🕹️ PS42018Santa Monica StudioVERY HARD

God of War (2018) rebuild deck

VERY HARD

Throw, embed and recall is fun the same afternoon you write it, which leaves the twenty hours of two-hander performance capture that the unbroken camera exists to point at.

You will get a good prototype. The product is what comes after.

The axe is why this is a KINDA and not a NO. Throw, embed, recall through a line of enemies is a couple of hundred lines, and it is fun the same afternoon you write it. The agent will hand you a free-orbiting camera and a fight that reads perfectly because you can see everything, which is precisely the game you are not building. Spend your review time on the attack-token queue and the off-screen indicators — a tight camera without both is just a bad camera. Watch for the agent quietly re-arming you while the axe is away; that trade is the design and it is the first thing to get optimised out. What no prompt reaches is the twenty hours of performance either side of the fighting.

Difficulty: VERY HARD · 4 of 5
First playable: A project
The original: 500 team-years
Released: 2018 · PS4
Genre: Action Adventure

The one-shot build prompt

Build a single-arena third-person melee prototype in the heavy-Norse-brawler mould. three.js plus a physics library. One arena, one throwable axe, three enemy types. No world, no story.

Requirements:
- Camera locked over the left shoulder at roughly 40 degrees FOV, close enough that the character fills a third of the frame, and it never cuts. That framing is the load-bearing constraint: you cannot see behind you, so the fight is unfair unless off-screen awareness is solved explicitly. Draw a damage-direction arc at the screen edge for every enemy winding up outside the frustum, coloured by attack type, appearing on the wind-up, not the hit.
- An attack-token queue: only one or two enemies may commit at once, the rest circle. Without it the mob is unreadable at this distance.
- Throwable axe. Aim mode halves your turn rate, the axe embeds where it lands and pins that enemy. Recall returns it to your current hand position, damaging everything on the return line. While it is away you fight bare-handed, and that trade is the design.
- Stagger meter separate from health, filled by heavy hits, opening a grapple finisher.
- Parry on a six-frame window at 60Hz, telegraphed by a colour flash on wind-up.
- A companion who fires on command and whom enemies never target.
- Hit-stop of 60-100ms on heavy hits plus a camera punch along the hit normal.

Definition of done: I throw the axe into one enemy, punch a second, then recall through a third and it lands in my hand while I am still moving.

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

What you lose

An unbroken camera across a twenty-hour game — no cuts, through combat, traversal, cutscenes and loading
Performance capture for two characters whose relationship is the entire product
The nine Valkyries, each a hand-authored moveset where every telegraph reads at a glance
Level design that folds a linear game into something that plays as though it were open

What to steal

The recallable weapon — it returns to where your hand is now, not to where you threw it from

One button becomes a positional puzzle: the return path is a second hitbox that you aim by walking. It drops straight into a top-down shooter, a platformer, a tower defence, anything where the player can relocate between the throw and the catch.

ScopeA weekend— build just this, not the game

Single self-contained HTML file, Canvas 2D, no build step. Build a top-down arena where the player throws one weapon and calls it back.

Requirements:
- WASD moves, click throws the axe along the aim vector. It travels, embeds in the first enemy or wall it hits, and stops there.
- Space recalls it. The return path is recomputed every frame from the axe's position to the player's current position, so a player who keeps moving drags the return line across the arena and everything it crosses takes damage. This is the whole toy. Do not make it fly back to where it was thrown from.
- While the axe is away the player is unarmed and deals a third of the damage in melee.
- Catching has a 0.15s window: on time gives a brief speed boost, missing drops the axe at your feet.
- While recall is held, draw the predicted return line faintly, so aiming by walking is learnable.

Definition of done: I throw across the arena, walk sideways, and kill two enemies with the return path alone.

Make it different

Not a clone — God of War (2018) 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.

Obsidian One Run

God of War (2018), but a roguelike run instead of a campaign, set in a Mesoamerican empire. Rendered in hand-drawn ink on paper.

Themea Mesoamerican empire

Anglea roguelike run instead of a campaign

Lookhand-drawn ink on paper

Build a browser game called "Obsidian One Run".

The pitch in one line: a action adventure in the spirit of God of War (2018), but a roguelike run instead of a campaign, set in a Mesoamerican empire.

WHAT THIS IS
Take the SHAPE of God of War (2018) — 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 roguelike run instead of a campaign. Twenty to forty minutes, procedurally assembled from hand-authored chunks, permadeath, and a meta-progression drip. Replaces authored content volume with combinatorics.
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 Mesoamerican empire. Stepped stone architecture, an astronomical calendar that gates events, and obsidian-edged weapons that break.
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.

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 500 team-years to the counter on the homepage.

Then try these

Or roll something nobody has built yet →

Questions

How hard is God of War (2018) to rebuild with an AI agent?

Yes — every game is buildable at some scope. The question is how hard, and God of War (2018) is VERY HARD (4 of 5). You will get a good prototype. The product is what comes after. Throw, embed and recall is fun the same afternoon you write it, which leaves the twenty hours of two-hander performance capture that the unbroken camera exists to point at. Reckon on a project to something you can actually play — not to something that matches the 500 team-years Santa Monica Studio spent.

What makes God of War (2018) hard to rebuild?

Throw, embed and recall is fun the same afternoon you write it, which leaves the twenty hours of two-hander performance capture that the unbroken camera exists to point at. 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 the recallable weapon — it returns to where your hand is now, not to where you threw it from — a weekend of work.

How long does it take to build a God of War (2018) clone?

Wrong question, and it is worth saying why. Nobody rebuilds God of War (2018) — the original took Santa Monica Studio on the order of 500 team-years, released in 2018 on PS4. 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 God of War (2018)?

An unbroken camera across a twenty-hour game — no cuts, through combat, traversal, cutscenes and loading. Performance capture for two characters whose relationship is the entire product. The nine Valkyries, each a hand-authored moveset where every telegraph reads at a glance. 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.

Get the next game

One email when new games go on the list. No other reason to email you, ever.