Skybound Steps

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 third-person 3D traversal game titled “Skybound Steps.” Use a dark navy sky/background with distance fog and a low-poly, softly lit aesthetic. The camera should be a perspective third-person follow camera positioned behind and above the player, keeping the avatar and nearby floating platforms in view; allow the camera to follow/orbit as appropriate for a standard third-person controller.

Build a small chain of three floating sky islands arranged upward and into the distance: island 1 centered around (0, 0, 0), island 2 around (8, 5.5, -7), and the summit island around (-6, 11, -15). Each island is a broad, roughly octagonal green grassy/rock platform with a tapered dark blue-gray rocky underside hanging below it, plus a few translucent pale-blue cloud puffs beneath. Use the approximate platform sizes shown by the implementation: radii 10, 7, and 8.5, with platform thicknesses around 2.4, 2.1, and 2.5. Connect island 1 to island 2 and island 2 to island 3 with narrow brown rectangular sky bridges, about 2.1 units wide and 0.35 units thick, aligned between the islands at their elevated top surfaces.

The player is a small stylized low-poly humanoid adventurer, using a blocky cube-world character model: square blond/yellow hair or head, simple face, red/dark red shirt, gray arms/legs, and chunky proportions. Start the player on island 1 near (0, 2.5, 5). The player should cast a soft shadow on the green platforms. Include standard idle, run, and jump/fall animations if available, and a climbing animation while using vines.

The central goal is to reach the highest summit island. Movement is controlled with WASD or arrow keys, jumping with Space, and climbing with E. Use a responsive third-person movement controller with approximately 7.2 movement speed, 10.5 jump speed, and strong downward gravity around -24. Place two vertical glowing golden-yellow vines: one between the first and second island around (4.1, 1.2, -3.3), extending 4.4 units upward, and another between the second and third island around (4.6, 6.6, -8.4), also extending 4.4 units. Each vine is a thin luminous cylinder. When the player is within about 2.4 units horizontally and near the vine’s vertical range, show a bottom-center rounded prompt reading “Press E to climb.” Pressing E toggles climbing. While climbing, pull the character toward the vine’s x/z position, disable ordinary traversal, and let W/Up climb upward and S/Down climb downward at about 4.2 units per second, clamped to the vine’s endpoints. Press E again to stop; if the character leaves the usable area, cancel climbing.

Add several bright cyan-blue faceted octahedral crystals as visual waypoints, not as collectibles or combat objects. Place them approximately at (3, 2.2, 2), (-5, 2.2, 5), (10, 7.7, -5), (-9, 13.2, -14), and (-3, 13.2, -19). They should have a cyan/blue emissive glow, low roughness, cast shadows, and gently pulse their emissive intensity over time. There are no enemies, attacks, health, lives, inventory, score, or timer; the challenge is simply traversal, jumping across/along the bridges, and using the glowing vines to gain height.

Light the scene with a bright warm directional sun from above/front-left that casts soft shadows, combined with a cool blue hemisphere light. Use ambient fog that fades distant geometry into the same dark navy sky. Enable antialiasing, soft shadow mapping, sRGB output, and a mildly cinematic/filmic tone mapping look.

Overlay a fixed HUD on top of the game. In the upper-left, show a translucent dark navy rounded panel with a subtle blue border and shadow. It must contain the title “Skybound Steps,” the instruction text “Run with WASD / arrows · jump with Space · climb glowing vines with E,” and the objective status initially reading “Reach the summit island.” In the upper-right, show a rounded blue badge reading “Island 1 / 3”; update it based on player height to “Island 2 / 3” when above roughly y=4 and “Island 3 / 3” when above roughly y=9. At the bottom center, show the gold “Press E to climb” pill only when the player is close enough to a vine and is not currently climbing. While climbing, set the status text to “Climbing...” and after the player rises above y=10.2, mark the game complete and change the status to “Summit reached — you made it across the sky!” Keep the clean HUD pointer-safe except for its informational elements, and make it responsive on small screens by shrinking/repositioning the panels.