Merge Menagerie

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 polished browser game titled “Merge Menagerie,” a bright pastel 3D Suika-style animal-merging game. Use a fixed, slightly elevated front-facing perspective camera looking into a tall vertical play board. The setting is a clean toy-like sky scene: a pale blue-to-cream gradient background with soft white cloud puffs drifting behind the board, a rounded cream pedestal/stage beneath it, and a large light translucent glass-like enclosure with a pale back wall, transparent side walls, white floor lip, and top rail. Use soft shadows, gentle ambient/directional lighting, rounded glass UI panels, and cute low-poly Kenney Cube Pets GLB models rendered as static stacking pieces. The board should be approximately 7.2 units wide by 10.8 units high, with a floor at the bottom and invisible/visible side boundaries that keep pieces inside. Put a pink/red horizontal danger line across the board around the upper region (about 8.85 units high).

The core loop: continually show one animal preview hovering at the top of the board, centered at a player-controlled horizontal aim position, with a thin pale-blue vertical drop guide and a softly pulsing colored halo ring. Move the preview left and right, then release/drop it into the enclosure. On desktop, mouse movement over the canvas aims the piece and clicking drops it; on touch, dragging aims and lifting the finger drops it; also support keyboard A/Left Arrow and D/Right Arrow to move, and Space, Enter, or Down Arrow to drop. Clamp aiming so the animal cannot extend past the side walls. After dropping, the piece falls under simple 2D circular physics displayed in 3D: gravity, floor and wall bounce, damping, collision separation, and stable stacking. Pieces should wobble/tilt subtly according to horizontal velocity and squash slightly on impact.

Each animal is represented by a circular collision radius and a cute increasingly larger model. The rarity progression is exactly: 1 Chick (yellow, radius 0.62, merge score 12), 2 Bunny (pink, radius 0.72, score 28), 3 Cat (peach/orange, radius 0.82, score 60), 4 Dog (light blue, radius 0.94, score 120), 5 Panda (pale gray/lavender, radius 1.06, score 260), 6 Lion (gold/orange, radius 1.18, score 540), 7 Elephant (periwinkle, radius 1.31, score 1020), 8 Giraffe (pale yellow, radius 1.43, score 1800). Spawn only Chick through Dog, with the weighted pool [Chick, Chick, Chick, Bunny, Bunny, Bunny, Cat, Cat, Dog]. Show the current animal preview and a “Next: [animal]” indicator for the upcoming random piece.

When two touching pieces are the same tier, merge them into one piece of the next tier, removing the originals and placing the new animal near their midpoint with a small upward impulse. Permit chain reactions: repeatedly find overlapping equal-tier pairs and merge them, so newly formed animals can immediately merge again. Do not merge Giraffes, since they are the final tier. Award the next tier’s score on every merge, update the highest animal discovered, and show a brief expanding colored ring effect at the merge position. Use a softer merge sound for ordinary merges, a bigger sound for Lion-tier and above merges, and a drop sound; unlock audio after the first interaction.

End the round when the stack rises above the danger line continuously for about 1.65 seconds without a merge clearing space. While danger is active, reveal a danger meter in the lower-left instruction panel, fill it from yellow through orange to red, and make the board danger line pulse more intensely. Merges reset the danger timer and briefly provide grace. When the timer fills, stop spawning and show a centered translucent overlay card titled “Board Full,” explaining the highest animal reached (including “the rarest creature!” if it is a Giraffe), the final score and best score, and a “Play Again” button. Provide a persistent “Restart” button at the lower right that resets the round; save the best score locally between rounds.

Build the HUD as fixed responsive HTML overlays over the canvas. At upper left, show a rounded translucent white panel with the title “Merge Menagerie,” the subtitle “Match twins to unlock rarer animals.”, and large stats for Score, Best, and Highest. At upper right, show a rounded “Rarity Trail” panel with the next-piece pill containing a colored dot and text such as “Next: Chick,” plus eight pill-shaped rarity chips labeled “1. Chick” through “8. Giraffe.” Initially chips are muted/locked; reveal/discover them as their tiers are reached and visually highlight the current highest tier. At bottom left, show the instructions: “Move with mouse or drag across the board.” and “Drop by clicking, tapping, or lifting your finger.” Keep the Restart pill button at bottom right. Use friendly rounded Fredoka/Nunito-like typography, navy-blue text, white translucent panels, pink accent colors, and soft blue shadows. On narrow screens, stack the top panels vertically while preserving the board and controls.

Include a loading screen before the animal models are ready, with the pastel gradient background and centered text that reports progress like “Loading cute animals… 7/8.” The game should feel tactile, cheerful, uncluttered, and toy-like, with the physics and merge rules carrying the gameplay rather than extra menus or invented power-ups.