Cloudpunk: New Voxel Indie Game

Marko Dieckmann shortly introduced a new title of his studio ION LANDS  Cloudpunk that has recently been revealed on Steam. This is an indie adventure game under development with a unique voxel look and cyberpunk settings.  

Cloudpunk: the Story

Cloudpunk is a cyberpunk exploration game with the heart of a storyteller. Your name is Rania. This is your first night working for Cloudpunk, the semi-legal delivery company based in the sprawling city of Nivalis. You go everywhere, from the Marrow below to the spires that pierce the grey clouds high above before scraping the edge of the troposphere. No delivery job is too dangerous, and no one is faster than a Cloudpunk driver.

It this story-focused game you will meet a diverse range of quirky characters including androids, AI’s and unscrupulous humans at every level of society. Everyone has a story, and in the course of one night in Nivalis, everything will change.

Reference

Our references are mainly Bladerunner and Firewatch. I’m mentioning Firewatch because we want to tell a personal story, that you will experience through the eyes of Rania, our protagonist, and Camus, her artificial dog, and best friend. I’m mentioning Bladerunner for the aesthetic and atmosphere in Nivalis, an immense vertical cyberpunk city with its own set of rules. The game will have no combat. It is about the people you meet and interact with. We didn’t want to make a game where you rush through the environment taking on hordes of enemies or planning your next kill. We want the players to take a moment and breathe in the atmosphere of carefully crafted environments and to enjoy driving their hovercars in this world. Therefore we’ve spent a great deal on finding the right look.

Game Production & the Team

We’ve been working on Cloudpunk since about Summer last year. It started with me doing prototyping and simple visual tests using a low poly art style which shortly after ended in a voxel aesthetic.

I wanted to return to the Cyberpunk setting after many years. What you can do with voxels suits this setting quite well, as most all of the buildings in modern cities have a blocky layout and are rather square than round. I started using MagicaVoxel, which is an excellent free voxel editor. It wasn’t that hard to get the voxel objects into Unity. The asset store provided a simple importer, which I changed and added on to suit my needs, as I wanted to import all the material settings supported by Magica. A couple months later I posted the first teaser on Twitter and was quite overwhelmed by the positive reception. The game has come a long way since then, with further improved visuals, gameplay and narrative design.

I assembled a great team consisting of author Thomas Welsh, voxel artist Eloise Tricoli, composer Harry Critchley, and 2D artist William Sweetman. We’re all very excited about this project and can’t wait to find out what everyone is thinking.

Marko Dieckmann, the head of  ION LANDS

Interview conducted by Kirill Tokarev