💿 PS11996CapcomVERY HARD

Resident Evil rebuild deck

VERY HARD

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

The technical trick — 3D over pre-rendered plates with a depth mask — is elegant and very promptable. What you cannot prompt is the 500 background paintings, which is why this is a KINDA. Interestingly, AI image generation makes the backgrounds more tractable than they have ever been; the collision and camera data for each one is still hand work.

Difficulty: VERY HARD · 4 of 5
First playable: A weekend
The original: 20 team-years
Released: 1996 · PS1
Genre: Survival Horror

The one-shot build prompt

Build a survival horror prototype with fixed camera angles and tank controls. three.js, 3D characters composited over static background images.

Requirements:
- The signature architecture: each room is a static background image plus an invisible 3D collision mesh and a camera transform. The 3D player model renders into that scene with a depth mask so they can walk behind foreground geometry. Build the room format as JSON: background image, camera matrix, collision polygons, depth-mask mesh, exits.
- Tank controls: up is forward relative to the character, left/right rotate in place. Crucially, the character keeps its heading when the camera cuts to a new angle, so you do not reverse direction on every transition. This is the one thing every clone gets wrong.
- Camera triggers: walking through a volume cuts to another fixed angle with a hard cut, never a pan.
- Inventory with a hard slot limit, item combining, item examination in a 3D viewer that can reveal hidden details, and a separate storage box. Scarcity is the entire design — 6 slots, not 20.
- Save points that consume a limited resource, with a save room that plays safe music and is the only place you can relax.
- Enemies that are slow, absorb many bullets, and block corridors, so the correct answer is usually to run past. Aiming is a lock-on with up/down target switching, no free aim.
- Doors as loading transitions with a 2-second animation, hiding the room swap and building dread.

Definition of done: I decide to leave a herb behind because my inventory is full, and I feel bad about it.

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

What you lose

The pre-rendered backgrounds, which are 500 hand-crafted paintings
Voice acting so bad it became the point
Puzzle and item-placement design across an entire interlocking mansion
The specific dread of a fixed camera pointed exactly where the designer wanted

What to steal

A six-slot inventory that forces evictions

Most inventories are storage, and storage is not a mechanic. Shrink it far enough and every pickup becomes a decision about what you are willing to walk away from — a locked door two rooms back does more design work than any monster.

ScopeA weekend— build just this, not the game

Build a scarcity-inventory toy as a single self-contained HTML file, Canvas 2D, no build step, no dependencies.

A small top-down layout of eight connected rooms. Items are scattered through them: keys, tools, consumables, and two-part items that combine into one. The player carries exactly six slots. One room holds a storage chest, the only place to offload, and it is deliberately far from everything interesting.

Rules: picking up with a full pack opens an explicit swap — take it and name what you drop, or leave it. Dropped items stay on the floor where they fell, permanently, and are drawn there. Combining two items frees a slot, which should feel like a gift. At least two doors need items you cannot carry alongside the tools required to use them.

Slot count, item list and room layout in a JSON config so scarcity is tunable in one place.

Definition of done: I walk back to the chest, and I resent the trip.

Make it different

Not a clone — Resident Evil 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.

The Outfit Offline

Resident Evil, but against bots — no netcode at all, set in organized crime. Rendered in oil painting frames.

Themeorganized crime

Angleagainst bots — no netcode at all

Lookoil painting frames

Build a browser game called "The Outfit Offline".

The pitch in one line: a survival horror in the spirit of Resident Evil, but against bots — no netcode at all, set in organized crime.

WHAT THIS IS
Take the SHAPE of Resident Evil — 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
Against bots — no netcode at all. Everything runs locally. No server, no lobby, no lag compensation. Bots use a small behaviour tree with a tunable reaction time. This single cut removes the hardest engineering in most multiplayer games.
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
Organized crime. Families, territory and quiet threats. The win condition is control, not a body count.
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
Oil painting frames. Visible brush strokes, thick impasto on impact frames, and a gallery-light grade with warm shadows.

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 20 team-years to the counter on the homepage.

Then try these

Or roll something nobody has built yet →

Questions

How hard is Resident Evil to rebuild with an AI agent?

Yes — every game is buildable at some scope. The question is how hard, and Resident Evil is VERY HARD (4 of 5). You will get a good prototype. The product is what comes after. 3D characters over pre-rendered plates with a depth mask is elegant and takes a day; the game is five hundred paintings, each needing a camera matrix, collision polygons and a depth mesh fitted by hand. Reckon on a weekend to something you can actually play — not to something that matches the 20 team-years Capcom spent.

What makes Resident Evil hard to rebuild?

3D characters over pre-rendered plates with a depth mask is elegant and takes a day; the game is five hundred paintings, each needing a camera matrix, collision polygons and a depth mesh fitted by hand. 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 a six-slot inventory that forces evictions — a weekend of work.

How long does it take to build a Resident Evil clone?

Wrong question, and it is worth saying why. Nobody rebuilds Resident Evil — the original took Capcom on the order of 20 team-years, released in 1996 on PS1. 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 Resident Evil?

The pre-rendered backgrounds, which are 500 hand-crafted paintings. Voice acting so bad it became the point. Puzzle and item-placement design across an entire interlocking mansion. 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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