A cosy exploration game built in Unity as my final major project for the MA Indie Game Development at Falmouth University.
Forage. Brew. Tend.
Underbrew is a vertical slice centred on a single cohesive gameplay loop: explore a hand-drawn underground world, forage for ingredients, process them at a grinding station, and brew potions at your apothecary. It sits at the intersection of cosy game design and metroidvania-style exploration.
The original proposal was more ambitious — combining metroidvania traversal, potion crafting, and shop management. Through development I made the deliberate decision to narrow the scope and deliver one polished, functional loop rather than several incomplete systems. The result is a vertical slice that clearly communicates its core experience.
The art direction also shifted during development. I moved from pixel art to a hand-drawn style, which allowed faster iteration while giving the game a more distinctive visual identity.
All systems were designed and built from scratch:
- Player controller — state machine handling movement, jumping, wall sliding, wall jumping, and dashing
- Inventory system — item pickup, storage, and slot management
- Crafting system — processing station (grinding) and brewing station, driven by scriptable object recipes
- Journal — tabbed interface tracking discovered items, unlocked potion recipes, and quest progress; acts as the primary onboarding tool
- Dialogue system — conversation assets with progression gating tied to game state flags
- Save system — persistent save data across scenes including resource respawn state and checkpoint progress
- Scene transition manager — fade-based transitions with spawn point routing
- Audio manager — centralised audio library with mixer support for music, ambience, and SFX
- Unity 2026 (URP) — Universal Render Pipeline, 2D
- C#
- Input System — Unity's new input system
- Dual Grid Tilemap — com.skner.dualgrid for terrain tiling
- Cinemachine — camera framing and transitions
| Asset | Source |
|---|---|
| Character animations | Warrior Free Animation Set by Clembod |
| Sound effects | Freesound.org / The Spriters Resource |
| All artwork, UI, and scene art | Original hand-drawn — Samuel Perkins |
This project was submitted as the major project component of the MA Indie Game Development programme at Falmouth University. It represents approximately one academic year of solo development, covering design, programming, art, audio integration, and playtesting.