Generalist programmer - Game developer
Aqua Mundo is a simulation game where you can build and manage your own water park.
Aqua Mundo is a big project. Its development combines a lot of different techniques and knowledge I learned in the past few years. On this page I want to lay out some of the most important parts of the game, and how I'm realizing them.
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If you're interested, you can find Aqua Mundo on Twitter, Discord and reddit.
Some screenshots of a very early version of the game.
The terrain and terraforming system
The terrain and terraforming style is inspired by Rollercoaster Tycoon 1/2. The landscape is divided in squares and the player can move them up and down however they please.
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Procedural curve based building
A lot of things in the game can be designed by the player through the use of bezier curves. The player lays down points, and the system extrudes a certain shape along the created curve. In the video you can see how the creation of a lazy river works.
Guest pathfinding
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The guests in the game don't calculate their own paths. Because of the relatively limited amount of possible entrances to attractions and other things that the guests can have as a goal, flow fields are created. These fields know for each path in the park what direction a guest should move to go to a certain goal.
The huge positive to this is that guests only have to find out which direction they should move to based on their location and goal, and not calculate their own path. The flow fields for each possible goal only need to be created once and then slightly altered whenever the player changes something in the path structure.
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But flow fields aren't the only tool guests use to navigate around the park. They combine it with steering behaviours in order to make their movements look more fluid, and to try and avoid as much collision with other guests as possible.
The path builder
The player can build paths and along the way, handrails and edges are automatically created whenever necessary. Supports for paths and other objects are also automatically generated where necessary, so it doesn't look like they're all floating in the air.
