Rootfall

Rootfall - a cozy physics-based destruction game to take back the world. 🌱

After humanity's fall, many abandoned humanmade structures are still around. 🌉
Play a living plant, climbing the remains of human civilization, weakening them until they collapse. 🌿 But not every part of nature is on your side – fireflies 🐝 will start to attack your leaves and if you don’t chase them away in time, you will burn. 🔥 Always be careful or you might find yourself without fertilizer, never able to grow any further. Choose different plants with unique traits, plan your routes, and use gentle tactics to bring structures down. 🌱

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About the project

Rootfall is a project made for the "Game Development" course at the Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen in the winter term 2025/2026.
The theme of the project is "Tamed growth".

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Game Description

Make yourself a tea, sit down, and destroy the traces of humanity. You find yourself in strange parts of the world, eager to grow. In a world where humanity was wiped out your plants help nature take back what was once taken from it. By growing on the remnants of a far gone civilization, you make them degrade until they finally collapse.

But beware of your own mortality. Your stems can break, fireflies are nearby. Leave your branches alone for too long and find yourself attacked and burning. Then time is of the essence. Break of your burning parts before you die a fiery death. Fertilizer can run out, leaving you stuck as humanities leftovers outlast you.

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Gameplay

You want to destroy as much of the simulated structure as possible.

• You can grow your plant by using fertilizer or move within the already grown plant 🌿
• Collect fertilizer to keep the ability to grow 💰
• By staying at a spot for a longer period of time you weaken the structure leading to collapse (beware: not all objects are simulated) 🧨
• If you leave parts of your plant alone for too long, fireflies are attracted and will set your plant on fire 🐝
• The fire spreads over the plant and can be cut off if you break the burning part off 🔥🚒
• In the menu different plants with different looks/features can be selected 🌴🌿🌱

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↔️ Controls

⌨️ Keyboard

• WASD to move and grow ↕️↔️
• Mouse for camera orientation 🎥
• Space for expanding the plant 🌿

🎮 Controller

• Left Stick to move and grow ↕️↔️
• Right Stick for camera orientation 🎥
• RT for expanding the plant 🌿

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🌴⛓️ “Tamed Growth” Theme

The theme of the project was “Tamed growth”. We incorporated that by limiting the growth of the plant with the fertilizer. Also, attacking fireflies make larger plants riskier as you must get back in time to the attacked parts of your plant to scare them away. Once the plant starts to burn, you can’t extinguish the fire, only cut off burning pieces.

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🛠️ Technical novelty

We simulate objects by converting meshes into a particlesystem, consisting of tetrahedrons. Those particles are simulated using distanceconstraints and positionconstraints from XPBD. For each distanceconstraint, we calculate what force is acting on it. If it exceeds a certain limit, the constraint breaks. The limit decreases, when you grow the plant.

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🎵🎨🎤 Art and sounds

All models and textures were made by us, either through hand drawing or procedural generation, and no generative models were used. We also recorded all sound effects from nature and composed and recorded the background music ourselves.

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👷 Upcoming features

• Expanded plant store
• More worlds
• Self collisions
• Collectables
• Leaderboard

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🔧 Bug report

If you experience any bugs or have feature requests, feel free to reach out or add an issue!

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Team

• Benedict Bleidt
• Benedict Sondershaus
• Dominic Braun
• Jasmin Schultz
• Karl Gauck
• Moritz Müller

(alphabetical order)