Design and development of a historical game level about lifestyle and architecture in Ancient Rome

Abstract

This Degree’s Final Project ’Design and development of a historical game level about lifestyle and architecture in Ancient Rome’, which consists in a playable game level whose objective is learning through the construction of a roman city and its free exploration. The player will have different buildings at his disposal to freely create the city, with a few restrictions. Once built or during construction, the player can visit and interact with the buildings and the automatically generated characters that inhabit the city. These characters have their routes and tasks in the public buildings of the city. This project has two different gameplay modes with different learning objectives. First, there is the build mode, where the player must build the city from an isometric view choosing from 10 different types of buildings on an empty terrain, placing every building freely as the player wishes. In this game mode the player will learn about the key buildings that were an integral part of the cities of the Ancient Rome Empire, and which type they belong to (housing, public building, basic infrastructure or defensive structure), in addition to their distribution in the city. On the other hand, the first person mode places the player in a first person mode inside the city. The player can walk around the city and visit the buildings and their characters. The objective of this mode is the immersion of the player in the setting, and teaching about the architecture, the usage of the buildings and the social class hierarchy of the Empire. This project has been developed with the game engine Unity3D [1], the building 3D models and the characters have been modeled with 3DS Max [2] and the animations have been created with Adobe Mixamo [3] lately edited with 3DS Max.