I’m building a 2D top-down airport management and builder sim in Godot 4. The vision is deep interconnected systems (baggage/cargo logistics, power networks, passenger flow, terrain, roads networks) paired with a realistic but stylised art direction, somewhere between functional simulation and something you’d actually want to screenshot. Player creativity is a core pillar… I want people to build airports that feel genuinely theirs, not just optimised boxes. It’s a long term project, early stages, trying to get foundations right before I go too deep.
Current setup
Base grid is 64px, in my head that is roughly 1 metre real size. Functional objects snap to this grid already… so conveyors, machines, stands are all 1x1 minimum. Cargo moves tile to tile, power flood-fills through connected nodes, everything is straightforward to reason about architecturally.
The core problem
The game spans a massive scale range and no single tile size feels right across all of it. I know abstraction is unavoidable… planes and runways will never be to real scale and I accept that. My problem is I don’t know where to apply the abstraction and what base tile size sets me up best for the full range of things the game needs to do.
Here’s where the current 64px/1m grid breaks down at each end:
Too large for interior detail
Inside terminals I want real creative freedom (individual furniture, desks, cubicles, plants, bins). Not single placeable “bathroom unit” abstractions actual player placed objects that make each terminal feel unique. At 1 tile minimum I can’t place anything smaller than a conveyor belt. I have a quadrant sub-system documented for decorations (4 slots per tile) but it feels like a workaround not a real solution, and it creates two mental models for placement which adds friction.
Roads have no good middle ground
To keep a logical centre node, road widths need to be odd numbers 1, 3, 5 tiles. One tile is too thin for a lane visually. Three tiles is already ~3m which while technically realistic feels wide in game, and a two lane road at 6 tiles total starts feeling massively oversized. Two tiles works visually but means everything is offset from centre which adds complexity to vehicle pathing. So right now I’m choosing between too thin or too wide with nothing in between.
Roads also need to support more than width… longer term I want junctions, rules, potentially splines or curves. Vehicles can’t be tiny or comically large so scale there is its own problem I haven’t fully solved. Planes I’m less worried about as they’ll be heavily scaled down but because they’re not sitting alongside terminal interiors constantly the abstraction feels less jarring. A scaled down 747 still feels big next to everything else. Equally runways being shorter than reality doesn’t break immersion the way a too thin road next to a terminal full of furniture would.
Terrain won’t look natural
I want meaningful terrain, so rivers that actually look like rivers, lakes, coastal maps. Not just decorative either, terrain that actively blocks building and requires player conversion (terraform, eventually maybe road bridges). At 64px tiles even with good autotile art rivers are going to look blocky. This isn’t just visual as it affects how interesting the terrain constraints are as a gameplay mechanic.
What I’ve considered
32px base tile (~0.5m): Conveyors become 2x2. Roads get more width options, a two lane road could be 4-5 tiles with a proper centre lane. Terrain autotiling has double the resolution. The downside is cargo logic complexity… currently a conveyor is 1 cell, 1 output direction, trivial. At 2x2 I need to decide whether the cargo system operates on sub-tiles or treats each machine as a single logical unit at its origin cell. Map goes from say 600x600 to 1200x1200 but I use sparse dictionaries for most systems so empty cells are free. Walls sitting on tile boundaries start eating meaningfully into smaller cells though.
16px base tile (~0.25m): Most functional objects become 4x4 by default. Roads, terrain, interior detail all get much more flexibility. But now the tile map is larger, most things are large multi-tile footprints by default and the complexity of registering and reasoning about large logical units on a tiny grid goes up significantly everywhere.
Multiple grids: Structural/simulation grid stays at 64px, decoration and terrain use a finer grid. Reduces complexity for simulation systems but now players have two placement modes with different rules which adds design and UI complexity. Also doesn’t fully solve the road width problem since roads are structural.
Where I’ve landed (not confidently)
I know my ideal doesn’t exist. A grid that makes a toilet cubicle, a conveyor belt, a terminal building, a runway, and a 747 all feel right simultaneously is not a real thing. Abstraction has to happen somewhere… I just don’t know where the right place is and I don’t want to commit to a base tile size and discover six months in that it was wrong.
Has anyone built something with a similarly wide scale range and found a base tile size that worked well? Did you end up with multiple grids or one? If you went small (16-32px) did the multi-tile footprint complexity become a real problem or did it feel natural after a while? Any approaches you wish you’d known before committing?
I would appreciate any insights because right now I’m going round in circles! I know some of these “wants” are in tension with each other and compromise is inevitable… I just can’t seem to find the right place to draw the line.