Inspiration
Beavers already do the job this genre is about: gather, build, and hold a river together when the weather turns. After a flood, a lone beaver felt like the right player — small, determined, and stuck with a dam that will not stay up on hope alone. We wanted the fantasy of rebuilding an ecosystem, but the fun of two tactile puzzles in one loop: stacking a dam, then pulling it apart on purpose.
What it does
Dam Good Beaver is a portrait survival and resource-management prototype. You explore a jungle, gather logs and stones, deposit them at home, then Tetris-build a dam. When water pressure rises, you orbit a 3D tower and pull pieces like Jenga — yank the wrong support and it falls. Optional mud can be scratched on as glue. Day 1 teaches the loop with no storm clock. Day 2+ is timed waves: survive as many storm days as you can.
How we built it
The prototype is prompt-built in Cursor as a single-player, offline HTML5 / Three.js game. All of our game code lives in one readable index.html; Three.js is local in vendor/. No CDN, no network at runtime. We locked the loop first (Explore → Gather → Craft → Build → Defend → Explore further), shipped a Day 1 tutorial, then wrapped the same loop in escalating storm timers. Controls are a virtual joystick plus double-tap harvest on mobile, with WASD and mouse on desktop.
Challenges we ran into
The hard part was one tight loop, not more features. Early Tetris hard-drops topped out the tutorial, so we slowed the fall and simplified pieces. A stylesheet bug once dumped CSS onto the screen as text. Map taps failed for a second after leaving a zone, which felt like broken navigation. 2D gold-hint Jenga was too obvious, so we replaced it with a 3D tower and hidden load-bearing — then had to stop raycasts hitting blocks that were already gone. Storm Tetris also had to spend only what was in the house, or a wave could soft-lock.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We shipped a full playable session: gather, deposit, build, pressure, optional mud, win / lose / reset. Day 1 teaches logs, then stones, then Jenga. Day 2+ is the same loop under a shrinking storm clock. The signature beat — Tetris construction plus Jenga maintenance — is in the build, not just the pitch. The package is a small offline zip with index.html at the root, under the 35MB cap.
What we learned
Lock the loop before you code, or the prototype sprawls. Next, objective clarity matters as much as the minigame (a cracked dam with a “go get stones” prompt beat a quiet toast). Tutorial Tetris has to stay easy. Hidden 3D picks need honest collision. And the Design Intent has to describe the build judges will actually play — deposit, not craft; days survived, not wildlife returning yet.
What's next for Dam Good Beaver
The dam becomes the start of a larger ecosystem narrative game: more biomes and materials, richer dam designs, upgrades, hazards, quests, and wildlife that actually come home as friends and predators once the river holds.
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