🟢 Xbox2015Moon StudiosVERY HARD

Ori and the Blind Forest rebuild deck

VERY HARD

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

Same story as Cuphead in different terms: the hard part is not the code. An agent gives you bash, tile collision and a competent camera, and it will still feel like a prototype, because what separates this from a prototype is a hand-painted world and a rig that blends through every transition. Watch for the agent implementing bash as a time-scale slowdown rather than a real pause, and for it launching the bashed object the same direction as the player, which is the classic inversion bug.

Difficulty: VERY HARD · 4 of 5
First playable: A weekend
The original: 50 team-years
Released: 2015 · Xbox
Genre: Metroidvania Platformer

The one-shot build prompt

Build the movement core of a precision metroidvania — one connected map of about twenty screens, three abilities, essentially no combat. Canvas 2D, fixed 60Hz simulation.

Requirements:
- Bash is the load-bearing mechanic and it is the one people implement backwards. On press near a bashable object or an in-flight projectile, freeze the entire simulation, enter an aim mode with a slowed cursor, and on release apply an impulse to the player along the aim vector and an equal, opposite impulse to the object. The object must travel the other way. Freezing must be a true simulation pause with its own input mode, not a time-scale multiplier, or physics drifts during the aim.
- Movement feel: 6 frames of coyote time, 8 frames of jump buffering, variable jump height by cutting upward velocity on release, higher gravity falling than rising, separate ground and air acceleration. Put every one of those numbers behind live debug sliders — you will change them two hundred times and you should not be recompiling to do it.
- Collision as swept AABB against a tile grid, resolved one axis at a time, with a small corner-correction nudge so clipping a ledge by two pixels does not stop you dead.
- Three gated abilities: double jump, wall climb, bash. The map must contain gaps only passable by chaining two of them.
- Camera with damped look-ahead in the direction of travel and a vertical deadzone.

Definition of done: I chain three bashes off a single projectile and cross a gap I could not cross on foot.

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

What you lose

Hand-painted parallax layers with volumetric lighting — the look is the reason anyone bought it, and it is painting, not shaders
Gareth Coker's orchestral score, which does most of the emotional work in a game whose only voice is a narrator speaking an invented language
A character rig that squashes, stretches and blends through every transition, so the movement reads as beautiful and not merely responsive
Level layouts authored to the exact reach of each ability, plus the escape sequences, which are choreographed set pieces rather than systems

What to steal

Player-placed checkpoints bought with a spendable, scarce resource

It hands difficulty tuning to the player without a difficulty menu, and it makes saving a tactical decision. Transplants cleanly into a roguelite, a survival game, a puzzle game, a racer with rewind charges — anywhere failure has a cost.

ScopeAn evening— build just this, not the game

Single self-contained HTML file, Canvas 2D. A short, deliberately nasty platforming gauntlet with spikes and moving platforms, and no automatic checkpoints anywhere in it.

- The player carries energy, capped at 4, refilled only by pickups placed sparsely through the level.
- One key spends one energy to plant a save anchor at the current position, snapshotting player position, remaining energy, pickups collected and the phase of every moving platform. Planting replaces the previous anchor.
- Death restores that snapshot exactly, including the energy count at the moment of planting — so a player who plants greedily runs dry and must clear a long stretch clean.
- Draw the anchor in the world as an obvious marker and show the energy count large.
- Place at least one energy pickup just past a hard jump, so the player must choose between banking progress now and pushing on for a better anchor position.

Definition of done: I stand in front of a hard section with one energy left and genuinely have to think about it.

Make it different

Not a clone — Ori and the Blind Forest 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 Teletype

Ori and the Blind Forest, but text-only, in a terminal, set in a Mesoamerican empire. Rendered in PS1 low-poly with texture warping.

Themea Mesoamerican empire

Angletext-only, in a terminal

LookPS1 low-poly with texture warping

Build a browser game called "Obsidian Teletype".

The pitch in one line: a metroidvania platformer in the spirit of Ori and the Blind Forest, but text-only, in a terminal, set in a Mesoamerican empire.

WHAT THIS IS
Take the SHAPE of Ori and the Blind Forest — 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
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
PS1 low-poly with texture warping. Vertex-snap positions to a low-resolution grid in the vertex shader, use affine texture mapping so textures swim, dither to 15-bit colour, and fog the draw distance.

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 50 team-years to the counter on the homepage.

Then try these

Or roll something nobody has built yet →

Questions

How hard is Ori and the Blind Forest to rebuild with an AI agent?

Yes — every game is buildable at some scope. The question is how hard, and Ori and the Blind Forest is VERY HARD (4 of 5). You will get a good prototype. The product is what comes after. Bash, swept AABB collision and a damped camera are a weekend; what separates Ori from a competent prototype is hand-painted parallax and a rig that blends through every transition, which is an art department, not a build. Reckon on a weekend to something you can actually play — not to something that matches the 50 team-years Moon Studios spent.

What makes Ori and the Blind Forest hard to rebuild?

Bash, swept AABB collision and a damped camera are a weekend; what separates Ori from a competent prototype is hand-painted parallax and a rig that blends through every transition, which is an art department, not a build. 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 player-placed checkpoints bought with a spendable, scarce resource — an evening of work.

How long does it take to build a Ori and the Blind Forest clone?

Wrong question, and it is worth saying why. Nobody rebuilds Ori and the Blind Forest — the original took Moon Studios on the order of 50 team-years, released in 2015 on Xbox. 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 Ori and the Blind Forest?

Hand-painted parallax layers with volumetric lighting — the look is the reason anyone bought it, and it is painting, not shaders. Gareth Coker's orchestral score, which does most of the emotional work in a game whose only voice is a narrator speaking an invented language. A character rig that squashes, stretches and blends through every transition, so the movement reads as beautiful and not merely responsive. 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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