NewBricks!

The project enables RIT students and other brick fans to build buildings out of bricks together, collaboratively, through our website.

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Inspiration

Bricks! We think bricks are very cool and wanted to make a story about them.

What it does

It allows you to build structures out of bricks in an interactive 3D environment, with multiplayer over the internet, by visiting our website and using basic mouse/keyboard controls.

How we built it

We deployed a Google Cloud VM, obtained a domain from Domain.com, used Certbot by EFF for an SSL certificate, used Flask and a WebSockets extension for the backend, and built the frontend with Three.js.

Challenges we ran into

The Google Cloud VM took a while to set up, since we weren't super experienced with it. Three.js was dynamically typed, which made it hard to check for errors.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We weren't super familiar with the Google Cloud or Three.js libraries, but we were able to leverage them to make a basic game!

What we learned

Never underestimate the amount of time it takes to deploy and set up the underlying infrastructure. But also, remember to incorporate design ideas from other brick fans so we can make our game more interesting and collaborative.

What's next for NewBricks!

We want to share our creation with the RIT community so we can have lots of prototypes for next year's RIT redesign plan! ;)

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