Engine fire
Shuts the runway until your fire trucks clear it, and the arrivals stack up behind.
/ˈɛəˌpɒli/ • AIR-pol-ee
Cosy to look at. Chaotic to run.
Airpoly is a co-operative airport ground management game. Take over a busy low-poly airport with friends, or run it on your own, and keep the timetable from falling apart.
Multiplayer
When three flights land in five minutes, you can't watch everything at once. Airpoly is built around splitting the airport between your crew and talking through the bottlenecks.
Someone on ground control
Assigning stands, holding traffic at junctions and clearing aircraft to taxi, so nobody ends up nose to nose.
Someone on the fleet
Sending a limited pool of tankers, belt loaders, catering trucks and stairs to wherever they're needed next.
Someone watching the board
Spotting delays before they spread, moving tugs around, and making the call when a gate runs behind.
The challenge
You don't steer trucks or fly the planes. Give an aircraft its taxi clearance, or queue three jobs for a fuel truck, and the game finds the route. The challenge is logistics, timing and talking to each other.
The Apron
Every flight goes through the same three stages on the ground, and you run all of them.
1. Ground control
Clear an arrival to land, and the real work starts on the ground. Every move is by explicit clearance: assign a stand, clear the aircraft to taxi, and hold crossing vehicles short at the junctions.
Where you park it decides the next hour. A gate has a jetway ready; a remote stand leaves you hunting for stairs and buses.
2. Turnaround
The moment the engines stop, the clock starts. Before the aircraft can push back, passengers need to get off and on, bags swapped, cargo loaded, tanks filled, galleys restocked and ground power plugged in.
Every vehicle is finite. You only have so many tugs, tankers and loaders. Queue up orders so a driver knows where to head next, but send a truck to the wrong stand and those minutes are gone.
Ground power
First thing plugged in, last thing unplugged. Ties up a unit for the whole stay.
Passengers
Easy at a jetway. At a remote stand you need stairs and buses both ways, and buses are always the first thing to run out.
Baggage
Belt loaders and carts. Unload the incoming bags, and make sure the outbound ones are actually for this flight.
Cargo
Containers and pallets in the hold, loaded by their own high-loader.
Fuel
A long leg will drain a small tanker dry. Where your tankers wait between flights decides whether the next one leaves on time.
Catering
Front and rear galleys. One truck does them back to back; two get it done in half the time.
3. Pushback
Doors closed. Send the tug, pick which way the nose points and clear it to the runway. Pick wrong and it's the long way round the taxiway.
Curveballs
When do things at airports ever go smoothly? They go wrong at peak hour, when every truck you own is already busy.
Emergencies
Medical
Priority clearance straight to a stand, with an ambulance waiting there.
Fuel spill
Locks down a stand just when an arriving flight needs it.
Weather
Fog
Spaces out the landings and eats into your turnaround margins.
Lightning
Stops all work on the apron. Turnarounds pause mid-job and the backlog builds until the storm passes.
Unplanned traffic
Peak weekend
A surge of extra flights, handled with the fleet you already have.
Diversion
An unscheduled arrival that needs a free stand and spare vehicles, now.
Network
Every airport is its own lobby that you join with a code. The plan is a shared archipelago where each airport is run by its own crew, with live flights between them.
Let a flight leave 15 minutes late? The downstream lobbies won't thank you. You can watch your reputation fly away away along with that late aircraft. It's up to you how you want to handle tight connections, long queues and baggage transfers to build your airport's connections.
Technology
Airpoly is built from scratch in Rust on the Bevy engine. The simulation, the networking and the airport tools are written for this game, to keep large, busy airports smooth in co-op.
Built with
Event-driven simulation
Traditional simulators run at a fixed tick rate. Airpoly is built to only do work when something happens, a clearance, a junction, or a stop, making it far easier to scale to large airports.
Deterministic motion plans
Instead of streaming positions every tick, the server sends a route and a speed profile against a shared clock. Every player sees the same smooth motion, even on a shaky connection.
Procedural airports
An airport is defined as lines: runways, taxiways, service roads and stands. The game generates the pavement, paints the markings, places the signs and works out the hold-short points.
Federated servers
Each airport runs its own servers, and the servers talk through a message broker, creating a shared multiplayer experience.
News
Get notified when there's something to play!
Contact
Work at an airport? 3D artist, composers, sound designers? I'd love to hear form you. Ideas for the game are welcome too.