The Upside-Down

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 first-person 3D horror maze game titled “The Upside-Down.” Use a dark, claustrophobic indoor labyrinth with a warm antique-gold palette: ochre/brown floor, mustard-gold maze walls, dark ceiling, heavy brown-green fog, dim ambient lighting, flickering rectangular ceiling lights, and strong flashlight illumination with soft bloom. Render in a cinematic but simple low-detail style with shadows and a subtle crosshair at screen center.

At launch, show a full-screen nearly black/brown radial-gradient intro overlay. Center the serif text: “THE BUILDING HAS NO OUTSIDE.” and beneath it “Keep the flashlight alive. Find the keys. Do not look away from what moves.” Include a glowing outlined button labeled “ENTER THE MAZE.” The HUD behind/after this overlay has the title “THE UPSIDE-DOWN” at top left, and top-right counters: “AREA 1 / 3”, “KEYS 0 / 3”, “STAMINA 100”, and a horizontal “BATTERY” bar. After pressing the button, hide the intro and begin the first-person game, requesting mouse pointer lock. Display brief centered-bottom narrative messages as events occur.

Build a procedurally generated grid maze on a large square floor and ceiling. The maze is 13 by 13 cells, with corridors carved by a randomized depth-first maze algorithm starting near the upper-left interior; walls are about 3 units wide and 3 units high. The player starts near the center/front of the structure at approximately (0, 0.2, 1.5). Use FPS controls: WASD/keyboard movement, mouse look through pointer lock, and jumping with gravity. Movement speed is about 3.6, jump speed about 7.5, with a slope limit around 42 degrees. Add collision against maze walls and the major doors. The camera has a 75-degree perspective view and a short atmospheric fog distance.

Place three glowing collectible torus-shaped keys around the maze, each with a different luminous color (yellow, cyan, and red), and show them as floating/visible pickup objects until collected. On proximity, hide the key, increment the key counter, and show messages such as “A KEY. SOMETHING HEARD THAT.” Collecting the first key opens/removes the dark gate to the lower hall and changes AREA to 2, with message “THE DOOR TO THE LOWER HALL IS OPEN.” Collecting the second opens the next dark gate and changes AREA to 3, with message “THE LAST HALL HAS NO EXIT.” After all three keys are collected, set the win state and show “YOU FOUND THE EXIT — IT FOUND YOU FIRST.” The game does not need a conventional victory scene; retain the maze view and HUD.

Add four unnerving humanoid “statues” positioned through the maze. They should look like pale off-white inverted/zombie-like mannequin figures, using an animated humanoid idle model if available; rotate them upside down or otherwise clearly make the head orientation unnatural, and add two dark-red horizontal straps/bands across each body. Place them at roughly alternating sides of the halls. Their core rule is the horror mechanic: each statue only remains still while directly visible in the player’s view. Determine visibility using the camera’s forward direction, a forward-facing threshold, a maximum distance of roughly 28 units, and a line-of-sight raycast. If a statue is not visible, it moves toward the player at roughly 1.65–2.25 units per second; occasionally play a quiet low footstep/triangle tone while they advance. If any statue gets within about 1.15 units of the player, kill the player. On death, show a sudden pale face close to the camera with glowing red eyes, display “THEY WERE NEVER STATUES.”, and reveal a “RESTART” button that reloads the game.

Give the player a flashlight attached to the camera, projecting a warm cream spotlight forward with a narrow cone, shadows, and bloom. Drain its battery continuously at about 0.55 per second from 100. When empty, greatly dim the flashlight and reduce bloom, while the HUD battery bar shrinks in real time. The ceiling lights should flicker independently with a warm emissive glow. Track stamina from 100: while moving drain it quickly (about 17 per second), while standing still regenerate it (about 10 per second); when exhausted, reduce movement speed to about 1.7 until stamina recovers. Show the numeric stamina in the HUD. Include subtle low footstep sounds during movement as well as occasional sounds from advancing statues.

Use a fixed HUD layer that does not intercept gameplay except for buttons: title in spaced serif lettering with a warm glow at upper left; compact monospace status readout upper right; a small pale crosshair at center; and warm-gold serif narrative messages at the lower center. Overall mood should be oppressive, minimal, and supernatural, with the central gameplay idea that enemies approach whenever the player looks away.