Huynen

Dutch project where you can walk through a prehistoric interactive 3D village.

I live in a province where a lot of megaliths are found. 52 of the 54 structures that we still have in the Netherlands are found in the province where I live. I come across them a lot and used to never really think about who build these structures and how their society and villages might have looked like. With this project I wanted to make an as accurate as possible village, I consulted with archeologists for this part as well. You can walk through the village and see information about certain objects and there is also the possibility to talk to the villagers.

I made the project with HTML, (S)CSS, JS and the ThreeJS library. The models, rigging and animations were all done in Blender. 2D elements were made using Photoshop.

You can take a look at the code on Github

Take a look around the village here: Huynen

Process

I started the project by defining the goals and the success factors. What are the main goals I want for this project?
- Historically accurate
- Accessible for PC users
- Interactive

Users that access the site will only need a mouse to navigate and interact, this way it is also easier for non-gamer people.

Because I wanted to make the village as accurate as possible I first visited the "Hunebedcentrum", a museum that has a lot of information about the archeological findings concerning the specific group of people called the "Trechterbekervolk" that build the megaliths.

These are some of the pictures I took during my visit:

After that, I did some research about the "Trechterbekervolk" and the artstyle I wanted the project to have. I chose a lowpoly art style. That way I could complete the project within the timeframe that I had set out for this project and I could keep the polycount, and thus the loading time, lower. Here you can see some "in-game" images:

I organized everything that I found on a Miro board. At a later stage I also consulted with archeologists, and let them interact with the project.

You can see the project for yourself here.