Description
One Bag of Ages is a world inside ancient paintings. The team hand-recolored the paintings and re-created the scenery they depict, building the atmosphere of traditional China. Step into a painting, hunt for treasures and fill one bag with antiques from the matching era, each recreated from a real piece, picking up a little knowledge of their forms and styles along the way. Every find rests in a curio cabinet to admire at leisure, more like a stroll through a museum than the tension of beating levels.
It is a gift for a dad. The team lead, who is also the game designer, has a father who has loved antiques for years, and lately the team lead has come to love traditional things too. The father is older now, so complicated games are out, and he hopes leisure time can still bring something of value. Many famous antiques are impossible to own in real life, but fast-moving AI and 3D technology bring the unreachable closer. The father's 66th birthday fell in the month the game was submitted, so the team used new tools to turn these beloved, once-unobtainable treasures into a birthday gift. They also did not want a "museum in the cloud" of flat on-screen displays; the goal is play that leaves a visual memory of traditional beauty.
Controls are minimal, rounds are short and it is easy on the eyes, which makes it kind to older players. It keeps reflexes sharp, and the features and details of each piece sink in naturally: learning through play. Difficulty is finely graded with a high ceiling, so the same controls can feel casual or hardcore, testing reaction, anticipation and speed.
It is an experiment in classical Chinese style, pairing scenes drawn from ancient paintings with 3D artifacts recreated from real antiques. The current demo opens with a Southern Song scroll depicting Lin'an and starts with Southern Song porcelain, with only a few levels to show the idea; paintings from other dynasties, and antiques from other dynasties and categories, will follow. The project was built new for the hackathon.
How Tripo was used
Tripo generated the game's 3D models, the artifacts recreated from real antiques that players gather into the bag, with tools such as Codex and WorkBuddy also used along the way.
