Thresholds

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.

Recreate “Thresholds” as a browser-based first-person 3D liminal-survival exploration game. Use a Three.js-style perspective FPS camera with mouse look, WASD movement, Shift to run, Space to jump, and E to interact. The player is represented primarily by the camera and starts just south of a central elevator in a large procedurally generated indoor maze. The environment is built from a very large tiled floor and ceiling, randomly placed partition walls and long corridor ribs, with a central elevator structure, elevator door, glowing floor pad, fluorescent ceiling fixtures, fog, shadows, and sparse atmospheric lighting. Use a restrained, unsettling material palette: Level 0 is a mustard/yellow-brown maze with olive-yellow walls, dark ceiling, wet-carpet/industrial ambience, bright pale fluorescent lights, deep shadows, and heavy distance fog. The overall visual style is minimalist, moody, procedural, and liminal rather than detailed or colorful.

The main loop is explicitly shown in the HUD: collect a quota of glowing collectible objects scattered around the maze, bring them back to the central elevator, submit them, and descend to the next level once the quota is met. On Level 0, call the collectibles “moisture tags” and require 5; show “Collect 5 moisture tags and return them to the central elevator.” Place quota+3 glowing cyan/teal rectangular tags around the maze, generally 18–66 units from the center. The player can collect a nearby tag by pressing E; it disappears and increments Inventory. At the elevator, E submits the carried inventory and increments the submitted quota. Once the quota is complete, change the elevator door to a greenish unlocked color and make the floor pad glow brighter; pressing E again at the elevator descends and generates the next level.

Include a compact translucent dark HUD panel in the upper-left with an uppercase letter-spaced level title in warm yellow, an objective line, and a status line such as “Quota 0/5 · Inventory 0 · Wet carpet, humming fluorescent corridors, and geometry that refuses to stay still.” The upper-right displays short amber event messages. Put a thin white glowing crosshair at screen center. Near the bottom center, show contextual prompts such as “E · collect item,” “E · submit 2 items,” “Elevator locked · 0/5 submitted,” or “E · descend to next level.” At bottom-left show “WASD move · Shift run · Space jump · Mouse look · E interact / submit at elevator”; at bottom-right show the subdued uppercase label “PROCEDURAL LIMINAL SURVEY.” Keep these UI elements fixed over the 3D view with a blurred, translucent panel treatment.

Build a sequence of themed procedural levels, retaining the same quota-and-elevator rules while changing colors, descriptions, collectible names, atmosphere, and simple environmental signatures: Level 0 The Yellow Maze (5 moisture tags, Bacteria); Level 1 The Freight Archive (6 inventory seals, industrial gray, a loading-bay/industrial prop); Level 2 Service Tunnels (7 valve cards, dark maintenance pipes); Level 3 Electric Station (8 relay fuses, blue-black transformer atmosphere and hard electric accents); Level 4 Empty Offices (6 desk memories and rows of office pods); Level 5 The Hotel Below (7 room keys and glowing hotel doors); Level 6 Blackout (5 glow shards, extremely dark lighting and pillars); Level 7 Tidal Interior (8 pressure markers, teal flooded-looking spaces and translucent columns); Level 8 The Vast (9 cave reliquaries and stalactite-like forms); Level 9 Suburban Night (7 porch tokens, dark facades and street lamps); and Level Fun The Celebration (6 party favors, magenta/pink party palette and floating balloon-like forms). Advance cyclically through this list after completing each quota.

Populate each level with three simple wandering humanoid entities. They consist of a cylindrical body and spherical head, with level-appropriate muted or celebratory colors. Their names are based on the level’s entity type (for example Bacteria, Bacteria Scout, Unknown on the Yellow Maze; Party Goer and Party Creator in the celebration level). Entities wander through the maze, occasionally investigate when they detect the player, then chase briefly if close, brushing the player away on contact before searching and returning to wandering. They should be atmospheric threats rather than combat targets: there are no weapons, attack controls, or health HUD. Add eight small glowing floor hazards/dead zones distributed throughout each level; on the Electric Station they can produce rare snapping electrical-arc audio/events, and on the Tidal Interior they look like deep-water patches. Add rare ambient events such as distant screams, unseen circling footsteps, a door opening somewhere, brief BLACKOUTS, and fluorescent lights stuttering. Use sparse synthesized tones for collection, elevator interaction, and ominous events. Ensure the result remains playable as a first-person collect-and-return maze and accurately communicates quota, inventory, submitted cargo, elevator state, and level progression through the HUD.