Mountain Maker
2024
Mountain Maker is a simulation sandbox I made solo for the 2024 GMTK Game Jam. The theme for the jam was “Built to Scale”, my interpretation in this game was that you terraform the landscape to create mountains for climbers to scale.
The gameplay was inspired by theme park management games like Rollercoaster Tycoon and Planet Zoo. These games have landscaping tools that let the user create more immersive park layouts and a lot of the fun comes from watching the visitors go around the park.
Early demo video from when I was testing the features. I used Unity’s terrain for the ground and made a runtime paint tool for editing the terrain height.
I found Unity’s navmesh system struggled with pathing on especially steep terrain so I switched to using the free version of Aron Granberg’s A* Pathfinding Asset. I used a grid graph with a high slope limit to allow the climbers to walk up almost vertical gradients.
