tint, which NPC is present, whether the elite is there. - Persist to localStorage so it survives a reload. - Add a debug key that prints all three values, then discipline yourself not to press it while playtesting. Definition of done: after an hour I can tell a black area from a white one within five seconds of walking in.
Not a clone — Demon's Souls (2020) 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.
Evacuate No Reflexes
Demon's Souls (2020), but a puzzle version — same fiction, no reflexes, set in a disaster movie. Rendered in hand-drawn ink on paper.
Build a browser game called "Evacuate No Reflexes". The pitch in one line: a action rpg in the spirit of Demon's Souls (2020), but a puzzle version — same fiction, no reflexes, set in a disaster movie. WHAT THIS IS Take the SHAPE of Demon's Souls (2020) — 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 disaster movie. A clock to impact, a map of exits, and ordinary people making ugly choices under sirens. 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 Hand-drawn ink on paper. Rough stroked outlines with per-frame jitter so lines boil, a paper-grain texture over everything, and ink-bleed on impacts. 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 200 team-years to the counter on the homepage.
Then try these
Questions
How hard is Demon's Souls (2020) to rebuild with an AI agent?
Yes — every game is buildable at some scope. The question is how hard, and Demon's Souls (2020) is VERY HARD (4 of 5). You will get a good prototype. The product is what comes after. Stamina, roll i-frames and backstabs all come out fine, but this is a remake, so the deliverable is definitionally the art, plus a shortcut graph an agent will flatten into a tube with three doors in it. Reckon on a project to something you can actually play — not to something that matches the 200 team-years Bluepoint Games and Japan Studio spent.
What makes Demon's Souls (2020) hard to rebuild?
Stamina, roll i-frames and backstabs all come out fine, but this is a remake, so the deliverable is definitionally the art, plus a shortcut graph an agent will flatten into a tube with three doors in it. That is why it sits at VERY HARD rather than a tier either side of it. If you want the idea without the project, the transferable part is world tendency — a hidden per-area scalar that shifts with how you behave and changes what the area contains — about a week of work.
How long does it take to build a Demon's Souls (2020) clone?
Wrong question, and it is worth saying why. Nobody rebuilds Demon's Souls (2020) — the original took Bluepoint Games and Japan Studio on the order of 200 team-years, released in 2020 on PS5. 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 Demon's Souls (2020)?
Five worlds of level design that FromSoftware spent years learning how to build, rebuilt asset-by-asset by Bluepoint. Enemy placement, which is the real difficulty and is authored metre by metre against sightlines and corners. Every model, texture and lighting setup remade at PS5 fidelity — this remake is, definitionally, the art. 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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