Optopia Issue #3 (May 2021)

INTERVIEW: DEVELOPING CLOUD GARDENS In September of 2020, the video game Cloud Gardens was released on Steam for early access. It seemed solarpunk so, out of curiousity, I bought the game and joined the Early Access Discord server. There, I had the opportuinity to speak with Elijah Cauley, the level designer.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Rifka Handelman: Could you explain Cloud Gardens to someone who’s never played it?

Eli Cauley: Cloud Gardens is a lo-fi artisan game where you are presented with dioramas of the apocalypse—a sort of soft apocalypse—and it’s your job to overgrow these dioramas with a variety of plants. It’s slightly a puzzle game, but it’s mostly about the aesthetic and process of tending space and turn it into a garden.

RH: Where did the original concept of the game come from?

EC: It all started when Thomas [van den Berg, also known as Noio, the main designer for the game] was working on a large-scale MMO game called Garbage Country where the idea was that people would build little settlements out of concrete structures. Part of it was that the plants would grow in real time. So you would log on, you would maybe plant a seed, and then when you left and then came back the vine would have grown. That growing system is now in Cloud Gardens, with some minor changes and lots of new plants.

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