Try it live Description
Mending the Sky retells a myth from the Huainanzi: "In ancient times, the four pillars of the sky collapsed and the nine provinces split apart... and so Nüwa smelted stones of five colors to mend the azure sky." It is a first-person 3D web game. The valley has turned gray, a glowing crack splits the sky, the ground shakes and a muddy flood keeps rising.
You are Nüwa. Walk, run and jump through the valley, follow the light beams and golden dots to gather the wood, fire, earth, metal and water stones, and drop them into a bronze ding furnace. The order follows the generating cycle of the Five Phases: wood feeds fire, fire creates earth, earth bears metal, metal collects water and water nourishes wood. A wrong stone shatters and the flood surges; if the water fills the valley, you lose. The starting point and stone locations change every run, and the ending records your fastest mend.
The five stones melt into one molten slurry. Nüwa carries it up into the rift, and it spreads from the middle to seal the whole crack. Then the four pillars rise, the black dragon falls and reed ash stops the flood. The water recedes, the gray valley turns green again, birds circle overhead, and Nüwa dissolves into points of light, returning to heaven and earth. This land, given back its color, is her gift to everyone who lives on after the flood.
World Labs Marble generated the two worlds, the storm valley and the mended valley; Tripo generated the stones, the furnace, Nüwa and the first-person arms; ElevenLabs provided the voice and music, while sounds such as the guqin, bells, drums, rain and thunder are synthesized live with WebAudio; Claude helped write the code and text. Everything renders in the browser with three.js and Spark, and the flood, the crack, the lightning and the mending are computed live with shaders on the Marble splats. The game also has Chinese and English subtitles, a pause menu and an auto-demo mode.
Before the hackathon there was only the idea of Nüwa mending the sky with the Five Phases; the code, scenes and models were all made during the event. This is a hackathon demo that is still being improved, and the Five Phases order and Nüwa's ending are artistic license.
How Tripo was used
Everything you can hold in the game was generated with Tripo. Marble provides the world and Tripo the objects in it, together forming a complete world-plus-props workflow.
- The five stones, wood, fire, earth, metal and water, are the core gameplay props: pick them up in the order of the Five Phases, smelt them in the furnace, then go mend the rift.
- The bronze ding furnace, Nüwa and the first-person hands.
- Integration: only the textures were compressed and the original geometry was kept. The models went straight into the world generated by World Labs Marble, sit on its terrain and are interactive in real time in the browser with three.js.
- In the author's words, without Tripo one person could not have made these finely textured mythological artifacts within the hackathon.
