”Save History – The Bonfire of Vanities” is a learning game based on the historical event in 1497 in Italy where supporters of the Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola started burning objects of sinful art (Bonfire of Vanities).
About the project:
Every artwork got its container and data from a Scriptable Object where Title, ImageSprite, Year, Correlating question with four answer options, Flavor information and PointValue. This ScriptableObject was used to populate and instantiate each container in Phase one (saving the artwork from the fire). When player clicked on a artwork earlier than 1497 the player is rewarded with 100% of the PointValue, if the artwork was created after 1497 the player recieved a -100% PointValue reduction. The player have three failed clicks before the player loses and have to retry. The all artwork that are instantiated are sorted into two lists, the ones the player clicked and those who were not clicked. These lists are used in the following result screen to inform the player which ones were correct and false, and those correct artwork that were missed.
Phase 2 will quiz the player of all the missed artwork that were instantiated in Phase 1. Answer options with the correlating question to the artwork with one correct and three false will be randomly placed out along with some Flavor Information about the artwork itself. If the player saved ALL the artwork, a bonus round will instead be created with three randomly selected artwork questions will be held to give bonus points. For each correct answer the player is rewarded 50% PointValue, and no points for a wrong answer.
When the player is done with Phase 2 the score is collected in a result view and the player is given a score sum.
Thoughts of the project:
The difficulty of this project have been to not make this game too difficult, which I’m not happy with the result, I think it’s still too difficult. I expect the player to fail the first trials before catching on to which of the artwork which are correct. But if it were to be used alongside an history art course there would be an more interesting challenge for the player.
”Save History – The Bonfire of Vanities” was the last project in the course Gamebased Learning at Stockholm University. We worked in Unity and art (except the artwork which the player interacts with) is made in Photoshop. The whole project is run in Unity Canvas, which was chosen for the simplicity of working with player interaction and that one of the requirements were to be able to play it in a web browser.