Arrow Escape Project Report
1. The Concept
Arrow Escape is a colorful, casual maze-puzzle game for the browser. Players tap arrows in the correct sequence so they can travel forward through the maze without colliding with other arrows or obstacles. The game combines quick visual puzzle-solving with a cute, rounded mobile-game presentation.
2. The Stack
The Stack: Vanilla HTML, CSS, and JavaScript in a single index.html file. The visual interface uses PNG assets stored locally in the assets folder. Progress, coins, sound preferences, and unlocked levels are saved with browser localStorage.
The AI Assist: Codex helped implement gameplay systems, level logic, UI screens, popup interactions, visual asset integration, testing, documentation, and project refinements while following the project's design references.
3. The 1 Day Sprint
Morning (Hours 1–3): Reviewed the project handoff, game rules, reference artwork, and task list. Established the single-file game structure and implemented the primary gameplay loop: arrow selection, movement, collision checks, lives, level completion, and basic progress saving.
Afternoon (Hours 4–6): Expanded the game with the home screen, level preview, pause flow, settings, sound toggle, hint system, coin rewards, and the Level Cleared popup. PNG artwork was integrated to keep a consistent cute, colorful, rounded design style.
The Finish Line (Hour 7–8): Completed the level set, refined loading and home-screen behavior, checked asset references and JavaScript syntax, restored the requested checkpoint when later layout experiments caused image scaling problems, and added project documentation.
4. The Roadblocks
Roadblocks: The largest challenge was maintaining consistent image sizing across different screen sizes while keeping the game in one HTML file. Some later visual changes caused PNG artwork to scale or crop incorrectly, especially on the loading and home screens. Because the project had no Git history or saved checkpoint, restoring an earlier state required a careful reconstruction from the approved UI state rather than a one-click rollback. Browser testing of the local file:// page was also restricted by the available preview environment, so static JavaScript, markup, and asset-link checks were used alongside in-app testing.
5. Key Takeaways
Keeping the project dependency-free made it easy to open and run anywhere, but it also made disciplined organization inside the single index.html especially important.
Using local PNG assets helped preserve a polished game-like visual direction, while localStorage provided a simple way to retain player progress without requiring a backend.
My final thought: Arrow Escape demonstrates that a complete, friendly browser puzzle game can be built with straightforward web technologies when the gameplay rules, UI direction, and scope stay clear from the start.