🌊🧜‍♀️ Pick — The Sunken Tale 🧜‍♀️🌊

🧜‍♀️ A choose-your-own-adventure mermaid story game made with love for Jaxon — an autistic 8-year-old who loves numbers.

"Swim with the currents, find your destiny!" 🐬

🧠 Why This Exists

I built this for my friend's son Jaxon, who is 8 years old, autistic, and absolutely loves numbers. He wanted a mermaid story — but he also wanted it to have maths in it. So every scene in the game has real ocean number facts woven through it.

Things like:

"8 arms × 240 suckers = 1,920 suckers on one octopus!"
"Blue whales sing at 188 decibels — louder than a jet engine!"
"7 is a prime number — only divisible by 1 and 7 itself!"

The Read to Me button was added so he can have it read aloud while he follows along.

Jaxon tested every ending. He counted his way through all of them.

🌿 Feature	🎭 What It Does
🌊 7 Story Paths	Coral Palace · Octopus Valley · Shark Caves · Sunken Wreck · Volcano Deep · Blue Whale · Golden Shore
🎭 14 Unique Endings	Two deeper choices per path — completely different outcomes each time
🔊 Read to Me	One-tap text-to-speech reads every scene aloud — built for accessibility
🧮 Jaxon's Fact Book	Collects real number facts as you play — 65 facts hidden across all 21 scenes
📜 Pick Log	Scrolling record of every choice you made in this run
🔄 Restart Magic	Instant reset — dive back in and find new paths
🧜‍♀️ Jaxon Cameos	At every good ending, Jaxon appears on the shore — always counting something
⚡ Zero Load Time	Pure HTML/CSS/JS — no install, no login, opens instantly

graph TD
    A["🧜‍♀️ Mia is lost... 🌊"] --> B{"Where does she go?"}
    B --> C["🏰 Coral Palace"]
    B --> D["🐙 Octopus Valley"]
    B --> E["🦈 Shark Caves"]
    B --> F["⚓ Sunken Wreck"]
    B --> G["🌋 Volcano Deep"]
    B --> H["🐋 Blue Whale"]
    B --> I["🏖️ Golden Shore"]
    C --> C1["Ending 1"] & C2["Ending 2"]
    D --> D1["Ending 3"] & D2["Ending 4"]
    E --> E1["Ending 5"] & E2["Ending 6"]
    F --> F1["Ending 7"] & F2["Ending 8"]
    G --> G1["Ending 9"] & G2["Ending 10"]
    H --> H1["Ending 11"] & H2["Ending 12"]
    I --> I1["Ending 13"] & I2["Ending 14"]

▶️ Play instantly online:

👉 dacameragirl.github.io/sea-drifter

🐚 Or clone locally:

git clone https://github.com/DaCameraGirl/sea-drifter.git
cd sea-drifter

🌊 Open the Portal:

# Option 1 — just double-click index.html 🧜‍♀️
# Option 2 — serve locally:
python -m http.server 8080

🌀 Play & Replay Forever! ✨

🧮 Jaxon's Fact Book

As you explore each scene, real number facts slide into Jaxon's Fact Book — a glowing panel that grows with every path you take. There are 65 facts across all 21 scenes. You'd need to play every path to find them all.

A few favourites:

🐙 8 arms × 240 suckers = 1,920 suckers on a single octopus! 🌊 The Mariana Trench is 11 km deep — deeper than Mount Everest is tall! ☀️ Sunlight takes 8 minutes to travel from the Sun to Earth! 🐋 Blue whales can live to 100 years old