Maze Muncher

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 browser game titled “Maze Muncher,” a single-screen Pac-Man-like maze game rendered on a square HTML canvas. Use a dark navy/black arcade presentation with a centered responsive game area (maximum width about 700px) and a square board with a blue border, rounded corners, and subtle blue glow. Above the board show a bold three-part HUD: “SCORE” on the left, “LIVES” centered, and “LEVEL” on the right; labels are white and their numeric values are cyan. Start at SCORE 0, LIVES 3, LEVEL 1.

Build the maze from a fixed 19-column by 17-row tile grid. The outer perimeter is solid wall, with internal rectangular blue wall blocks forming the symmetric maze corridors. Draw walls as dark royal-blue tile rectangles with a slightly lighter blue short highlight near the top of each block. The traversable corridors are very dark navy. Place a small pale-yellow pellet in every normal corridor pellet location and larger bright-yellow power-pellet-like dots at the four map locations marked as special pellets. The player starts near the lower center of the maze at grid coordinate (9,12), facing left. Draw the player as a bright yellow circular character with a wedge-shaped animated mouth opening and closing, oriented in the current movement direction.

The goal is to eat all pellets in the maze while avoiding three autonomous chasers. Normal pellets award 10 points; the four larger special dots award 50 points. When the pellet count reaches zero, increment the level, award 500 bonus points, repopulate the same fixed maze with all pellets, and reset the player and chasers to their starting positions. There is no separate victory screen for clearing a level; gameplay continues at the next level. The player has three lives. If the player enters the same tile as any chaser, subtract one life and reset all character positions; if lives reach zero, stop the game and show a full-screen dark translucent overlay with a centered dark card, a yellow “Game over” heading, text showing “Final score: [score],” and a “PLAY AGAIN” button. Restart resets score, lives, level, pellets, and positions.

Start the three chasers together near the upper-middle/home area around grid coordinates (9,8), (8,8), and (10,8), with distinct colors red-pink (#ff5c7a), light cyan (#6ce7ff), and pink (#ff9cf0). Draw each as a rounded ghost shape with a semicircular top, a zig-zag/wavy bottom, two white eyes, and dark-blue pupils. Chasers move one grid step at a time through non-wall tiles, generally selecting routes toward the player but sometimes targeting their home position; they occasionally choose a random alternative and do not reverse direction when selecting normal options. Move the player and ghosts on a fixed step interval of roughly 0.13 seconds. The player should support buffered directional input: pressing a direction stores it as the next direction and turns into it as soon as the adjacent tile becomes open. Movement is grid-based and blocked by walls and the board boundary.

Support keyboard controls: Arrow keys and WASD (W/up, A/left, S/down, D/right). Prevent browser scrolling for these keys. Also provide an on-screen touch directional pad below the hint, arranged as a cross in a 3-column layout: up triangle on top, left/down/right buttons on the lower row. Buttons should be dark navy with thin blue borders, rounded corners, white arrow glyphs, and a pressed-state color/scale effect. Under the board show the instruction text: “Arrow keys / WASD or the touch pad — eat every dot and avoid the chasers.” Use a dark page background, system sans-serif typography, responsive sizing, and a vertically centered layout that works on mobile portrait screens. Use a canvas for the board drawing and continuously redraw the maze, remaining pellets, player, and ghosts. Show the HUD and touch controls during play, and only show the game-over overlay when all lives are lost.