I'm Thomas Welsh, the lead author and narrative designer at Cloudpunk, and I'm part of a small group that builds the most brilliant, bizarre cyberpunk city ever seen in a game. That city is called Nivalis, and in Cloudpunk, you get to spend one crazy night working and working there. You will make friends with enemies, visit underground nightclubs and gardens in the sky, meet the wealthiest and poorest people in the community, and interact with people, androids, cyborgs, and people blurring the boundaries between all three.
When I got on board to help Mark (who is leading our project) create the Cloudpunk issue, I had the best chance any writer could have! I was introduced to the beautiful voxel world that a player could fly around or explore on their feet, and Mark had one task for me.
"Fill this world with stories big and small – drama, tragedy, action, comedy, and as many incredible and wonderful characters as you can imagine."
It was a dream!
To help me write this open-world, narrative-based game, we looked at games based on stories we liked. Games like Firewatch, Disco Elysium, and Kentucky Route Zero. Taking this as inspiration, I wrote an article for a hundred stories and a hundred side stories for the player to explore. Within those narratives, Cloudpunk offers tough moral decisions to the player – decisions that will change the lives of people who live in Nivalis permanently.
Cloudpunk's massive structure follows the normal life of driver Rania during her first night in town. I've always loved games and movies that went on one crazy night: Die Die Hard, The Warriors, Arkham Asylym. That's the kind of night we wanted to have when playing Cloudpunk!
Nivalis reaches up to the clouds above and falls to the ocean floor below. It's wet and loud, filled with jazz and synth-pop, and it's almost always raining. When designing this city, we were inspired by movies and games, but also real places such as Shinjuku in Tokyo, Hong Kong and Seoul.
As you explore Nivalis at night, you are accompanied by your mysterious Cloudpunk call handler, and your only friend is your AI dog camera with his personality uploaded to your flying car.
You will encounter many different characters overnight. Characters like BlockFourOh, a group of robots are being tracked by authorities for their urban renewal projects. Or Dolly, a pop manager who has been replaced by an android doppelganger. Then there is Huxley, a dysfunctional robot who can only talk about clichés. Or maybe you will see Gorgothoa, a dysfunctional epicenter who thinks it is the reincarnation of an adult eater.
There are no shootings, fights, RPG stats, or unlockable skills in Cloudpunk. Instead, Cloudpunk is all about the exploratory city and characters you come across. You will also want rare collections for delivery, such as ancient video cartridgeges that you can sell on the black market, or digital taps containing deleted memories of your android neighbor.
Life in Nivalis is difficult but only by making new connections with the unfamiliar residents of this great city that you can use until morning.
