Paper Blocks

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-playable 2D side-view pixel-art sandbox game titled “Paper Blocks.” Render the game on a full-window HTML canvas with crisp/pixelated drawing and a crosshair cursor. Use a large tile world 180 tiles wide by 64 tiles high, with 32-pixel square blocks. The camera follows the player horizontally and vertically, clamped to the world edges, showing a bright blue sky with pale cloud puffs and a soft green distant hill band behind the terrain.

Generate the terrain procedurally: for each x column, make a gently uneven surface around tile y=34 using sine-wave height variation. Put a grass block on the surface, about four layers of brown dirt beneath it, and gray stone below that down to the bottom. In columns x=133 through 153, replace the surface/top layers with pale sand and use stone underneath. In the deep underground area (y>=42), randomly remove a small percentage of blocks to create sparse air pockets/cavities. Add simple trees at approximately x positions 12, 23, 35, 48, 62, 84, 96, and 116: brown wood trunks three blocks tall above the surface and compact green leaf canopies around their tops. Blocks are colored flat but have a subtle light strip at their top, a faint dark outline, and a clean, paper-like pixel aesthetic. Solid blocks are grass (green), dirt (brown), stone (gray), wood (brown), leaves (green), and sand (tan); air is empty.

The player is a small stylized blocky humanoid, initially around x=8 tiles and high above the terrain so they fall onto it. Draw a yellow square head, tiny dark eyes oriented toward the facing direction, a blue rectangular torso, and two dark-brown legs. Give the avatar a thin dark arm/hand line extending toward the mouse target. The player has collision dimensions about 22 by 42 pixels, solid tile collision, gravity, and simple platformer physics: horizontal WASD or left/right-arrow movement at a constant speed, Space/W/up-arrow jumps only while grounded, and falling under gravity. Stop movement against solid blocks and support walking on terrain and placed blocks.

Make the central mechanic mouse-based block editing within a reach radius of about 5.1 tiles from the player. Convert the mouse screen position into world tile coordinates through the camera. A left click breaks/removes a non-air block in reach and increments “Blocks mined.” A right click places the currently selected block into an empty tile in reach, unless that tile overlaps the player; suppress the browser context menu. Also allow E to toggle between Break and Place modes: in Place mode a normal left click places the selected block, while in Break mode it breaks blocks. Draw a reachable tile outline under the cursor: red in Break mode and yellow in Place mode. Ignore edits outside the world or outside reach.

Provide a five-slot bottom-center hotbar for selectable blocks: slot 1 grass, slot 2 dirt, slot 3 stone, slot 4 wood, and slot 5 sand. Select them with number keys 1–5; the active slot has a yellow border and is lifted slightly, while each slot shows a colored swatch and its number. Leaves exist in the world but are not one of the five selectable hotbar choices. Include a fixed HUD overlay: top-left panels showing “Blocks mined: N,” player tile coordinates “X: N Y: N,” and “Mode: Break/Place”; top-right help text stating the movement, jump, mouse break/place, E mode toggle, and 1–5 block selection controls. Use translucent dark panels, white bold text, rounded borders, and a mobile-responsive compact help layout.

At startup, show a centered translucent dark overlay card with the title “Paper Blocks,” explanatory text that this is a legal Scratch-style browser riff on Paper Minecraft where the player can mine, jump, and place blocks in a 2D sandbox, and a yellow “Start mining” button. The overlay blocks gameplay until clicked; after starting, hide it and enable controls. Keep the overall presentation simple, colorful, and grid-based, with no enemies, inventory counts, combat, levels, or win condition beyond freely mining and building in the sandbox.