🍄 Nintendo2017Nintendo EPDVERY HARDSuper Mario Odyssey rebuild deck
VERY HARD
The moveset is a genuine weekend; the game is 836 hand-placed moons, fifty bespoke capture controllers and a camera carrying dozens of authored region overrides.
You will get a good prototype. The product is what comes after.
An agent will write jump code that zeroes horizontal velocity on landing, because that is what every platformer tutorial on the internet does, and the result feels like wading through porridge. Check that one line before you look at anything else. The capture system is architecturally trivial as a controller swap and an absolute swamp as a pile of form flags, so say which one you want in the prompt or you will get the swamp. The moveset is a genuine weekend. Eight hundred reasons to use it are not.
- Difficulty
- VERY HARD · 4 of 5
- First playable
- A project
- The original
- 300 team-years
- Released
- 2017 · Nintendo
- Genre
- 3D Platformer
Build a 3D platformer movement sandbox with a possession mechanic. three.js, one small floating island, twenty collectibles. The moveset is the product; the level is a test track. Requirements: - Ground moveset: run with acceleration and a skid turn, plus a chained jump ladder — normal arc, higher, then highest with a flip. The chain continues only if the next jump input arrives within 8 frames of touchdown with the stick still held forward. - The load-bearing detail: each jump in the chain must preserve horizontal velocity through the landing frame. Almost every clone zeroes horizontal speed on ground contact and re-accelerates from nothing, which is exactly why the third jump feels dead. Keep the horizontal component, apply friction only, and add the vertical impulse on top of it. - Dive, ground pound, long jump, and a roll that converts a dive into ground speed. Coyote time of 5 frames, jump buffer of 6 frames. - Capture: throw a projectile that arcs out and boomerangs back to your hand. If it touches an entity tagged capturable, that entity becomes the player and its own controller object replaces yours entirely. A frog jumps three times as high and cannot dive. A rock cannot jump but breaks things. Swap a controller component, never booleans on the player. - A chase camera on a spring that never clips terrain and never fights the player's input. Definition of done: I chain three jumps into a dive, roll out of it at full speed, and cross a gap I cannot cross from standing.
- 836 hand-placed Power Moons — 880 once the multi-moons are counted — each one a designed reason to be standing somewhere specific
- The camera, which is a tuned system with dozens of hand-authored region overrides, not a spring
- Hundreds of blended animations — the moveset reads because the animation sells the physics, not the other way round
- The capture roster: fifty-odd creatures, each a bespoke controller with its own art, audio and one good idea
Capture — touching a creature swaps your entire movement controller for theirs.
Most games add abilities to a fixed character. This replaces the verb set wholesale, so one small level can demand three completely different movement skills without three tutorials. It costs you an interface and a pointer swap, and it is the cheapest variety you will ever buy in a level that size.
ScopeA weekend— build just this, not the game
Build a single-file HTML page, Canvas 2D, side-on platformer, demonstrating controller swapping.
Requirements:
- One player entity with a controller field. Write three controllers as plain objects sharing one interface: { maxSpeed, accel, jumpImpulse, mass, update(entity, input) }. Human: moderate speed, one jump, a dash. Frog: half speed, triple jump height, no dash. Boulder: cannot jump, twice the mass, smashes breakable blocks on contact above 6 units/s.
- Press C to throw a projectile on a 200px arc that returns to the thrower. If it overlaps an entity tagged capturable, swap the player's controller for that entity's, retarget the camera, and leave the old body standing where it was.
- Nothing outside the controller object may branch on which form you are. If the string 'frog' appears anywhere in the movement code, you have built it wrong.
- One high ledge and one breakable wall, placed so each form is required exactly once.
Definition of done: I clear the ledge as the frog, smash the wall as the boulder, and the movement code contains no per-form conditionals.Not a clone — Super Mario Odyssey 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.
Shogun Flatland
Super Mario Odyssey, but 2D instead of 3D, set in feudal Japan. Rendered in VHS camcorder night.
Build a browser game called "Shogun Flatland". The pitch in one line: a 3d platformer in the spirit of Super Mario Odyssey, but 2D instead of 3D, set in feudal Japan. WHAT THIS IS Take the SHAPE of Super Mario Odyssey — 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 2D instead of 3D. Canvas 2D and sprites. The mechanics survive the dimension drop; the asset budget falls by an order of magnitude. 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 Feudal Japan. Duels decided before the first strike, weather and season as mood, and restraint in everything including the interface. 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 VHS camcorder night. Tracking lines, timestamp burn-in, autofocus hunt, and crushed blacks with over-bright headlights. 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 300 team-years to the counter on the homepage.
Then try these
Questions
How hard is Super Mario Odyssey to rebuild with an AI agent?
Yes — every game is buildable at some scope. The question is how hard, and Super Mario Odyssey is VERY HARD (4 of 5). You will get a good prototype. The product is what comes after. The moveset is a genuine weekend; the game is 836 hand-placed moons, fifty bespoke capture controllers and a camera carrying dozens of authored region overrides. Reckon on a project to something you can actually play — not to something that matches the 300 team-years Nintendo EPD spent.
What makes Super Mario Odyssey hard to rebuild?
The moveset is a genuine weekend; the game is 836 hand-placed moons, fifty bespoke capture controllers and a camera carrying dozens of authored region overrides. 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 capture — touching a creature swaps your entire movement controller for theirs. — a weekend of work.
How long does it take to build a Super Mario Odyssey clone?
Wrong question, and it is worth saying why. Nobody rebuilds Super Mario Odyssey — the original took Nintendo EPD on the order of 300 team-years, released in 2017 on Nintendo. 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 Super Mario Odyssey?
836 hand-placed Power Moons — 880 once the multi-moons are counted — each one a designed reason to be standing somewhere specific. The camera, which is a tuned system with dozens of hand-authored region overrides, not a spring. Hundreds of blended animations — the moveset reads because the animation sells the physics, not the other way round. 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.
One email when new games go on the list. No other reason to email you, ever.