Try it live Description
The Happy Prince: The Ear of the City reimagines Oscar Wilde's fairy tale The Happy Prince as a little city forever caught at dusk. At its center stands the golden statue of the Happy Prince. He can see every sorrow in the city, but he cannot move. The swallow is his messenger: each day it takes one gold leaf from the statue and delivers it to whoever needs help the most.
You play the swallow. Fly freely through the city in full 3D, steering by hand or drifting on auto-cruise over rooftops and bell towers; squeezing through narrow alleys triggers special fly-through camera moments. Perch beside different townspeople and eavesdrop on fragments of their talk: some complain about the weather, others hide illness, debt or farewells they cannot say. The clues are scattered, even contradictory, and from them you must work out who is truly at the edge today.
Each day you get one chance to give the gold leaf. Choose right, and you witness that person's full story; that night a wreath appears around the Prince's neck. Choose wrong, and the one who truly needed help dies in silence; the Prince weeps, and rust blooms on his golden body. Miss day after day and the rust spreads across him; miss six days in a row, and the seventh brings the bad ending: every gold leaf falls, and the swallow dies in the snow.
This gift is for everyone in the city who suffers alone, unseen. The gold leaf is a gift, and so is being seen. The game was built with the help of HolyMolly, an AI game-making platform: an explorable city, NPC-driven storytelling and complete ending sequences make up a full puzzle experience from day one to the finale. Only the world of the original tale is borrowed; all in-game text is original. It plays in the browser.
How Tripo was used
Tripo is the visual foundation of this world: every 3D asset in the game was generated with Tripo.
- Every 3D asset: the rooftops, bell towers, the golden Prince, the swallow and the townspeople were all generated with Tripo.
- Seen up close: you fly low over every roof and through narrow alleys, so the assets are seen point-blank, and density and a consistent style decide everything. Tripo made a whole town's worth of coherent assets possible.
- The workflow: generate assets in Tripo, then assemble gameplay, story and endings in HolyMolly, all the way from assets to a playable world.
