Spindle Garden

A gardening simulator about breeding strange plants. Every plant is assembled from modules, and two plants that meet can produce a hybrid.

Year: 2024–2025
Context: Final-year project, ICAN
Role: Sole programmer, systems design, tools, technical art
Built with: C#, Unity, FMOD, shaders
Scope: 15,000+ lines of C#, 50+ classes
Link: Play on itch.io (opens in a new tab)

Concept

The player tends plants on a network of connected cells: watering them, watching them grow, and letting them spread. When two different plants meet while spreading, they can cross and produce a hybrid that mixes the traits of both parents.

Each plant is built from three modules, a head, a body and a foot, and each module carries its own properties. The combinations run into the millions, and every new module multiplies them.

First-person view of the garden at dusk: a purple market tent, planted beds and a watering can in hand. — The garden at dusk. Plants grow on the stone beds and spread from one to the next.

What I built

I programmed the game alone. These are the systems it rests on.

Connected cells: Cells are nodes joined by links rather than a fixed grid. Plants spread along those links with a pathfinding pass, and editor tools let you draw and inspect the network.
Plant lifecycle: A state machine carries each plant from growth to maturity, decomposition and death, synchronised with the day and night cycle, watering and FMOD audio.
Hybridisation: When two plants collide, the parents are validated, modules are picked from each, 50/50 by default or weighted by the fertiliser on the cell, properties are averaged and a new plant definition is created. Inbreeding is prevented to keep lineages varied.
Modular assembly: Modules snap together on anchor points; positions and combined stats are computed at runtime.

A plant spreading from one stone bed to the next along a link. — Linking two cells, then letting a plant spread across.

Diagram: two parent agents with module sets AAA and BBB produce a hybrid mixing their modules. — How a hybrid is made. Open for full size.

Diagram of the gam’ script architecture: managers for the game, zones, orders and UI, connected to cells, plants and agents. — Script architecture: game, zone, order, currency and UI managers above the cells, plants and agents. Open for full size.

Around the core

Herbarium: A collection book in the spirit of a Pokédex. Discovered plants are rendered live in 3D, filterable by family, with the properties of every hybrid you have made.
Invasive agents: Autonomous pests search for, move toward and parasitise the playe’ plants, each driven by its own state machine.
Economy: Prices follow a plan’ complexity. Zones and inventory can be upgraded, and NPC orders ask for specific hybrids.

The herbarium book opening, with empty slots for head, body and foot modules. — The herbarium fills in as new plants are discovered.

State machine diagram: growing, pause, mature, decomposing and dead. — Plant agent states. Open for full size.

Flowcharts for a plan’ lifecycle, the hybridisation process and tool handling. — Lifecycle, hybridisation and tool flows. Open for full size.

Architecture

The codebase leans on a handful of patterns: singleton managers, state machines, observers and factories, with an event system between modules and ScriptableObjects for data.

The payoff is extensibility. A new module type, behaviour or propagation rule takes a few lines rather than a rewrite.

A seedling on a stone bed, with a watering gauge on the left of the screen. — Planting and watering.

A purple tent beyond two stone beds, the playe’ hand holding a tool.

Next projectInternship, 2024NovuumA narrative third-person action game. During my internship at Pocmaker I built its playable demo in Unreal Engine 5.