I‘m bad at 3D tech stacks so I vibe coded an interactive Odyssey narrative scroll project using Astra

I am pretty bad at Three.js and 3D modeling in general. When I got my hands on Astra to test its capabilities, I decided to build something narrative driven instead of a 3D demo.

The inspiration came from The Odyssey and Christopher Nolan's filmmaking, mixed with elements of Homer's original story. The result is an interactive world scroll where scrolling through the page moves the story forward.

The journey starts with Odysseus leaving Ithaca for the Trojan War, then follows his long voyage home through the Cyclops' island, Circe's island, and the underworld, where he meets his fallen comrades. From there, he encounters the Sirens and sea monsters, reaches Calypso's island, and ultimately chooses home over immortality. It ends with his return to Ithaca, reclaiming his home and reuniting with his family.

I built it in Netas Studio using Astra, with Image2 for images and Seedance 2.0 for video.

A quick note on the demo. The recording looks a little choppy in places, especially at the beginning. The experience combines scenes that advance as you scroll with video sequences connecting key moments. Scrolling through the actual page yourself feels much smoother.

The background music was also generated by Astra, and I was really impressed by how well it fits the atmosphere of the story.

After the world scroll, I also added an Atlas marking the major stops along Odysseus's journey. All the map artwork was generated with Image2.

Three things stood out to me about Astra that might not come across in a 3D demo.

I only gave it a rough outline, and it quickly worked out the story beats and shot descriptions. It's a bit expensive, but this made me think it could be really good for roleplay or tabletop RPG campaigns.

I needed images and videos for several locations, so there was a lot to work on in parallel. That workflow felt much faster than my previous experience with GPT-4, though that's a personal impression rather than a benchmark. I'll keep testing it.

I didn't like the initial fonts and styling. I gave it pretty vague feedback asking for a more ancient Greek feel, with papyrus textures and typography to match. It adjusted the colors and fonts, and the result was much closer to what I had in mind.