🕹️ PS42018Insomniac GamesVERY HARDMarvel's Spider-Man rebuild deck
VERY HARD
The swing is one distance constraint and it is genuinely fun within the hour; the game is Manhattan at artist density plus hundreds of bespoke contact animations, and no prompt reaches either.
You will get a good prototype. The product is what comes after.
Best effort-to-payoff entry in the PS4 bucket: the swing is one constraint solve and a rough version is fun inside an hour. Expect the agent to reach for a spring joint first. Refuse, twice if necessary, because the failure is subtle and you will blame your tuning instead of the model. What a prompt will never give you is the animation, and a capsule on a rope is honest fun but it is not the game — Insomniac's version reads because every contact has a bespoke clip. That gap is the whole distance between KINDA and YES.
- Difficulty
- VERY HARD · 4 of 5
- First playable
- A weekend
- The original
- 350 team-years
- Released
- 2018 · PS4
- Genre
- Superhero Action
Build a web-swinging traversal prototype over a procedurally generated block grid of towers. three.js, no engine. Traversal only, plus three enemies on one rooftop so arriving somewhere means something. Do not build a city — build eight blocks. Requirements: - The swing is a rigid distance constraint, not a spring. On attach, record the rope length. Each fixed tick, integrate gravity, then project the player's position back onto the sphere of that radius and remove the radial component of velocity. A spring looks correct in a screenshot and feels like rubber in the hand. This is the single thing to get right. - A pendulum under gravity alone bleeds energy and stops. Add a pump: holding the button shortens the rope through the downswing and lengthens it on the upswing, injecting energy the way a child on a swing does. Cap the resulting speed. - Anchor by raycasting forward and upward for building geometry. Attach the visible web to the hit point but let the physical anchor sit a few metres above it, so the arc is never flat. - On release, keep the full tangential velocity and switch to ballistic motion with about 15% air control. - Camera FOV lerps 60 to 85 degrees with speed, plus a small roll into the swing direction. - Fixed 60Hz physics with rendering interpolated. Definition of done: I cross eight blocks without touching the ground, and my speed at the end is higher than at the start.
- Manhattan at a density that took a hundred artists — the traversal only sings because the city was built for it
- Hundreds of context-specific swing, wall-run and landing clips, selected by a state machine that never shows a seam
- Licensed characters and every mission built around them
- The air-juggle combat system, which is a separate game's worth of tuning on its own
Outcome-scored target selection — pick the lock-on target by simulating what happens if you pick it, not by which sits nearest the crosshair
Distance-to-crosshair picks the wrong thing constantly. Scoring candidates by the resulting arc, angle or damage makes a game feel like it read your mind, and the idea drops unchanged into auto-aim, grapple hooks, snap-to-grid editors and card targeting.
ScopeA weekend— build just this, not the game
Single self-contained HTML file, Canvas 2D, no build step. Build a side-view grapple toy where the game picks the anchor for you. Requirements: - A scrolling landscape of buildings of varying heights. The player is a dot under gravity. Hold space to grapple, release to let go keeping tangential velocity. - On press, do not attach to the nearest point. Cast fifteen candidate rays in a fan ahead of and above the player, and for each hit cheaply simulate the resulting pendulum for one second: rope length, entry angle, whether the arc clips the ground, forward distance covered at release. Score them, attach to the winner. - Show the working. Draw all candidates in grey, rejected ones struck through, the winner bright with its score printed. This debug view is the point of the toy. - Add sliders for the scoring weights so you can feel the difference between nearest and best-outcome. Definition of done: with outcome scoring on I clear six buildings in a row; with nearest-point scoring I hit the ground in three.
Not a clone — Marvel's Spider-Man 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.
Pendragon One Run
Marvel's Spider-Man, but a roguelike run instead of a campaign, set in Arthurian legend. Rendered in chunky voxel sandbox.
Build a browser game called "Pendragon One Run". The pitch in one line: a superhero action in the spirit of Marvel's Spider-Man, but a roguelike run instead of a campaign, set in Arthurian legend. WHAT THIS IS Take the SHAPE of Marvel's Spider-Man — 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 Arthurian legend. Oaths that bind mechanically, a fellowship that can fracture, and a quest nobody is quite good enough for. 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 Chunky voxel sandbox. Blocky voxels, AO in corners, bright readable biomes, and destruction that leaves debris cubes. 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 350 team-years to the counter on the homepage.
Then try these
Questions
How hard is Marvel's Spider-Man to rebuild with an AI agent?
Yes — every game is buildable at some scope. The question is how hard, and Marvel's Spider-Man is VERY HARD (4 of 5). You will get a good prototype. The product is what comes after. The swing is one distance constraint and it is genuinely fun within the hour; the game is Manhattan at artist density plus hundreds of bespoke contact animations, and no prompt reaches either. Reckon on a weekend to something you can actually play — not to something that matches the 350 team-years Insomniac Games spent.
What makes Marvel's Spider-Man hard to rebuild?
The swing is one distance constraint and it is genuinely fun within the hour; the game is Manhattan at artist density plus hundreds of bespoke contact animations, and no prompt reaches either. 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 outcome-scored target selection — pick the lock-on target by simulating what happens if you pick it, not by which sits nearest the crosshair — a weekend of work.
How long does it take to build a Marvel's Spider-Man clone?
Wrong question, and it is worth saying why. Nobody rebuilds Marvel's Spider-Man — the original took Insomniac Games on the order of 350 team-years, released in 2018 on PS4. 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 Marvel's Spider-Man?
Manhattan at a density that took a hundred artists — the traversal only sings because the city was built for it. Hundreds of context-specific swing, wall-run and landing clips, selected by a state machine that never shows a seam. Licensed characters and every mission built around them. 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.
One email when new games go on the list. No other reason to email you, ever.