Try it live Description
A City Through Time is a planned city-building game inspired by historical China. Players will lay out streets, build homes and markets, manage resources and guide one city through changing dynasties. As in-game time advances, building names, available architecture and events change, and older neighborhoods, old buildings and past decisions remain part of the city's history.
The team wants players to experience civilization through everyday life: feeding people, connecting neighborhoods, adapting to change and choosing what to preserve. Every player will end up with a city that has its own story. It is a gift for people everywhere, and for civilizations humanity has yet to meet: through one Chinese city, visitors new to Chinese culture can discover how humans live, create, adapt and pass things on by building a world themselves.
The project now has two stage deliverables. The first is a work-in-progress page that brings together the team's existing Blender renders of the Forbidden City, an 84-second bilingual art-and-concept video, and the city-building game plan and current status; it can be browsed in a web browser but is not playable yet. The second is Before the Rain, a playable chapter set in a courtyard inspired by Dream of the Red Chamber. You clear and build, assign tasks to characters, collect resources and tend flowers, through to a spring rain and a small gathering. Starting with a single courtyard lets the team explore the links between places, resources and people as they work toward the original plan for city-building and dynastic change. The Forbidden City 3D scene assets provide the art foundation for the wider project, and Before the Rain will keep being refined after this submission.
How Tripo was used
The characters in Before the Rain were made with Tripo, and the city to come is planned around it too.
- Characters: Baoyu and Daiyu were generated with Tripo image-to-3D and rigged with Tripo auto-rigging, then processed in Blender, fitted with adapted motion capture and brought into the game.
- Props: the courtyard uses an existing Tripo bonsai asset from the team.
- Next: the team plans to generate homes, shops, workshops and era-specific variants with Tripo, while historical checks and game rules remain their own work.
