🖥️ PC2000MaxisVERY HARDThe Sims rebuild deck
VERY HARD
There is no goal, no fail state and no score, so nothing carries the game except the autonomy of the little people — and that means every object in the house has to advertise what it does to characters who are choosing for themselves, which is a whole architecture rather than a feature.
You will get a good prototype. The product is what comes after.
The needs bars are an afternoon and are not the game. The reason this sits at very hard is the smart object architecture — get it right and everything after is content, get it wrong and every new object means editing a giant switch statement in the character brain, which is exactly the wall people hit around object number six. Ask for advertisement-based autonomy explicitly and up front. It is also the honest reason the original took so long: the engine was tractable, the hundreds of hand-animated interactions were not.
- Difficulty
- VERY HARD · 4 of 5
- First playable
- A project
- The original
- 40 team-years
- Released
- 2000 · PC
- Genre
- Life Simulation
Build a life simulation with autonomous characters. Vanilla JS or a small engine, isometric or top-down 2D, no framework requirement. Requirements: - A build mode: place walls, doors and objects on a grid, with a room detector that works out enclosure. A player-built house must remain navigable or clearly report that it is not. - Needs model per character: hunger, energy, hygiene, bladder, social, fun. Each decays at its own rate, and the discomfort from a low need rises non-linearly so a nearly empty bar dominates everything else. - Build the AI as smart objects, not as a character brain. Each object advertises the interactions it offers and what they do — a fridge advertises 'meal, +40 hunger, 20 minutes, requires standing space here'. Characters do not know what a fridge is. They ask every reachable object what it offers, score each advertisement against their current needs and the walking distance, and pick the best. This is the architecture the original used and it is the reason the game could be extended with new objects forever. - Because of that, adding a new object must require zero changes to character code. Prove it: add a new object type after the AI is finished and confirm you touched nothing else. - A queue of actions per character with interruption rules, so an urgent need can override a queued want but a character does not abandon a meal every three seconds. - Pathfinding on the grid with doors as chokepoints, and characters that route around each other rather than through. - Time controls at 1x, 2x and 4x, and a needs panel with a live readout of what each character is currently deciding and why. Definition of done: I place a new object I invented, and a character walks over and uses it without me writing a line of character logic.
- The content, which is the actual product — hundreds of objects, animations and interactions, and a house full of five of them is a tech demo
- Character animation that sells emotion; without it a needs system is a spreadsheet with sprites
- Simlish and the sound design, which is most of the charm and none of the code
- Pathfinding that survives a player-built house — the original had years of work on getting Sims through doorways their owners had made impossible
Objects advertise what they offer; characters never know what anything is
Inverting where the knowledge lives is the whole trick. Normally the character AI holds a list of what to do with each object type, which means the AI grows every time the world does. Put the offer on the object — what need it fills, how much, how long, what it requires — and the character becomes a fixed scoring loop that never changes again. New content becomes pure data, modders can add objects without touching code, and emergent behaviour appears for free because characters weigh options you never explicitly compared.
ScopeA weekend— build just this, not the game
Build an advertisement-driven autonomy sandbox as a single self-contained HTML file. Canvas 2D, no dependencies. - A room grid with four or five objects and two or three autonomous characters. - Each object publishes a list of advertisements: need affected, magnitude, duration, and any spatial requirement. Characters have no knowledge of object types at all. - Each character scores every reachable advertisement as magnitude weighted by how badly the need is met, minus a travel cost, and commits to the winner with a short hysteresis so it does not thrash between two similar options. - Draw a live debug overlay: for the selected character, list every advertisement it can currently see with its computed score, ranked, updating each tick. - Include an 'add object' button that injects a brand new object type at runtime from a JSON definition typed into a textarea. Definition of done: I paste in a new object definition mid-run and a character incorporates it into its decisions on the next tick, with no code changes.
Not a clone — The Sims 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.
Nile Offline
The Sims, but against bots — no netcode at all, set in ancient Egypt. Rendered in blueprint technical drawing.
Build a browser game called "Nile Offline". The pitch in one line: a life simulation in the spirit of The Sims, but against bots — no netcode at all, set in ancient Egypt. WHAT THIS IS Take the SHAPE of The Sims — 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 Ancient Egypt. Tomb architecture as level design: sealed rooms, traps built by people who expected robbers, and hieroglyph legibility as a UI language. 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 Blueprint technical drawing. White line-work on a blue ground, dimension lines and callout labels on live objects, and a grid that is diegetic rather than decorative. 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.
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 40 team-years to the counter on the homepage.
Then try these
Questions
How hard is The Sims to rebuild with an AI agent?
Yes — every game is buildable at some scope. The question is how hard, and The Sims is VERY HARD (4 of 5). You will get a good prototype. The product is what comes after. There is no goal, no fail state and no score, so nothing carries the game except the autonomy of the little people — and that means every object in the house has to advertise what it does to characters who are choosing for themselves, which is a whole architecture rather than a feature. Reckon on a project to something you can actually play — not to something that matches the 40 team-years Maxis spent.
What makes The Sims hard to rebuild?
There is no goal, no fail state and no score, so nothing carries the game except the autonomy of the little people — and that means every object in the house has to advertise what it does to characters who are choosing for themselves, which is a whole architecture rather than a feature. 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 objects advertise what they offer; characters never know what anything is — a weekend of work.
How long does it take to build a The Sims clone?
Wrong question, and it is worth saying why. Nobody rebuilds The Sims — the original took Maxis on the order of 40 team-years, released in 2000 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 The Sims?
The content, which is the actual product — hundreds of objects, animations and interactions, and a house full of five of them is a tech demo. Character animation that sells emotion; without it a needs system is a spreadsheet with sprites. Simlish and the sound design, which is most of the charm and none of the code. 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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