👾 Arcade1981NamcoFIDDLYGalaga rebuild deck
FIDDLY
Enemies fly arc-length-parameterised Bezier paths and then dock into formation slots; ask for it loosely and you get the 1978 sideways shuffle every model has memorised.
You will get it, but one specific system will fight you.
Agents build this as a grid of aliens that shuffles sideways, because that is the other 1978 game they have memorised. You have to be explicit that movement is path-following with a docking step, or the whole character of it evaporates. Expect to hand-tune the spline control points yourself; describing a swooping entry in words does not survive contact with a Bezier. The two-bullet limit is the thing a reviewer will file as a bug, including the model itself on a second pass.
- Difficulty
- FIDDLY · 2 of 5
- First playable
- A weekend
- The original
- 3 team-years
- Released
- 1981 · Arcade
- Genre
- Fixed Shooter
Build a fixed-position space shooter with formation-flying enemies as a single self-contained HTML file. Canvas 2D, Web Audio, no dependencies. Requirements: - The player ship slides along the bottom and fires upward, with a hard maximum of TWO player bullets alive at once. This cap is the entire rhythm of the game. It will feel wrong for the first ten minutes and correct forever after, so do not raise it. - Enemies use no physics. Each wave enters along a named spline path, travelling at constant arc-length speed with the sprite rotated to the path tangent, then docks into an assigned slot in a 10-column formation grid. - Once docked, the formation sways left and right as one unit and enemies hold fixed offsets relative to it. - Between waves, docked enemies peel off in ones and twos, fly a dive path that exits the bottom of the screen, then re-enter from the top and re-dock in their old slot. - Control point arrays, wave composition and per-stage speed multipliers live in waves.json. - A top-row enemy occasionally fires a tractor beam downward. If it takes the player's ship, shooting that enemy on its next dive returns the ship and you fly two abreast: double fire rate, double hitbox width. - Every few stages, a bonus round where enemies fly through without shooting, with a perfect-clear bonus. Definition of done: I can lose a ship to the beam, rescue it on the next dive, and see two ships firing together.
- Namco's trademark and the insectoid sprite work, which is why it is not just another grid of aliens
- The ascending capture jingle through a single cabinet speaker
- Stage after stage of escalating endurance play, and the leaderboard culture built on top of it
- The dual-fighter trade: give up a life for double firepower and double hitbox, balanced until it is exactly worth it
Arc-length spline paths that dock into formation slots
Movement that reads as flight rather than translation is a path plus an arc-length table, and once you own that machinery you reuse it for boss entrances, cutscene cameras and anything that should look choreographed. The docking step is what turns a flypast into a formation.
ScopeA weekend— build just this, not the game
Build a path-following movement toy as a single self-contained HTML file. Canvas 2D, no dependencies, no build step. - Define entry paths as chains of cubic Beziers in a JSON array of control points. Before anything moves, sample each path and build an arc-length lookup table, so a unit travels at constant speed along it no matter how the control points are spaced. Naive t-stepping speeds up and slows down for no reason and reads as a bug. - Rotate each unit to the path tangent as it flies. - Every unit owns a slot in an 8-column grid. At the end of its path it docks: control passes to the grid, which sways left and right as one body while units hold fixed offsets. - Press D to send a random docked unit out along a dive path that exits the bottom, re-enters from the top, and re-docks in its original slot. - Include a drag-to-edit mode for control points with live redraw. Definition of done: dragging a control point changes the shape of the flight and the unit still moves at unvarying speed.
Not a clone — Galaga 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.
ARR No Reflexes
Galaga, but a puzzle version — same fiction, no reflexes, set in a SaaS company. Rendered in flat vector minimalism.
Build a browser game called "ARR No Reflexes". The pitch in one line: a fixed shooter in the spirit of Galaga, but a puzzle version — same fiction, no reflexes, set in a SaaS company. WHAT THIS IS Take the SHAPE of Galaga — 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 SaaS company. Customers, uptime and roadmap as systems. The fantasy is shipping product under metric pressure, not casting spells. 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 Flat vector minimalism. Pure geometry, no textures, three colours plus white. All feedback carried by motion and scale rather than detail. 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 3 team-years to the counter on the homepage.
Then try these
Questions
How hard is Galaga to rebuild with an AI agent?
Yes — every game is buildable at some scope. The question is how hard, and Galaga is FIDDLY (2 of 5). You will get it, but one specific system will fight you. Enemies fly arc-length-parameterised Bezier paths and then dock into formation slots; ask for it loosely and you get the 1978 sideways shuffle every model has memorised. Reckon on a weekend to something you can actually play — not to something that matches the 3 team-years Namco spent.
What makes Galaga hard to rebuild?
Enemies fly arc-length-parameterised Bezier paths and then dock into formation slots; ask for it loosely and you get the 1978 sideways shuffle every model has memorised. 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 arc-length spline paths that dock into formation slots — a weekend of work.
How long does it take to build a Galaga clone?
Wrong question, and it is worth saying why. Nobody rebuilds Galaga — the original took Namco on the order of 3 team-years, released in 1981 on Arcade. 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 Galaga?
Namco's trademark and the insectoid sprite work, which is why it is not just another grid of aliens. The ascending capture jingle through a single cabinet speaker. Stage after stage of escalating endurance play, and the leaderboard culture built on top of it. 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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