Mansion of Measurements

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 browser game titled “Mansion of Measurements,” a top-down pixel-art exploration and educational escape puzzle. Render the world in a crisp, low-resolution 384x216 canvas scaled to fill the screen with nearest-neighbor pixelation. Use a very dark haunted-mansion palette: brown wooden floors, nearly black brick walls with highlights, red rugs, gray cobblestone rooms, dark cellar/crypt floors, warm gold HUD text, and heavy black vignette around the screen. The camera should follow and center on the player while clamping to a large mansion map.

Build a connected mansion occupying a roughly 40-by-32 tile map with 12-pixel tiles. Include multiple rooms joined by narrow corridors and door gaps: foyer, dining hall, parlour, gallery, kitchen, sitting room, study, cellar, grand hall, library, crypt, laboratory, and a southern exit hall. Use walls around floor areas and solid collision against walls and most furniture. Decorate the rooms with chunky pixel sprites including tables, sofas, desks, bookshelves with colorful books, barrels, crates, a statue with red eyes, a sarcophagus, sink, fireplaces with animated orange/yellow flames, a cauldron with green liquid and bubbles, and a large two-tile front door with a visible padlock at the south end of the exit hall. The player begins in the foyer and must travel through the mansion to the exit.

The player is a tiny pixel adventurer carrying a lantern: blue shirt, brown hair, skin-colored face and arms, dark trousers and boots, and a warm lantern glow. Support keyboard movement with WASD and arrow keys, plus an on-screen virtual joystick on touch devices. Movement should be smooth, axis-separated, collision-aware, and slower than a tile per frame; animate the player’s legs while walking and show facing direction. Support interaction with E, Enter, Space, or a large mobile SEARCH button.

Implement a lantern-based visibility system. Most of the mansion should be dimmed by a translucent near-black fog, while a circular radius of about eight tiles around the player is brightly visible. Fireplaces create small permanent warm-lit areas. Add a subtle flickering warm tint, player glow, low ominous drone, simple square-wave/triangle/sawtooth sound effects, and occasional brief ghost scares in dark areas. A scare is only a visual/audio event: a pale blocky ghost with dark eyes and mouth briefly appears near the edge of view, accompanied by a red flash and unsettling sound; do not turn it into a combat system.

Create exactly six measurement clues per run. Randomly shuffle a bank of single-digit New Zealand Year 6-style measurement questions and choose six. Examples from the actual question bank include: centimeters needed to reach a target length, litres remaining, unit conversions, elapsed time, temperature differences, area, fractions of an hour, rounding millilitres, remaining kilometres, units digits, hundreds of grams, volume, and metric dimensions. Place the six clues randomly on six eligible furniture objects selected from tables, desks, shelves, barrels, crates, sarcophagi, fireplaces, or the cauldron. Unsolved clue holders should have a small animated yellow sparkle so they can be spotted in the darkness.

When the player is close to a clue holder and interacts, open a centered dark parchment-style modal overlay. Show “CLUE n of 6,” the measurement question, and a single-digit answer field. Accept digits 0–9 from the keyboard and provide a visible numeric keypad with 1–9, blank, 0, and DEL for touch use. Include SUBMIT and LEAVE IT buttons. Correct answers play positive tones, mark the clue solved, record its digit, update the HUD, and close after a short delay. Wrong answers show “Wrong. A draft whistles... try again.”, play harsh sounds, flash red, and may trigger the ghost scare; allow retrying. Do not allow movement while a modal is open.

Keep a fixed HUD over the canvas. At the upper left display “CLUES 0 / 6” and update the count. At upper right display “CODE” followed by six spaced slots, using underscores for unknown digits and revealed digits for solved clues. At the bottom, show temporary instructional messages such as “Find 6 measurements. Answers are single digits. Unlock the door to escape.”, progress messages, and directions to the front door. The interface should use a retro pixel font similar to Press Start 2P for HUD/buttons and a larger VT323-like typeface for question text.

When the player is close to the southern padlocked front door, interaction opens a second centered modal titled “THE FRONT PADLOCK.” Show six large numbered dials labeled CL1 through CL6, initially blank, with mouse wheel, click/tap cycling, and touch drag up/down controls. Include the explanation that each digit is a clue answer in clue order, plus TRY TO ESCAPE and STEP AWAY buttons. The lock opens only if all six dials match the six selected clue answers in their clue-array order; otherwise show “The lock refuses. Check your clue answers and their order.” with a brief scare effect. The player can approach the door before solving all clues, but the lock should report the current found count and only unlock with the complete correct six-digit code.

After a successful code entry, play a sequence of triumphant tones, change the padlock to an open state, and display a message telling the player to walk south through the door. If the player moves below the exit door while unlocked, end the game with a darkened overlay reading “YOU ESCAPED!” and “The mansion is behind you.” Preserve the retro, eerie, educational escape-room feel throughout. Include responsive mobile controls, prevent page scrolling, and make the game restart with a fresh randomized six-question clue set on reload.