Neon lights in the place of sunlight, endless skyscrapers yet no sky. Quite a dystopian view, but there is a certain beauty that can be found in it. The team at Ion Lands had taken upon themselves to flesh out the grim cyberpunk world of Cloudpunk in a way that shows how even in such a cruel place, not everything is black and white, and some good can shine through the dirt of the streets. The choice that the players have to face is: will they protect that small spark of hope, or let it be extinguished. We asked the developers a few questions, to guide you through the creation of Cloudpunk, and what it took to make it astounding.
GOG: Thank you so much for taking the time to speak to us. To start off, could you shortly, in your own words, describe Cloudpunk?Ion Lands: Thank you for having me. Cloudpunk is a cyberpunk experience that frankly didn't exist before. You are thrown into a world that is both dystopian and strangely inviting and captivating so that you'll have a hard time leaving it. You play as Rania, a driver from "out of town" who just started working for the Cloudpunk delivery service. Since you, the player, just visited the city for the first time as well, Rania's story kinda becomes your own.
Rania's job and the way it influences the mood of the story isn't what you'd expect of a game from this genre. Where did the idea to base the gameplay on delivery service come from?The cyberpunk stories we all know are about hacking superheroes, secret agents, hired guns or depressive private detectives. And we all love them. But we wanted to tell the story from the perspective of someone doing the most ordinary, mundane job. The delivery driver was the perfect fit, as it combines that "simple" job with the opportunity to explore the city freely.
Cloudpunk's environment has an incredible ability to suck you in, and make you feel like you're really cruising around a mega-city, drowning in the neon lights of the streets. This couldn't be an easy thing to achieve, so let me ask, what was the biggest technological obstacle you encountered?Thank you. The biggest technical obstacle was managing the size of the city. To keep performance at an acceptable level, we needed to cut the city into multiple parts, and in general, what we have in the game is not the entire city. That wouldn't have been possible for us to achieve. But it's large enough to get lost. And because you can explore everything in an "open world" manner, it was also challenging to manage the performance around the busy hubs, i.e. areas with lots of characters walking around, lots of details on the ground or vehicles passing by. But these challenges are fun.
The Visual style of Cloudpunk - voxel art, a 3D version of pixel art is quite a unique choice. What convinced you that this is the direction that'd fit Cloudpunk best?During the lengthy pre-production of the game, I went through many different concept ideas that were not paying rent in my mind. Let me say this, I had to throw many of them out. At the same time I was thinking about ways to produce all the assets for the next game in a more efficient way. Things like that have a very high priority for small indie studios, who constantly need to think how they can achieve more with less budget. So I stumbled over a tool called MagicaVoxel and the voxel art community and immediately fell in love with the rather technical looking art and how fitting it was for a cyberpunk game. This was the
first gif I posted on Twitter in 2017.
The style and detail have evolved a lot over the course of the 2.5 years of development that followed after. At the beginning everything was quite rough and designed to be looked at from a distance. Later when first person exploration was implemented, we added a ton of detail to make the world atmospheric and believable, even with voxels.
What is the most absurd concept you introduced in the game, that would be the most plausible to be a real life thing in the future?There are actually 2, of which one is funny and the other one rather depressing. In the city of Nivalis you need a permit to listen to or play Jazz. Without a permit, you might be sentenced to death. That's the funny one.
Then there is the concept of an elevator to heaven called the Ascension Escalator. People who live in the lower parts of the city actually never see the sky. Try to imagine how that might feel. So people pay a lot of money to use that escalator which brings them up above the clouds to see the sky. They secretly know that this would be their end, as the escalator indeed goes above the sky, but then... you know.
Are you ready to set off on a neon-soaked narrative adventure ? You should play Cloudpunk! 