Reveal and Demo news - CLOUDOME

WHAT IS ALL THIS?

Lacking funds to outsource anything and having gone thru several project cancellations due to key partners (aka free asset contributors) flacking off to play Warframes and Paths of Exiles, I wanted to start working on something about which I could be 100% confident in my ability to complete it fully by myself, while the final game...

a) not looking like total trash;
b) scope and gameplay-wise not feeling compromised, at least much, by the lack of budget and dev power.

I knew I needed a new idea: none of my old GDDs can realistically be done by one person in a reasonable amount of time. I still had standards tho. I was looking for an idea that I by myself could develop into a game that is:

a) complete;
( i.e. not a half-game, barely-a-game, obviously-unfinished-game, etc )

b) not a walking simulator;
( not even a glorified one )
( i.e. it can be recognized as a game and not just an "experience" )

This might sound dumb, but it took me multiple days of brainstorming. In the end, in the universe I’ve been working on for many years now (that has numerous games "planned" for it already), I found the new event I was looking for, the one fitting my challengingly minimalistic criteria, and I was able to form a vision of a game I could make about it, which presented itself to me as both doable (as a solo undertaking) and satisfyingly complete as a video game (in its potential final form).

So what is CLOUDOME? For marketplaces and such, I still haven’t decided how I will go about selling it. I am a musician and songwriter by trade: I mostly deal with metaphors for feelings, not literal descriptions of things that cause them. For game enthusiasts and devs, maybe some of these bullet points will make sense:

• CLOUDOME is a game of exploration and puzzle solving;
• Takes place inside a mysteriously calm (and colored) region of a gas giant;
• About 50% of the time you pilot a small fighter class space ship exploring the region and looking for points of interest;
• Other 50% of the time you explore highly mysterious points of interest on foot (in first person), which mostly consist of puzzles and platforming;
• There will be an opening slide show explaining what is going on — it's not just my head canon;
• The mystery you find yourself in is for you, the player, to observe and put together;
• The game will never tell you "Wow look at that thing! Sure is strange! I wonder what and why and how! Let's find out! Here, I put a giant marker on the screen for you! Der der";
• The ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything will never be answered directly in a 120 minute-long cutscene at the end of the game, not even if you 100% it;
• The map is largely open from the start and sequence-breakable if you know where you’re going;
• There is a little bit of combat. I'm not especially proud of it yet, but it's there for you if you need it like a good loyal friend;
• "But what is it REALLY about, John?" It's about family, of course;
• JK. In short? I suppose it’s about wondering unexplored places and finding strange things;
• Being by yourself in an unknown environment, having no backup;
• Unable to go back to safety, having to go forward not knowing if there is an exit on the other side of the abyss you are plunging into;
• It is also about arcade-y flight controls with which I am quite happy. No Unity physics are used for any it: just pure math. I suppose I could say that I made my own rudimentary physics for the flight controls;
• Some of the puzzles are hard AF and potentially just altogether bad and may even require a bit of a community effort to solve;
• If anyone solves the puzzle in the demo at all (brute forcing or not) and won’t feel like sending death threats my way, I will share a bowl of dog food with my puppy. OK, I probably won't. It will be unexpected tho!

Elevator pitch?

1. Subnautica lost its survival/building mechanics;
2. No Man’s Sky lost its endless universe, the survival/building mechanics, and had its POIs turned all unique and containing actual things to do around them;
3. The two had a baby.

HOW LONG?

At least 10-12 hours to 100%, maybe 6-8 hours on average, 30 or so minutes to sequence break, 1 minute to glitch thru.

WHEN?

Not very soon.

KICKSTARTER? EARLY ACCESS?

Maybe. And probably not, but also maybe.

WRAPPING UP, PET PEEVES, EXCUSES

• I couldn't manage to make the clouds look the way I want… at all. YET! And my current approach is very poorly optimized, too. I need something completely different than the Unity’s particle system: potentially not even a particle system at all but a shader-based solution. Do I find my current system passible? Honestly: it probably is, but I know and you know and I know you know that it sucks.
• Unity, not only thru its recent ground-breaking innovations in the field of business administration, but also thru how reliable its editor has been recently, is telling me to move on. And I want to. Preferably to Godot. Unreal’s editor wouldn’t even open on my system under the time it takes me to finish a cup of tea. Regardless of which engine I should switch to, I have quite an SDK for CLOUDOME in Unity right now: porting over would be not only heartbreaking, but also momentum-destroying. If it was up to me, for the next, say, 3 months I would much prefer to keep working on the game over porting its demo. If you have experience with both Godot and Unity, and you somehow find CLOUDOME something you would like to work on for nothing but royalties from potential sales, please contact me wherever you prefer: I may have a big assignment for you.
• Speaking of which, if you want to be part of the CLOUDOME team in any other role, I will probably be grateful to have you. Specifically, in case anyone is interested, knowing a thing or two about creating weather systems would make you irreplaceable. All artists welcome. Coders welcome. Welcome all.
• Publishers: I am available for sale and my standards for acceptable quality of life are staggeringly low.
• Steam page may or may not be under construction.
• Super early highly exclusive demo available here and now. A few link buttons are broken: will be adjusted once corresponding pages are up.
• OST is available here.
  also on legacy streaming services soon (maybe in a week or two).

LINKS AND SUCH

Project’s Twatter
( comes pre-abandoned personally by me for your viewing pleasure. mostly just for announcing news/update published here or on m'patreon: I don’t plan on live tweeting the dev process )

m'Personal Twatter
( for contact, DMs open )

m'Website
( in case you want to check out who I am, also an alternative way to get in touch )

Patreon
( non-gamedev updates, alternative way to get the demo's soundtrack, and an even more alternative way to contact me )

P.S.

I probably forgot a ton of important stuff: tbh rolling all of this out simultaneously (demos, videos, screenshots, ost, this article, yada yada) is a tad overwhelming so I wouldn't be surprised if in a day or two I had to correct/update every piece of Cloudome-related content I have done/uploaded lately.

Thanks for checking out this stuff!