Tulip

Tulip is an action-adventure platformer made in Unity. It is still a work in progress and currently serves primarily as a portfolio project. My goal is to create a compelling game world with satisfying combat and exploration.

Originally, Tulip was heavily inspired by Terraria and featured a procedurally generated world with mining and building. However, I decided to move away from a sandbox in favor of a hand-crafted world after developing some exciting ideas for worldbuilding. Some of my biggest inspirations include games like Hollow Knight, Ori and the Blind Forest, V Rising, Divinity: Original Sin 2, Core Keeper, Wall World, Laika: Aged Through Blood, SteamWorld Dig, and Fallout.

An old build of the game from when it was still a sandbox prototype is available:

⭐ Features

⚙️ Systems & Mechanics

• Melee combat: spear, axe
• Grappling hook mechanic
• Spawn constraints: rules like "only on safe blocks", "needs headroom", etc.
• Item swing motion config with editor tooling
• Invulnerability frames
• Status effects: health regen, bleed
• Enemy AI: walking, flying, attacking
• Loot items for entities

👾 Content

• Tilemap World (background walls, blocks, shelved: curtain tiles)
• Entities: Treant mimic, flying skull, trees, generic walking enemy
• Items: Weapons, tools, materials (ore, wood), tiles

✨ Shaders & VFX

• Portal Shader: Shader for rendering two worlds through a portal (unused)
• Parallax Shader: Parallax background shader with moving cloud
• Sprite outline and dissolve shader
• Rain VFX: Rain in VFX Graph, configurable (not supported on WebGL)

📱 User Interface (UI Toolkit)

• Menus | [Death overlay](Assets/UI/Death Overlay/DeathOverlay.uxml)
• [Data bindings](Assets/UI/Settings Menu/SettingsMenu.uxml) using the MVP pattern
• Global converters for data bindings
• Custom styling for default Unity UITK controls like DropdownField, TabView via .unity- USS classes

🎵 Audio (FMOD)

• FMOD project source included
• Footstep sounds for the player and enemies
• Muffled music when player is indoors
• Audio volume options in game
• Positional audio in 2D space

🔧 Miscellaneous

• Async and Awaitable usage
• Input System usage
• Custom WebGL template to fix data persistence bug on web builds
• Event channels for some UI events (ScriptableObject-based)

🗑️ Abandoned

These features have been abandoned either because they are out of scope or don't fit the design anymore:

• World Terraforming (breakable & placeable tiles)
• Custom Rule Tiles for the world
• Hotbar with slot locking, HUD, and UI Template for hotbar item slots
• LDtk project: Blocks, walls, curtains

💡 Planned

• A hand-crafted world
• Rain system
• More equipments, weapon types
• More enemies, NPCs
• Better enemy AI

Game Design

I have a lot of notes on different design aspects like narrative, system mechanics, NPCs, quests, enemies/bosses, and more. I might share the plans in more detail once I've made good progress on something.

Art & Sound

The art direction/style is not finalized. I'm using placeholder assets that seem to go well enough together for the time being. Same with music and sound effects. I purchased some assets (ATTRIBUTIONS) and made some placeholder art myself, but the paid assets aren't available on the public repo since I can't share the source files. The itch.io builds use the paid assets as expected, though! I also bought a MIDI keyboard to learn music, which may not have been the smartest investment, but surely I'll make some progress one day.