Try it live Description
Guardians of Yuanmingyuan is a 3D game that combines first-person exploration with strategic tower defense, set in Yuanmingyuan, China's historic imperial gardens, also known as the Old Summer Palace.
A present-day visitor steps through a reflection in the ruins and into the gardens of the past. Explore all three gardens along paths through courtyards, bridges and waterways; meet the residents, repair the waterworks and help with everyday garden tasks. As danger approaches, the animal heads of Haiyantang's zodiac fountain take form as guardians. Build your formation, combine their abilities and choose upgrades to repel the attacks and protect the gardens and the lives within them. After battle, you return to a place where water still flows and daily life carries on.
It is a gift for the unsung keepers of our shared cultural heritage, inviting players to know a place through its courtyards, its flowing water and its ordinary lives, and to find their own reasons to care for it.
Selected buildings and structures draw on historical images and research; the story is fictional. The game is developed with Cocos Creator and TypeScript, with its 3D world built using Tripo and Blender; some of the art was made with GPT-Image-2.5 and some of the music with Suno.
How Tripo was used
Tripo is the main tool behind the project's core 3D art. Base models were generated with Tripo, then refined in Blender (structural cleanup, material adjustments, animation and multi-level LOD) before going into Cocos Creator.
- The twelve zodiac animal heads: they go into battle directly in tower defense and attack by spraying water.
- Garden residents and some interactive props: they support the garden quests; the enemy troops come from Tripo too.
- Fountain sculptures, pines, willows and Taihu rocks: they fill out the gardens.
- The same models were also used for the codex, skill icons and promotional images.
In the author's words, Tripo turns design ideas into 3D assets that can be worked on further, a key production step in taking the project from visual design to an interactive game.
