Inspiration
What it does
How we built it## Inspiration
After 2 years of learning Unreal Engine for game development for a personal project, I realized Gemini could collapse the entire game development process: generate art, write dialogue, and power live NPC conversations. The idea was simple — what if you could walk through ancient India instead of reading about it? What if a merchant could tell you about trade routes, and you could ask follow-up questions? Targeting india's UPSC civil services exam has over 1 million aspirants every year, and History is one of the hardest subjects — dense timelines, hundreds of facts, and zero engagement.
What it does
AItihasika is an isometric 2.5D browser game set in a Maurya Empire marketplace.
- Players explore the scene generated with Gemini, interact with 4 NPCs (merchant, potter, elder, child),
- collect historical artifacts and learn through scripted dialogue and historical facts.
- After the scripted content, each NPC opens up for freeform conversation powered by Gemini 3 Flash — players can ask anything and receive historically accurate, in-character responses. The NPCs maintain conversation context, stay in persona, and deflect anachronistic questions in-character.
How we built it
- Phaser 3 (JavaScript, no build system) for the game engine, served as static files
- Gemini Image Generation for all visual assets — background, NPCs, props, collectibles
- Gemini 3 Flash (
chats.create()) for multi-turn NPC conversations with per-character system prompts - Vercel for deployment, no backend needed
Challenges we ran into
- AI-generated sprite conversion for phaser: Generated pixels weren't in the exact requiremnt by phaser. Had to transform them with python scripts
- Asset style coherence: Separate API calls produce mismatched styles; required careful prompt iteration
- Phaser keyboard vs HTML input: Phaser intercepts all keys; had to disable its keyboard manager during chat mode
Accomplishments that we're proud of
- Complete playable game in 5 days — all art AI-generated, NPCs powered by Gemini
- Every visual asset generated with Gemini — no stock art, no manual drawing
- Works without API key; Gemini chat enhances but isn't required
What we learned
- Gemini's multi-domain capability is the differentiator — one platform for image gen, code assistance, and runtime NPC intelligence
- Biggest time sink is asset generation, not code
What's next for Aitihasika - Learn History by Living It
- Full NPC simulation — daily routines, relationships, persistent memories
- Multiple eras — Ashoka's court, Gupta age, Mughal Delhi
- Gemini-powered quiz generation based on player conversations
- UPSC syllabus mapping — every conversation teaches exam-relevant material
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