🎯 PS52021Insomniac GamesVERY HARDRatchet & Clank: Rift Apart rebuild deck
VERY HARD
The portal matrix chain is a good afternoon once you know it only betrays you when you strafe; the game is twenty weapons with twenty personalities, and that is modelling, VFX and comedy timing, not code.
You will get a good prototype. The product is what comes after.
The portal matrix chain is where an agent confidently hands you something that looks correct standing still and falls apart the moment you strafe. Budget your review time there and nowhere else. It stays a NO rather than a KINDA for one reason: Demon's Souls at one-level scale is still the shape of the game, and this at one-level scale is a crowd shooter with a clever window in it. The game is twenty weapons with twenty personalities, and that is content, not code.
- Difficulty
- VERY HARD · 4 of 5
- First playable
- A project
- The original
- 450 team-years
- Released
- 2021 · PS5
- Genre
- Action Platformer
Build the traversal-and-crowd-shooter core of a 3D action platformer, scoped to two small levels and one portal joining them. three.js. Do not attempt the game. Requirements: - The portal is the whole exercise. Render the destination view to a render target and sample it on the portal quad, with the destination camera transform computed as portalB.matrixWorld multiplied by a 180-degree Y rotation, multiplied by portalA.matrixWorld inverse, multiplied by the player camera's matrixWorld. Get that chain wrong and the view slides as you strafe, which reads instantly as fake. Then apply an oblique near-plane clip on the portal camera so geometry between it and the portal plane never renders. - Both scenes stay resident in memory. No loading screen, no fade. Walking through swaps the active scene and carries the player's velocity and camera orientation across the portal transform in a single frame. - Crowd combat: 25 to 40 cheap enemies in an arena, five weapons with genuinely different crowd shapes — a cone, a lobbed area, a piercing line, a deployable that fights for you, a slow single-target hammer. - Traversal: double jump, air dash, hover, wall run, and a grind rail evaluated along a Catmull-Rom spline. - Camera strafe-locks during combat and frees up during traversal, damped rather than snapped. Definition of done: I look through the portal, see the other level moving in real time, walk in, and the camera never cuts.
- Streaming full-size levels off an NVMe fast enough that the swap is instant — at prototype scale you just keep both scenes in memory, which is not the same achievement
- Around twenty weapons, each with its own model, animation set, VFX and audio, which is where the entire personality lives
- Ray-traced reflections and character rigs with film-grade facial animation on a cartoon budget
- Comedy timing, which is writing and voice performance and has never once come out of a code generator
Per-weapon experience, so weapons level from being used rather than from a shop
It makes the loadout a record of how you actually play instead of how you spent currency, and it rewards using the weak thing. Drops into an RPG, a shooter, a deckbuilder, a crafting game — anywhere the player picks a tool repeatedly.
ScopeAn evening— build just this, not the game
Single self-contained HTML file, Canvas 2D. Top-down arena, endless enemies, five weapons on number keys. - Each weapon carries its own XP bar. XP comes from damage dealt with that weapon, not from kills, so a weak weapon used constantly still climbs. - Five levels each. Every level changes exactly one visible number: damage, magazine size, spread, projectile count. At level 5 the weapon evolves — new name, one new behaviour (pierce, ricochet, homing), and a second XP track begins. - Scale each weapon's XP curve to its damage per second so the fast weak weapon and the slow heavy weapon reach level 5 at roughly the same time. This is the whole failure mode: get it wrong and one weapon runs away while the other four become dead weight you never touch. - HUD shows all five bars at once, permanently, so the player can see what they have been neglecting. Definition of done: I deliberately switch to my worst weapon because I want to watch it evolve.
Not a clone — Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart 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.
Blackpowder Endless
Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart, but an endless survival mode instead of levels, set in the Wild West. Rendered in ASCII terminal.
Build a browser game called "Blackpowder Endless". The pitch in one line: a action platformer in the spirit of Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart, but an endless survival mode instead of levels, set in the Wild West. WHAT THIS IS Take the SHAPE of Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart — 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 An endless survival mode instead of levels. One arena, escalating waves on a data-driven timeline, a run timer and a score. Replaces level design with a difficulty curve. 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 The Wild West. Distance, dust and long reloads. A single main street the whole design hangs off. 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 ASCII terminal. A monospace character grid as the only renderer, colour via ANSI-style palette, and every animation expressed as glyph changes. 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 450 team-years to the counter on the homepage.
Then try these
Questions
How hard is Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart to rebuild with an AI agent?
Yes — every game is buildable at some scope. The question is how hard, and Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart is VERY HARD (4 of 5). You will get a good prototype. The product is what comes after. The portal matrix chain is a good afternoon once you know it only betrays you when you strafe; the game is twenty weapons with twenty personalities, and that is modelling, VFX and comedy timing, not code. Reckon on a project to something you can actually play — not to something that matches the 450 team-years Insomniac Games spent.
What makes Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart hard to rebuild?
The portal matrix chain is a good afternoon once you know it only betrays you when you strafe; the game is twenty weapons with twenty personalities, and that is modelling, VFX and comedy timing, not code. 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 per-weapon experience, so weapons level from being used rather than from a shop — an evening of work.
How long does it take to build a Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart clone?
Wrong question, and it is worth saying why. Nobody rebuilds Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart — the original took Insomniac Games on the order of 450 team-years, released in 2021 on PS5. 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 Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart?
Streaming full-size levels off an NVMe fast enough that the swap is instant — at prototype scale you just keep both scenes in memory, which is not the same achievement. Around twenty weapons, each with its own model, animation set, VFX and audio, which is where the entire personality lives. Ray-traced reflections and character rigs with film-grade facial animation on a cartoon budget. 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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