ETA HordeAdaptive

A survivors-like auto-battler set in a food-delivery city at dinner rush, where enemies get stronger every time you win. Rendered in oil painting frames.

GenreSurvivors-like auto-battler

Settinga food-delivery city at dinner rush

Twistenemies get stronger every time you win

Lookoil painting frames

Share on XWeight: Small loop territory

Lock a reel with the padlock to keep it and reroll the rest. Every roll has its own URL. Press R to roll. Weight is how hard the inspiration is on VibeDex — not a weekend promise.

How to actually use this

Roll until something makes you laugh or makes you curious. That reaction is the only signal worth trusting at this stage.
Copy the prompt for your agent. It ends by asking for a plan first — read the plan, and argue with it. That conversation is where the design actually happens.
Build the loop with rectangles before anything else. If a grey box moving around is not fun, the pixel art will not rescue it.
Then apply the look. It is deliberately the last step in the prompt, because a beautiful broken game is much harder to diagnose than an ugly working one.

The one-shot build prompt

Build a browser game called "ETA Horde: Adaptive".

Concept: A survivors-like auto-battler set in a food-delivery city at dinner rush, where enemies get stronger every time you win. Rendered in oil painting frames.

THE CORE LOOP
The player only moves; every weapon fires automatically on its own cooldown. Enemies pour in on an escalating timeline for a fixed run length, and levelling up offers a choice of upgrades.

THE RULE THAT MAKES IT DIFFERENT
Enemies get stronger every time you win. Difficulty scales off the player’s demonstrated strategy, not their score. Counter what they actually used last run, and show them that it happened.

REQUIREMENTS
- Must hold 60fps with 2000+ entities: object pools, a spatial hash, and a single batched draw call. The level-up choice screen is the entire loop, so make it instant and keyboard-navigable.
- Heat maps of orders, bike physics, and ratings that punish lateness. The city is a graph of kitchens and door codes.
- Visible brush strokes, thick impasto on impact frames, and a gallery-light grade with warm shadows.
- Runs in a browser with no build step. Vanilla JS or a single small library, ES modules, no bundler required to try it.
- Fixed-timestep update loop with interpolated rendering, so the game is frame-rate independent on a 144Hz monitor.
- All content — levels, entities, balance numbers — lives in JSON or plain data files, never inline in the logic. Tuning must not require reading code.
- Audio generated with the Web Audio API rather than asset files, so the whole thing stays self-contained.
- Feel pass, treated as a requirement and not as polish: hit-stop on significant impacts, screen shake scaled to magnitude, particles on every state change, and easing on every transition. Nothing may pop in or out instantly.
- Full keyboard support, a pause that actually pauses, and a settings panel exposing the tuning constants as live sliders. You will need those sliders.
- Respect prefers-reduced-motion: keep the fades, drop the shake and the parallax.

BUILD ORDER
1. The core loop with placeholder rectangles. No art, no audio, no menus. Make it fun as rectangles first — if it is not fun as rectangles, the look will not save it.
2. The twist, wired into that loop. This is where the design lives, so expect to rewrite step 1 once you feel it.
3. Content and balance, moved out into data files.
4. The look, applied last as a rendering layer over a game that already works.
5. The feel pass.

Weight class: Small loop territory. Cut systems rather than shipping them half-built — this is not a calendar promise.

Start by writing a one-page plan covering the core loop, the data shapes, and what you are deliberately leaving out. Wait for me to approve it before writing code.

The decks

Wild mode: genres, settings, twists and looks in src/lib/roll.js. Append only — share links use indices.

Genre · 36

Roguelike deckbuilder
Twin-stick shooter
Tower defence
Survivors-like auto-battler
Match-3 puzzler
Incremental idle game
Physics puzzler
Bullet hell
City builder
Team-drafting auto-battler
Rhythm game
Farming and life sim
Metroidvania
Management tycoon
Survival crafting
Turn-based tactics
Endless runner
Typing game
Stealth game
Social deduction game
2D platformer
First-person shooter arena
Fighting game
Arcade racer
Turn-based RPG
Point-and-click adventure
Visual novel
Horror exploration
Sports match game
Beat-em-up brawler
Grand strategy map
Escape-room puzzle box
Open-world lite sandbox
Soulslike action
Trivia party game
Immersive sim lite

Setting · 52

a sunken cathedral
a derelict space station
a medieval bakery
a deep-sea salvage operation
a haunted shopping mall
an arctic research base
a cursed arcade
a Roman legion supply line
an open-plan corporate office
an alien greenhouse
a Wild West mining town
a rain-soaked cyberpunk precinct
a monastery library
a travelling circus
a 1970s submarine
a floating sky market
a subway network at 3am
a volcano observatory
a Soviet-era apartment block
a lighthouse at the end of the world
a packed sports stadium
a SaaS startup office
an indie hacker desk
a solo long-haul trip
a 24-hour convenience store
a remote coworking loft
a food-delivery city at dinner rush
a weekend makerspace
a budget airline terminal
a coastal surf town
a university campus during finals
a farmer’s market Saturday
a medieval castle under siege
a muddy front-line trench
a mob-run night city
a jewel heist in progress
a Hollywood backlot at night
a live TV studio
a hospital ER at full tilt
a maximum-security prison
a wood-panelled courtroom
a music festival campsite
a desert highway truck stop
a rainy noir police precinct
a luxury hotel floor sealed for “maintenance”
a nightclub at peak hour, plus the rooms the crowd never sees
an offshore oil rig in rough weather
a skyscraper still under construction
a city sewer and storm-drain network
a casino floor and the counting rooms underneath
a refrigerated warehouse on the edge of town
a private members’ club after midnight

Twist · 35

you can only act on the beat
time rewinds every 30 seconds
one button is your whole control scheme
you play as the antagonist
death is permanent and inherited
there is no combat at all
the interface lies to you
the map is destroyed as you play
you control two characters at once
everything runs on a 60-second timer
you cannot see — you can only hear
every action spends the same resource
the world is rearranged each run
you escort something fragile
enemies get stronger every time you win
you can undo your moves but the world cannot
the camera has its own agenda
your score is also your health
all your inputs are mirrored
you are always falling
chat is a real control channel
you only get three verbs
the day/night cycle is the difficulty curve
everything is a subscription you can cancel
you draft the rules before you play
you only see what you have revealed
there is no HUD — the world is the UI
every choice locks the moment you confirm
failure deletes one of your verbs forever this run
you share one life pool with everything on your side
nothing is explained in words — only signs in the world
a cursed token must be held, passed or dumped on a timer
you win by making a deal, not by destroying the threat
critical information is shown once, then gone
the playable space shrinks on a clock you can read

Look · 29

PS1 low-poly with texture warping
Game Boy four-shade green
CRT arcade with scanlines
flat vector minimalism
hand-drawn ink on paper
16-colour pixel art
isometric voxel
ASCII terminal
claymation with baked light
N64 fog and vertex colour
blueprint technical drawing
risograph two-colour print
silhouette against one light
photocopied zine
anime cel-shade
oil painting frames
soft watercolor
VHS camcorder night
comic-book halftone
clean product UI 3D
chunky voxel sandbox
neon synthwave
black-and-white noir film
paper cut-out collage
modern low-poly diorama
manga screentone
glitch datamosh
soft pastel indie
LEGO brick build

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