Interview: Developing Cloud Gardens

INTERVIEW: DEVELOPINGCLOUD GARDENS

Interview

The background image for the first page, a still from the game featuring a wall dotted with air conditioning units. It is overgrown with vines. Everything is in a pixelated, 3d style.

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.

At some point during the development process Thomas realized the MMO wasn’t panning out, but that the plant mechanism was cool and very artistically powerful. He started prototyping these very small structures, like what you see in the game today, and he put together a small set of props. I think the barrel and the TV were some of the first things that he made, which were taken from the previous MMO concept.

We spent a long time talking about what kind of spaces we wanted to overgrow and what kind of plants we wanted and how to make the game fun. We liked the idea of tending your garden in a leisurely way, as opposed to mind-bending puzzles.

The background image for the second page: a still image from the game, featuring buildings overgrown with trees and reedlike plants, in a pixelated, 3D rendered style. Flower pots dot the ground and a black bird peeks out from among the grasses.

RH: The game is set sort of vaguely post-apocalypse—there aren’t any people, and the buildings are fallen-down and overgrown. Did you ever have an idea of how the world of Cloud Gardens was created?

EC: One of the things that happened with Cloud Gardens is that it is an aesthetics-forward game specifically focused on the plants. We knew that the plants looked good in particular spaces and on particular things. We toyed with having a story, but ultimately decided to leave it completely open-ended. I think that a lot of themes that we end up playing with in terms of having plants growing in abandoned industrial spaces makes people think about climate change and the apocalypses that we’re currently facing, which is definitely intentional. But ultimately, the nature of the story of the wasteland is—at least for now— unspecified.

A still from the game featuring a fallen-apart rusted greenhouse overgrown with bamboo, monstera plants, wisteria vines, and trees. All the plants have different pink fruits hanging off them. The greenhouse is set on a brick tower that rises out of a blue void.

A still from the game, depicting a large rusted pipe overgrown with ferns. Lights come up from the ground to illuminate the grasses.

RH: Could you talk a little about those themes? What do you think about the ideas of beauty in broken-down buildings, and creating something to ruin it?

EC: When designing the levels, I looked at a lot of building games, especially the building aspect of the Sims. What you’re doing in Cloud Gardens is almost like a double inverse—you’re not breaking things, but what you’re building is already kind of broken.

I think that there’s an interesting dynamic there. Normally when you’re exposed to broken-down structures in games, it’s because of entropy, time, and decay. In Cloud Gardens we encourage the opposite, where we’re taking care of and finding beauty in these broken-down structures.

The background for the third page: a close-up of a pillar supporting a brick structure. The structure is overgrown with vines and fruit trees.

RH: What about the other themes of the game? What was the process for those, and how do you try to bring them across to the player?

EC: We talked about a lot of things in terms of the themes and level palettes. At one point we were thinking about a run-down area called the Stacks, sort of inspired by people living out of old shipping containers.

The environments that I thought would be most satisfying to overgrow would be those of industrial environments or luxury environments, places where you’re watching great wealth decay as opposed to like watching poverty decay. That was something that we were trying to be mindful of in our depictions of it because there’s something satisfying to watching the downfall of monuments to capitalism and our current industrial cultural era.

The background for the fourth page: the right half of the third page. In this we can see horizontal circle-shaped holes built of brick, and covered in wisteria vines, along with more fruit trees in planters and pillars overgrown with vines.

RH: You focus a lot on the plants, and the only other life in the game are the crows that accompany the player. What was the reason behind including those?

EC: There are sort of two answers to that. One is that it’s to show that life exists beyond humans. The threat is not like to the planet— plants will continue, crows will continue, but it’s us that won’t be in the picture.

But the other answer is that we wanted something that was moving inside of the static vignettes.. A big influence on the game was a sandbox game called Townscaper, which has a similar idea of digital space, and no real objective, that we wanted to lean into. And we liked their birds—which are much cuter than the crows in Cloud Gardens, but serve a similar purpose of grounding the player in a disconnected digital space.

A still from the game, depicting a highway road sign rising out of the cloudy void. The struts are covered in signs, which are overgrown and illegible.

The background of the fifth page: a closeup of vines on pavement, traffic cones, a tire, and a parking meter.

RH: This idea of moving away from the typical video game levels and objectives—how do you plan to implement that moving forward?

EC: There’s already a suite of three chapters, which are sets of levels, and there’s three more planned. We’ve seen folks in the community building these ridiculous and awesome gardens in our sandbox mode and we want to continue to give them tools to be able to make more ridiculous gardens and to have more control over what they’re doing while keeping the whole experience accessible.

We kept a system of levels—didn’t make it purely a sandbox game— because people feel comfortable with that. Folks wanting levels because they understand that levels will teach you how to play. We didn’t want an environment that encouraged “only a true gamer can figure out the game”—we wanted anyone to be able to play the game. We also didn’t want to punish players for not understanding the game, especially since we don’t have much text. Ultimately, in development, we will see how Early Access goes. You can make the kind of games you want to, but you also have to pay rent and eat food and I, at least, don’t live in a country where there’s enough of social safety net for artists to allow us to ignore those kinds of factors.

A still from the game, depicting a small wooden structure on a raised concrete patio. There is a rusty pipe coming out of the left of the building. The building, concrete patio, and ground are overgrown with purple-flowered grasses, ferns, a monstera plant, pothos vines, and white mushrooms with pink spores.

A still from the game, featuring the wisteria plant card, a card-shaped rectangle coevered in pixelated pink vines and with a seed at the center. "WISTERIA" is written in blocky font underneath the seed.

RH: What are your favorite things about the community that has sprung up around Cloud Gardens, like the Early Access Discord?

EC: I have been really excited by the variety of folks who have come to this game, both through traditional gaming channels, but also folks who are like “mostly I just write solar zines, but this game looks up my alley” or people who are doing a PhD in botany or who used to do landscaping or who do urban exploring, and just love plants and landscapes. There’s someone in the Discord who makes real-life model dioramas using plants and they were like “this game is saving me so much money because I can just make digital ones and not have to pay for my normal materials.”We knew that this would be a niche game, and we hoped that there would be a niche of people who would be excited about a more meandering gardening and aesthetic experience.

I also love the people in Discord who fixated on the garden gnome props. I will neither confirm nor deny that it was the garden gnomes that ended the world, but I think that’s funny.

The background to the sixth page. A rusty blue car is overgrown with monstera plants. There are traffic cones off to the left, and two black birds on the right.

RH: Which of the plants in the game is your favorite?

EC: The wisteria, the hanging plant. I really like the way it looks and it made me think about how plants take up space on physical structures.