Dead Zone Command

Cinevva's analyzer read this game's design doc and its source, then wrote the brief below. "Make your own" hands it to the game creator as your opening message, so you start from a real spec rather than a one-line idea.

Create a playable Three.js-style top-down tactical RTS named “Dead Zone Command.” The player is a military commander viewing a procedural regional outbreak map from an orthographic overhead camera. Use a dark near-black green background and terrain plane with a subtle square grid, thin gray roads/backroads, brighter wider highways, thick bright blue winding rivers with center lines, small tan bridges at road crossings, scattered dark-green town/city footprints made from rectangular blocks, and a yellow circular evacuation landing zone with a ring near the map edge. Add a translucent red danger/infected-pressure area in one corner. Keep the aesthetic like a simplified official tactical map: procedural low-poly geometry and flat colored unit icons, no realistic textures.

Core gameplay: missions contain soldiers, combat vehicles, civilians, zombies, and sometimes gunships or evac trucks. Units are placed across a bounded roughly 120x120 regional map. Soldiers are blue square/box tactical icons with about 100 HP and automatically fire at nearby zombies. Combat vehicles are larger pale-gray/green armored rectangular vehicles with a turret and barrel; they have much more health and automatically fire heavier, longer-range shots. Civilians are small bright-green circular markers; they can be selected and ordered toward the yellow LZ. Zombies are red triangular markers that automatically pursue the nearest civilians, soldiers, vehicles, trucks, or barricades once the short deployment phase expires. Zombies damage targets on contact; dead civilians are counted as lost and immediately turn into newly spawned zombies, with a brief red infection marker. Show short colored firing tracer lines from soldiers, vehicles, and air support.

Include mutant zombie variants in the outbreak: normal red zombies, larger slower orange Bloated mutants with high HP, pale/lime-green Spitters with low HP that attack from range and apply poison damage over time, and fast pink Clawers with somewhat lower HP but stronger melee damage. Variant spawning uses the outbreak’s mutation chance, and the HUD may show the number of living mutants. Zombies should be visually distinguishable by their flat triangular icon colors and small variant details.

The main objective in ordinary regional/campaign missions is to evacuate at least the mission’s required number of civilians into the yellow LZ and eliminate every remaining zombie. Civilians entering the LZ disappear, increase the evacuated count, and contribute to victory. Lose if all combat units are gone while zombies remain or if too many civilians are lost. Start each ordinary operation with a very short 5-second deployment phase during which the commander can issue initial orders before zombie movement; use a visible deployment message.

Add selectable units and direct manipulation. Clicking/tapping a selectable unit selects it and displays a bright yellow-green circular selection ring; shift-click can add units. Once anything is selected, the next map click or drag-release issues a move order, placing selected units in a loose formation around the destination and briefly showing a pale-blue move marker. The Move Selected button re-prompts movement. Empty-map dragging pans the camera, and mouse wheel plus Zoom + / Zoom – buttons change orthographic zoom. Deselect/Escape clears selection, construction mode, and drop mode. Provide keyboard shortcuts: 1 selects all soldiers, 2 all combat vehicles, 3 all civilians, T all evac trucks, B toggles barricade construction, 4 or 5 opens a normal airdrop planner, and 6 opens the super-drop planner.

Allow construction of barricades. The Build Barricade button costs 25 supplies, enters build mode, and the next map tap places a low-poly tan/orange rectangular barricade at that location. Barricades have health, block/choke zombie movement and attract zombies as targets, and can be destroyed. Supplies are shown in the HUD.

Allow reinforcement drops. Provide three normal airdrops and one super drop per mission. Opening a drop planner shows a modal/loadout panel with plus and minus controls for infantry and combat vehicles, a weight counter, and Deploy/Cancel controls. Infantry costs 1 weight and vehicles cost 3; normal capacity is 6 and super capacity is 12. After deployment, the next map tap creates the chosen soldiers and vehicles around a temporary glowing circular drop marker and vertical descent beam, selects the newly dropped units, and prompts a move order. Show remaining drops in the HUD.

Campaign mode has five sequential missions unlocked by the Next Mission button. Mission 1, “Dire Authorization,” has soldiers, one combat vehicle, civilians, zombies, supplies, and one gunship. Open it with a brief scripted cutscene: two civilians run from a small pursuing group of zombies, a detailed blue-gray helicopter gunship flies in from offscreen and fires tracers to kill the pursuers, the civilians extract, and the camera centers on the soldiers and zooms back into live RTS play. During live play, the gunship patrols automatically, selects nearby zombies, and fires powerful long-range shots. Model the gunship as a visible improved tactical icon: armored fuselage, blue glass cockpit, nose and chin cannon, long tail boom and fin, side weapon wings/pods, a dark shadow beneath it, and translucent spinning main/tail rotor blades.

Mission 2 is “Bridgehead Exodus”: a river-heavy map with more rivers, towns, zombies, civilians, two vehicles, one gunship, fewer soldiers and supplies, and a goal of evacuating 17 civilians while clearing all infected contacts. Mission 3 is “Seaside Convoy”: use a dark blue ocean plane with a sandy-edged island landmass; start four yellow evac trucks plus soldiers and combat vehicles on the island. Trucks are controllable larger yellow/orange vehicles with cargo body, cab, and a small evacuation marker. Order trucks to the yellow safe zone; a truck reaching it is saved, and saving at least one truck wins, while losing all four trucks loses. Mission 4 is “Last Light”: begin with a short chaos cutscene showing some armored vehicles being destroyed, civilians fleeing, and soldiers/remaining vehicles falling back. Then run a 90-second nuclear-strike countdown while additional civilians and zombies enter from map edges. The player tries to save civilians before impact. At zero, show a prominent visible nuclear event over the map: white flash, orange fireball, expanding shockwave ring, then hide units and man-made structures (towns/buildings/bridges/barricades) while leaving the grid, terrain, rivers, and roads readable; add scattered scorch marks and rubble. Mission 5 is “Mutant Breakout,” with a mutant-heavy outbreak, one gunship, 9 soldiers, 3 vehicles, 14 civilians required, and the mutant behaviors above.

Build an always-visible tactical HUD in a clean rounded-panel style matching the visual: dark translucent green panels with thin glowing green borders and large pale mint/white text. At the top show the operation/mission name and live counters such as “Civilians rescued/goal out,” living civilians, soldiers, vehicles, zombies, mutant count when applicable, supplies, and remaining drops. For truck missions show trucks saved/alive. For the nuke mission show saved civilians and “Strike T-90s” countdown. Beneath it show a briefing/instruction line including cutscene, deployment, nuclear, selection, build, and airdrop prompts as appropriate. Provide large touch-friendly controls: Select Soldiers, Select Vehicles, Select Civilians, Select Trucks when relevant, Move Selected, Build Barricade with current cost, Zoom +, Zoom –, Deselect, Airdrop, Air Armor/normal-drop entry, Super Drop, Restart, and Next Mission/New Map. Use a red outlined Restart button and disable Next Mission until the operation is complete; in base mode, Next Mission should instead generate a fresh procedural map. Show short toast notifications for selection, deployment, evacuation, kills/mission completion, failure, and nuclear impact.