🖥️ PC2007ValveBRUTAL

Team Fortress 2 rebuild deck

BRUTAL

Rocket jumping falls out of the physics on the first try; everything after that is servers, an item economy and a nine-class balance job Valve has been holding down since 2007.

The hard part is not game design at all.

TF2 shipped after nine years, two full restarts and a change of art style, which should calm anybody down about their own schedule. KINDA rather than NO, because the local build lands: six classes and a control point is a weekend, and the rocket jump falls out of the physics on the first try. What you cannot have is the thing that keeps it alive — class balance is not a task you complete, it is a job somebody holds down, and Valve has been holding it down since 2007. Build it anyway, if only to find out that the best movement mechanic in shooters is a missing minus sign in a damage formula.

Difficulty: BRUTAL · 5 of 5
First playable: A project
The original: 45 team-years
Released: 2007 · PC
Genre: Class-Based Shooter

The one-shot build prompt

Build a class-based team shooter played against bots on one control-point map. three.js, six classes, local only — the servers and the balance job are what you are not building.

Requirements:
- Explosions apply a radial impulse to every player in radius, including the one who fired, scaled by distance and damage. Self-damage is reduced by roughly half; the self-impulse is not reduced at all. That single asymmetry is what lets an explosive class launch itself across the map, and it is the movement skill ceiling of the genre. Do not clamp it, and do not let anyone talk you into treating it as a bug.
- Projectile and hitscan weapons must not share a code path. Projectiles get travel speed, gravity where appropriate and a collision sweep. Hitscan resolves instantly with damage falloff by distance and a ramp-up at close range.
- Six classes defined entirely in JSON — health, speed, weapons — and each one must be uniquely good at something and helpless against something else. Include a fast fragile flanker, a slow high-health area-denial class, a healer whose beam locks to a target and fills a charge meter, and a class that builds an upgradeable stationary turret at a cost.
- Respawn in synchronised waves on a shared per-team timer, never individually.
- One symmetrical map: central point, high ground per team, one flank route.
- Feel: class movement speeds identifiable by ear, a hit sound that pitches with damage dealt, a kill feed that names classes.

Definition of done: I launch myself onto the high ground behind the enemy team using my own rocket, which nobody explicitly told the game to allow.

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

What you lose

Nine classes balanced against each other for nineteen years and counting
Art direction where every class is identifiable by silhouette at any distance, which took Valve years and a published paper to arrive at
The voice acting and character writing, which is why anyone remembers this game
Servers, the item economy, and the hats, which turned out to be the business model

What to steal

Synchronised respawn waves

Respawning players in timed batches instead of on individual clocks turns a scatter of deaths into a single team-wide event: kill three people at the wrong moment for them and you have bought yourself thirty seconds of empty map. It converts trading kills into controlling tempo, and it is a timer, not a system.

ScopeAn evening— build just this, not the game

Single self-contained HTML file, Canvas 2D, no build step. Top-down arena, two teams of five simple AI fighters, a capture point in the middle. Nobody respawns on their own clock. Each team has a repeating wave timer, starting at ten seconds, and every dead member of that team returns together on the next tick, at their own spawn, walking back in as a group. Draw both wave timers as bars on screen, because the whole mechanic is anticipation. Track and display how long each team has held the point, and add a slider for wave length so I can feel the difference between five seconds and fifteen. Definition of done: I wipe four of the enemy team just after their wave fires, hold the point uncontested for most of the next wave, and can point at the bar that explains exactly why.

Make it different

Not a clone — Team Fortress 2 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.

Campus One Room

Team Fortress 2, but one level, done properly, set in university life. Rendered in paper cut-out collage.

Themeuniversity life

Angleone level, done properly

Lookpaper cut-out collage

Build a browser game called "Campus One Room".

The pitch in one line: a class-based shooter in the spirit of Team Fortress 2, but one level, done properly, set in university life.

WHAT THIS IS
Take the SHAPE of Team Fortress 2 — 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
One level, done properly. A single space, built to a finish quality you could not sustain across twenty. Every prop and every sightline is deliberate.
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
University life. Semesters, clubs, exams and housing. Social graphs and deadlines do more damage than monsters.
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
Paper cut-out collage. Layered cardstock shapes, soft drop shadows between layers, and scissors-edge silhouettes that parallax.

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 45 team-years to the counter on the homepage.

Then try these

Or roll something nobody has built yet →

Questions

How hard is Team Fortress 2 to rebuild with an AI agent?

Yes — every game is buildable at some scope. The question is how hard, and Team Fortress 2 is BRUTAL (5 of 5). The hard part is not game design at all. Rocket jumping falls out of the physics on the first try; everything after that is servers, an item economy and a nine-class balance job Valve has been holding down since 2007. Reckon on a project to something you can actually play — not to something that matches the 45 team-years Valve spent.

What makes Team Fortress 2 hard to rebuild?

Rocket jumping falls out of the physics on the first try; everything after that is servers, an item economy and a nine-class balance job Valve has been holding down since 2007. 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 synchronised respawn waves — an evening of work.

How long does it take to build a Team Fortress 2 clone?

Wrong question, and it is worth saying why. Nobody rebuilds Team Fortress 2 — the original took Valve on the order of 45 team-years, released in 2007 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 Team Fortress 2?

Nine classes balanced against each other for nineteen years and counting. Art direction where every class is identifiable by silhouette at any distance, which took Valve years and a published paper to arrive at. The voice acting and character writing, which is why anyone remembers this game. 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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