Era Tribes

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 small original turn-based 3D strategy game titled “Era Tribes,” designed for touch/pointer play. Use a bright, friendly low-poly/isometric presentation: a floating round island made from an 8x8 staggered hex-like grid of individual six-sided tiles, surrounded by a circular blue ocean, under a pale blue sky with soft fog and warm directional lighting. Let the camera be a perspective camera angled down from above (roughly 50-degree field of view), centered on the island, with smooth orbit controls, damping, zoom limits, and a shallow maximum polar angle. Tiles should cast and receive soft shadows and have subtle raised height: plain and resource tiles are low, mountain tiles slightly higher. Use a colorful, accessible stylized palette: green plains, dark green forests, gray mountains, blue-gray ore, tan neutral villages, blue player territory, and pink/red enemy territory. Add low-poly environmental props: Kenney-style trees on forests, rocks on mountains and ore, towers on cities, and colored flags for owned cities. Make blue player units and red enemy units as simple rounded low-poly humanoid figures with a colored body, skin-colored head, and a horizontal era-gear bar whose color changes with the player’s era. Units should gently bob in place.

The board is exactly 8x8 and uses a fixed terrain layout, with rows (z=0 through 7) represented by these codes: “ffmfmfmm”, “fpgppgof”, “mgpffgpm”, “fppmgppf”, “mpgffppm”, “fogpgpgf”, “mmpfmfpf”, “ffgppmff”. Interpret f as forest, m as mountain, o as ore, and g/p as plain. Stagger alternate rows horizontally to make the grid look hex-like. Start with a blue player city at coordinate (1,1), a red enemy city at (6,6), and two neutral villages at (5,1) and (2,6). Start with one blue unit at (1,2), and two red units at (6,5) and (5,6). The player begins in the Stone Era on turn 1 with 4 food and 0 knowledge. Show the whole island and keep the game board visible behind the HUD.

Core interaction: tapping/clicking a tile inspects it. Tapping a blue unit selects it; then tapping an adjacent tile makes that unit move if the destination is empty, or attack if it contains an enemy unit. Units can move or attack only one neighboring tile per turn. Use row-parity neighbor directions to support the staggered grid. A unit may move once and attack once per turn, with moved/attacked state shown in the inspection panel; occupied friendly tiles cannot be entered. Highlight the selected tile with a yellow ring and show possible neighboring destinations with faint white rings. When a unit kills an enemy, move the attacker into the defeated unit’s tile. Moving onto a neutral or enemy village captures it, changes its owner color, refreshes its appearance, and places the appropriate colored flag. Display contextual messages for selections, invalid distance, occupied tiles, attacks, captures, harvesting, training, research, and turn transitions.

Implement six eras with these exact names, unit names, evolution costs, gear colors, attack, and maximum HP values: Stone / Clubber / cost 8 / #b9a070 / attack 1 / HP 3; Bronze / Spearman / cost 14 / #d88b42 / attack 2 / HP 4; Iron / Knight / cost 22 / #ccd5df / attack 3 / HP 5; Steam / Ranger / cost 34 / #8b7a67 / attack 4 / HP 6; Electric / Volt Guard / cost 50 / #66d8ff / attack 5 / HP 7; Stellar / Star Walker / cost 70 / #d19cff / attack 7 / HP 9. Player attack strength comes from the current era. On evolution, update all existing blue units’ max HP to the new era’s value, raise their current HP to at least new max HP minus one, and recolor their gear.

Provide four bottom action buttons: “Train (cost)”, “Harvest”, “Evolve (knowledge cost)” and a wide red “End Turn.” Training costs food equal to 3 plus the current era index, spawns a new blue unit on the first open neighboring tile of the selected player city (or the first player city if no suitable city is selected), and selects the new unit. If there is no open adjacent tile, show a message. Harvest works on a selected, unharvested forest or ore tile only when it is adjacent to player land or the selected player unit. Forest gives 3 food; ore gives 4 plus the era index. Mark the resource tile harvested, remove its tree/rock, and visually change its tile color. Research spends the current era’s listed knowledge cost and advances one era; disable it when unaffordable or already Stellar. Disable actions while the enemy is thinking or the game is over.

At the end of the player turn, add food equal to 2 plus the number of blue cities, and knowledge equal to 3 plus twice the number of blue cities plus the current era index. Reset player unit movement and attack flags, and heal a damaged player unit by 1 if it is standing on blue-owned territory. Increment the turn, briefly show that the red tribe is thinking, then run a simple enemy AI: enemy units attack an adjacent blue unit if possible; otherwise move one free neighboring step toward the nearest blue unit or blue city and capture a city if they step onto it. Enemy units heal 1, increase their effective era over time (initially one era behind the player, with gradual advancement based on turn), and the enemy spawns additional units from its first city while its total is below 3 plus floor(turn/5), using open neighboring tiles. Then return to the player turn.

Win and loss rules must be explicit: win when there are no red cities or no red units; lose when there are no blue cities or no blue units. On game over, change the information panel heading to “Game Over,” stop input/actions, and show a victory or defeat toast. The HUD should be fixed over the canvas with dark translucent rounded pills at the top reading “Era,” “Turn,” “Food,” “Knowledge,” and “Cities blue/red,” with important values highlighted in gold. Put a dark translucent inspection panel near the lower left reading “Era Tribes” initially and “Tap a tile to inspect it,” then show tile type, coordinates, owner, resource details, village status, and unit HP when selected. Include a temporary centered toast below the top bar. On desktop, include a compact “How to play” panel at lower right with the five basic instructions; hide that help panel on narrow mobile screens. Use a rounded Nunito-like bold font, responsive flex layout, touch-safe buttons, colorful gradients, button shadows, and a responsive mobile arrangement where the action buttons share the bottom width and the inspection panel sits above them. Preserve the cheerful, polished low-poly board-game feel rather than adding menus, inventories, or unrelated systems.