🖥️ PC2017Bluehole (now PUBG Studios)BRUTALPUBG: Battlegrounds rebuild deck
BRUTAL
You can fake a populated lobby with two levels of bot detail, but you cannot host ninety-nine strangers on an eight-kilometre streamed map, and anti-cheat is a permanent headcount rather than a task.
The hard part is not game design at all.
This is the clearest case on the site of a game whose product is its server bill. Early access opened in March 2017 with a map eight kilometres on a side and ninety-nine other people on it, and neither of those is a thing you host. The level-of-detail trick makes a bot lobby feel populated, but what you have built is a looting game with a timer rather than PUBG: bots do not third-party you and bots do not get greedy at the wrong moment. The useful history here is not the netcode. Greene had already built this mode twice inside other people's games before Bluehole called him, which is a better lesson about how ideas get made than anything in the engineering.
- Difficulty
- BRUTAL · 5 of 5
- First playable
- A project
- The original
- 60 team-years
- Released
- 2017 · PC
- Genre
- Battle Royale
Build a single-player battle royale against 49 bots. three.js, one square kilometre of map, local only — there is no version of this with real players that you are going to run. Requirements: - You cannot afford to simulate 49 agents properly, so simulate them at two levels of detail. Bots outside a radius of the player are abstract: a position moving toward the safe zone, a rough gear score, and fights between them resolved statistically on a one-second tick weighted by that gear. Bots inside the radius are promoted to full agents with pathing, weapons and line of sight, and demoted again when the player leaves. Distant gunfire audio is generated from the abstract layer. This is the only way the match feels populated on one machine and it is the architecture. - The safe zone is a published schedule: at match start compute every phase's centre, radius, wait time, close time and damage per second, and draw the next circle before it begins closing. The player must always be deciding against a deadline they can already see. - Floor loot inside buildings rather than crates: weapons with attachment slots, three armour tiers, healing items with cast times that root you in place. - Vertical recoil patterns, weapon sway, bullet drop and travel time, and a scope with zeroing. - Sound as information: footsteps by surface, gunshot direction and distance, vehicles audible far further than a person. Definition of done: I hear a firefight two hundred metres away that no full agent is simulating, and I decide to go around it.
- Ninety-nine other people, which is not a feature, it is the game
- A map eight kilometres on a side, streamed, plus the interest management to keep a hundred players inside it
- Server tick rate arguments, desync, and anti-cheat, which is a permanent staffing commitment rather than a task
- The loot tables and building density, tuned so that choosing where to land is a gamble with known odds
A visible deadline that eats the map
A shrinking safe zone is not a hazard, it is a pacing device that costs you one circle and one damage-over-time tick. It guarantees the match ends, it forces the players into each other, and because the next boundary is drawn before it starts closing, standing still becomes an active decision instead of a default.
ScopeAn evening— build just this, not the game
Single self-contained HTML file, Canvas 2D, no build step. Top-down map a few hundred metres square, one player, a dozen simple AI wanderers. The mechanic is the boundary. At start, generate a schedule of six phases, each with a centre chosen inside the previous circle, a radius, a wait duration, a close duration, and a damage-per-second that rises every phase. Draw the current boundary solid, and draw the next one as an outline the instant the phase begins waiting: the player has to see where they will need to be before they need to be there. Outside the boundary, apply the damage tick with an unmistakable screen effect, and show a countdown to the next close. Definition of done: I am outside the boundary with the clock running, and looting one more building costs me a real amount of health.
Not a clone — PUBG: Battlegrounds 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.
Starfall Same Sofa
PUBG: Battlegrounds, but local split-screen instead of online, set in a space opera. Rendered in Game Boy four-shade green.
Build a browser game called "Starfall Same Sofa". The pitch in one line: a battle royale in the spirit of PUBG: Battlegrounds, but local split-screen instead of online, set in a space opera. WHAT THIS IS Take the SHAPE of PUBG: Battlegrounds — 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 Local split-screen instead of online. Two players, one keyboard or two gamepads, one screen. All the multiplayer fun, none of the distributed systems. 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 space opera. Big politics, bigger ships, and faster-than-light travel treated as ordinary infrastructure rather than as a miracle. 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 Game Boy four-shade green. A strict four-colour palette, 160×144 internal resolution scaled up with nearest-neighbour, and no anti-aliasing anywhere. 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.
- three.js — WebGL rendering for the prototype
- colyseus — authoritative room server, for when you inevitably try anyway
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 60 team-years to the counter on the homepage.
Then try these
Questions
How hard is PUBG: Battlegrounds to rebuild with an AI agent?
Yes — every game is buildable at some scope. The question is how hard, and PUBG: Battlegrounds is BRUTAL (5 of 5). The hard part is not game design at all. You can fake a populated lobby with two levels of bot detail, but you cannot host ninety-nine strangers on an eight-kilometre streamed map, and anti-cheat is a permanent headcount rather than a task. Reckon on a project to something you can actually play — not to something that matches the 60 team-years Bluehole (now PUBG Studios) spent.
What makes PUBG: Battlegrounds hard to rebuild?
You can fake a populated lobby with two levels of bot detail, but you cannot host ninety-nine strangers on an eight-kilometre streamed map, and anti-cheat is a permanent headcount rather than a task. That is why it sits at BRUTAL rather than a tier either side of it. If you want the idea without the project, the transferable part is a visible deadline that eats the map — an evening of work.
How long does it take to build a PUBG: Battlegrounds clone?
Wrong question, and it is worth saying why. Nobody rebuilds PUBG: Battlegrounds — the original took Bluehole (now PUBG Studios) on the order of 60 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 PUBG: Battlegrounds?
Ninety-nine other people, which is not a feature, it is the game. A map eight kilometres on a side, streamed, plus the interest management to keep a hundred players inside it. Server tick rate arguments, desync, and anti-cheat, which is a permanent staffing commitment rather than a task. 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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