Rendering fluids in a 2D pixel art style game

Hello! So I’m making a 2d game about some nerdy stuff, but the graphics for my fluids are kinda boring and I want to make them better.

Here is the current look (I’m using a tilemap to render tiles currently):


As you can see, the “water” doesn’t look quite right, its not like a big collection of water. You can see every individual water tile.
The problem im encountering is essentialy I want one of these things, but I have no idea how to make them:

  1. Make the tiles be kinda like metaballs with an height, but in 2D. I believe this is hard to implement and it probably won’t fit, so I just wanna know how you would solve that problem. (Kinda like in Oxygen Not Included)
  2. Make the tiles have an height (based on their mass, which each tile has)¹ and also have so that only the edges of the body of water should have an outline.

I wouldn’t mind if anybody else has an better idea to render fluids though, I have no idea how to make fluids to be honest :sweat_smile:. If I need to elaborate on something I can provide more info.
Any help would be appreciated!

¹ For simplicity, each tile has a mass and the fluid on the image should have a max mass of 1000kg, so basically if a tile had 500kg mass and it was a fluid, the height would be halved. If the mass was >1000kg, it would still be a full tile.

if you check asset store 2d fluids,

is anything there that looks good?

Can get some inspiration from those and then look into 2D fluid algorithms.
Pretty sure there are also free/opensource ones in github that you can study.