Platonica

Inspiration

We were inspired by the properties of platonic solids and their association with the elements in historical philosophy.

What it does

Platonica is a meditative puzzle game where you rotate pieces of a polyhedron to unlock their inner power.

How we built it

We decided early on to make a 3d game since both of us were interested in learning about advanced concepts in graphics programming such as shaders, linear algebra, computational geometry, and audio mixing. In the ideas phase, we made cut outs of tetrahedrons and drew on them to imagine what we could do. We built a puzzle generator in html to quickly make different puzzles and test them out in the game. We made prototypes on figma to get a feel for how the game might work.

To get started with code, we used a tutorial on youtube, and then hacked our way through the rest.

Challenges we ran into

Our initial idea of what a puzzle looked like was a maze, but we quickly realized how difficult that would be when we're limited to rendering triangles, and using keyboard and mouse. So we pivoted to building the puzzles with triangles and making the interactions simpler and more intuitive.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We built a basic game engine from the parts that pygame gave us, and this taught us a lot about the limitations and design of games.

Also, there's like a bunch of shaders in this game. And we learned a lot about how they work by making different ones.

What we learned

• We learned how geometry shaders work and what interesting features they unlock (like diffuse lighting and face manipulation).
• Jesse learned how to use linear algebra to move things around
• Alice learned how to think like a pixel

What's next for Platonica

We hope to polish this game a bit and publish a free version on itch.

Built With

• moderngl
• numpy
• opengl
• pygame
• python