🖥️ PC2017Team CherryVERY HARDHollow Knight rebuild deck
VERY HARD
The movement and the hitstop are a fortnight; the game is 150 hand-drawn rooms laid out so that wandering pays, which is the three years Team Cherry spent after the movement already worked.
You will get a good prototype. The product is what comes after.
Hitstop is the cheapest feel win in action games and models will not add it unless you say so: five frozen frames on contact does more for combat than any particle system. What kills this project is scope, because every room is drawn, tuned and wired into a map that has to make wandering feel rewarded rather than punished. You can have the movement working in a fortnight and then spend three years on the world, which is roughly what three people at Team Cherry did.
- Difficulty
- VERY HARD · 4 of 5
- First playable
- A project
- The original
- 9 team-years
- Released
- 2017 · PC
- Genre
- Action Metroidvania
Build a 2D metroidvania with melee combat and ability-gated rooms. Single self-contained HTML file, Canvas 2D, fixed timestep, no build step. Requirements: - Hitstop is the load-bearing detail. On any successful hit, freeze the simulation for 5 frames while continuing to render, then apply knockback to both parties plus a 2px screen shake. Almost everything good about the combat feel comes from this, and it is never added unprompted. - The attack is a short-lived hitbox, 0.12s, in one of four directions from the player, with a 0.35s cooldown. A down-attack that connects with an enemy or a spike sets vertical speed to a fixed upward value rather than adding to it, and refunds the air dash, so bounces can be chained indefinitely. - Taking damage: 0.8s of invulnerability, a hard fixed knockback away from the source, and 0.15s of input lock. - Rooms are JSON tilemaps in a graph, joined by named transitions that preserve entry momentum. Camera is per-room with soft bounds. - Abilities (dash, wall cling, double jump) are flags that unlock geography, not doors. Build at least two rooms that are visibly reachable but not yet enterable. - Save state — health, currency, abilities, defeated bosses, last bench — persists to localStorage when you rest. Definition of done: I can cross a spike pit by chaining three down-attack bounces, rest at a bench, reload the page, and come back with all of it intact.
- A hand-drawn world of roughly 150 rooms built to reward wandering rather than following a marker
- Christopher Larkin's score and the ambient design that carries all that empty space
- Forty-odd bosses with tells readable enough that losing always feels like your fault
- Environmental storytelling that explains nothing directly and still lands
Currency dropped where you died, and guarded
Dropping your money at the spot you fell turns a death into a decision — go back for it or write it off — while costing the run nothing permanent. It is the rare punishment that makes the next five minutes more interesting rather than less.
ScopeAn evening— build just this, not the game
Build a death-debt toy as a single self-contained HTML file. Canvas 2D, no build step. - A small arena, a player who moves and attacks, hazards that kill, and pickups that grant currency. - On death, your currency goes to zero and a shade spawns at the exact spot holding every coin you were carrying. You respawn at the entrance with nothing. - Defeat the shade to take the currency back. Die again before reaching it and the old shade is deleted, those coins are gone permanently, and the new shade holds only what you had collected since. - The shade is a real threat, not a pickup: it fights back, and it sits wherever you died, which is by definition the most dangerous part of the room. - Persist currency, shade position and shade contents to localStorage, so reloading the page cannot launder the debt. - On screen: current currency, shade contents, distance to shade. Definition of done: I die somewhere nasty, decide the coins are not worth the trip, and that decision is what costs me them.
Not a clone — Hollow Knight 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.
Brasswork Teletype
Hollow Knight, but text-only, in a terminal, set in steampunk. Rendered in LEGO brick build.
Build a browser game called "Brasswork Teletype". The pitch in one line: a action metroidvania in the spirit of Hollow Knight, but text-only, in a terminal, set in steampunk. WHAT THIS IS Take the SHAPE of Hollow Knight — 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 Text-only, in a terminal. A monospace grid and nothing else. Forces the writing and the systems to carry everything, and the entire art budget goes to zero. 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 Steampunk. Visible mechanism everywhere. Anything that moves does so because a gear you can see is turning it, and pressure is a resource. 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 LEGO brick build. Studded bricks, clutch-power joints, minifig scale proportions, and explosions that separate into pieces not polygons. 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 9 team-years to the counter on the homepage.
Then try these
Questions
How hard is Hollow Knight to rebuild with an AI agent?
Yes — every game is buildable at some scope. The question is how hard, and Hollow Knight is VERY HARD (4 of 5). You will get a good prototype. The product is what comes after. The movement and the hitstop are a fortnight; the game is 150 hand-drawn rooms laid out so that wandering pays, which is the three years Team Cherry spent after the movement already worked. Reckon on a project to something you can actually play — not to something that matches the 9 team-years Team Cherry spent.
What makes Hollow Knight hard to rebuild?
The movement and the hitstop are a fortnight; the game is 150 hand-drawn rooms laid out so that wandering pays, which is the three years Team Cherry spent after the movement already worked. 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 currency dropped where you died, and guarded — an evening of work.
How long does it take to build a Hollow Knight clone?
Wrong question, and it is worth saying why. Nobody rebuilds Hollow Knight — the original took Team Cherry on the order of 9 team-years, released in 2017 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 Hollow Knight?
A hand-drawn world of roughly 150 rooms built to reward wandering rather than following a marker. Christopher Larkin's score and the ambient design that carries all that empty space. Forty-odd bosses with tells readable enough that losing always feels like your fault. 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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