Fahrenheit48-BC

Inspiration

Throughout the ages, what has been more impermanent than human knowledge? Entire fields of study have been dedicated to uncovering what we used to know and how we lived. Fahrenheit48-BC takes us back to the burning of the Great Library of Alexandria where we have the chance to save some of what would be lost by restoring burnt pages and rebuilding books from the fragments.

What it does

Save books from the flames, piece together pages, and copy down what on the brink of loss to archive them in a new library built after the fire. Try your best in the fight against impermanence as time decays the pages on your bookshelves, pillars in the ruins where you savage for pages collapse and hide more under rubble, birds make nests out of the paper, and cinders continue to burn in the ruins of Alexandria. You can't save them all but pick and choose what knowledge should be persevered for the next generation.

How we built it

We used the game engine Godot, Git and Github for source control, Aseprite and Pixel Studio for pixel art, and BlockBench for 3D modeling.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The individual systems we made were unique to each of us and we all learned heavily during the course of this project. Especially with two first-year students and this being the first time we've done 3D development for all of us (with one exception), we're still really proud of the progress we made on this game. For me (Andrea), as mentioned, I've never used 3D in Godot before, so making seemingly simple code in from 2D projects was completely different in 3D! The most frustrating of these was tracking the mouse on the camera to pick up and drag the book fragments,
Julian: The music guy This was really fun for me because I got to explore a type of music I don't usually make. I usually like breakcore and fast modern beats, so leaning into the more Egyptian motifs was really unique and somewhat challenging. At first, I didn't know where to start, so I studied the cultures around the time period of the Library of Alexandria, such as the Greeks whose mythology was the namesake of the building, the Egyptians because of the setting, and the Romains, the ones who ended up burning the building in war. Tom This was my first time making 3D models, so it took a long time to get a hang of it and I'm proud of my progress. Also putting the camera on a path to follow the player (at a distance) ended up looking really cool and I like that. Daniel I worked on the logic to copy the book pieces and get a score to identify when the player did a good job restoring it. I used Vectors and measured the distance of where the player drew their version vs where it should be, and it ended up working really well. Hosanna: This was my first time building a full game in Godot and I had a lot of fun! Staying up all night was really hard, but it was totally worth it! I made the player movement and the main menu, which I made all on my own. The others supported me when I really needed, but I tried my best to learn by myself and follow tutorials and look through the docs to learn the language and UI of Godot. I got the learn about simple 3D and UI methods so overall, I think I can use these skills later on to build something even bigger!

Challenges we ran into

Integrating our individual systems We worked on each part separately and combined them near the end, but many things we thought had no conflicts did when we put them in the same scene. One example of this was the world environment for the fog and spark/cinder particles in the library ruins scene. The way Andrea projected a ray into the world to find where the mouse was relative to the 3D environment made it complete incompatible with Tom's mobile camera! We ended up having to show each of our work in different scenes.

What we learned

Tom This was our main artist's first big foray into 3D. Hosanna Again, this was also my first full game in Godot! As a first year student, I feel like I learned a LOT of useful skills. I feel like one thing I struggled a lot with was Git :(.