{"id":121,"date":"2014-09-12T04:04:00","date_gmt":"2014-09-12T04:04:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mythicbattles-scenarios.com\/wormwood\/blog\/index.php\/2014\/09\/12\/eulogy-for-the-stillborn-cloudscape\/"},"modified":"2025-09-03T02:38:57","modified_gmt":"2025-09-03T09:38:57","slug":"eulogy-for-the-stillborn-cloudscape","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wormwoodstudios.com\/blog\/index.php\/2014\/09\/12\/eulogy-for-the-stillborn-cloudscape\/","title":{"rendered":"Eulogy for the Stillborn Cloudscape"},"content":{"rendered":"
Primordia<\/i> ate up a huge amount of my time, energy, and passion for two years, but at the end, there it was, our baby!\u00a0 Unfortunately, the follow-up to Primordia<\/i>\u2014<\/span>a project called Cloudscape<\/i>\u2014<\/span>also ate up a huge amount of my time, energy, and passion, for almost a year.\u00a0 At the end, there’s really nothing to show for it.Originally this was going to be a postmortem, trying to understand what went wrong with our ambitious, beautiful, doomed project, but candidly I don’t see any point in that exercise.\u00a0 Instead, I want to share with you guys some of what it would have been.<\/p>\n
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On Perebor, a world of seething clouds and strange wind-borne creatures, the La civilization flourished and faded, leaving behind mysterious towers to be picked clean by treasure-hunters, archaeologists, and profiteers.\u00a0 <\/span>Now, the scavengers\u2019 boom years have passed.\u00a0 <\/span>What remains is a decadent world, nominally run by the Amarant Corporation but in fact ruled by a ruthless criminal known as the Headman.\u00a0 <\/span>For decades, no starships have passed through this backwater, but an unexpected visitor has suddenly arrived: Dahlia Hein, a messenger from the Interstellar Courier Service, coming to claim a bequest left by a certain \u201cAngelo Nemo.\u201d\u00a0 <\/span>The trouble is, no such person seems to exist . . . .<\/i><\/div>\n
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When people ask about Primordia <\/i>sequels\u2014<\/span>and about unanswered questions in the game, such as why the War of the Four Cities began or what happened to the Choir in Civitas\u2014<\/span>my answer tends to be that Primordia<\/i>‘s universe only seems<\/i> big and elaborate.\u00a0 The peripheral things, however neat they may have sounded, were really just there as ideas <\/i>not as fully realized content: for example, the War of the Four Cities just represents war for no good reason to no good end; it’s not a particular fictitious geopolitical conflict spawned from social and economic considerations.<\/div>\n
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With Cloudscape<\/i>, however\u2014<\/span>ambitiously imagined as the first game in a trilogy\u2014<\/span>I wanted to build a universe that could actually sustain more than a stage-production scale.\u00a0 As preparation, I spent years gorging myself on space opera and planetary romances, and I fell particularly in love with the works of the late, great Jack Vance.<\/div>\n
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To the extent Cloudscape<\/i>‘s “universe”\u2014<\/span>as opposed to the particular planet on which the game takes place\u2014<\/span>has a single strongest inspiration, it is the Oikumene of Vance’s The Demon Princes <\/i>series: a decadent but not depressing faster-than-light human civilization that serves as a fun-house mirror to our present-day virtues, flaws, and foibles.<\/div>\n
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But I didn’t just want to create a big setting for the game(s): I wanted to have both<\/i> the big setting and<\/i> a content that was basically about “ideas” just like Primordia<\/i>‘s smaller content was.\u00a0 So there’s this elaborate backstory that sets up a sociopolitical history and fictitious universe for the game, but also operates as a bunch of symbols and allusions.<\/div>\n
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For example, “Perebor,” the world on which the game was to be set, takes its name from a Russian word that is both a Russian Orthodox funereal bell-striking ritual <\/a>and<\/i> a nerd slang term for a problem that lacks an elegant solution<\/a>.\u00a0 The planet was colonized by a Russian corporation (Amarant ZAO), although by the start of the game’s timeline, most of the Russians were long since gone from the planet.\u00a0 (Unlike Primordia<\/i>, Cloudscape<\/i> would take place in a “real world future.”)\u00a0 Russian cultural allusions, from Tchaikovsky’s Snow Maiden<\/a> (a leitmotif, puzzle solution, and parallel to the game’s story) to prison slang, were woven through the setting.\u00a0 (Tchaikovsky, of course, was a double allusion, the second one to Loom<\/i>, one of my favorite games.)\u00a0 Other cultures flitted around: Jewish, Christian, and Buddhist thought, Saami traditions, Romantic poetry, Conway’s game of life, Gold Rush-era prospecting, analog technology, and so on and so forth.<\/div>\n
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Thematically, the game was about the breakdown of families, death rites and rebirth, and captivity.\u00a0 Crows were integral\u2014<\/span>in the imagery, in the themes, and in Pereborian culture (they served as a primary meal item, sometimes passed off as “black squab”; another key staple was “small mutton,” the euphemistic term for rat).<\/div>\n
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As with Primordia<\/i>, I spent an inordinate amount of time on language and wordplay.\u00a0 I agonized over names\u2014<\/span>like Moeder Veer (actually, Vic’s inspired adaptation of my “Mother Feather”), the cult leader; Anton Walzer, the Headman’s brutal enforcer; Jules Barba, a fossicker who served as an informant for the Amarant Security Office.\u00a0 Sometimes I tried to create a kind of echo in different names.<\/div>\n
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Perebor:<\/div>\n
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\u00a0Teratorn:<\/div>\n
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Terebinth:<\/div>\n
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One of the things I’m proudest about regarding the design is the way in which image, idea, and setting were fitted together, such that we could have an awesome creature like the teratorn or a tortured tree like the terebinth actually make sense<\/i> as organic elements of Perebor, rather than just part of a quilt of striking but unrelated elements.<\/div>\n
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Because one of the important characters\u2014<\/span>an “off-screen” character, since he’s long-dead by the time the game starts\u2014wa<\/span>s a Pereborian poet, I found myself dusting off the old Primer playbook and writing a variety of poem-based puzzles.\u00a0 One of the more clever ones IMHO (I’ll avoid spoiling the puzzle) worked off of this poem:<\/div>\n
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The Sum of Man<\/u><\/div>\n
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\n
The seven sins are all man\u2019s worth,
\na fitting match to seas of earth,
\nthe churning, teeming devil\u2019s brew
\nfrom which evolved those sinning two,
\nwhose lust ten generations bore
\nuntil the One could take no more.
\nHe rent the firmament asunder,
\nsending forty days of thunder
\nto drown his murd’ring, grasping brood,
\nwho, still abiding, grew more shrewd
\nand so connived fourscore more arks
\nto spray their seed across the dark.
\nA thousand worlds were claimed by man,
\nnew bowers where he\u2019d breed his clan,
\nand thus a star-crossed race would sire,
\nunsmiteable by flood or fire.<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n
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Setting aside the poem’s dubious merits as a work of art, it did manage to cram in some of the game’s background lore (namely, the project of seeding different worlds with humans) and a puzzle, so there’s that. Plus, a shout out to Days of Thunder?\u00a0 That’s worth something, right?<\/div>\n
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I wanted to retain the eccentricity that we had in Primordia<\/i>\u2014<\/span>even build upon it\u2014<\/span>while still having the characters come across as human.\u00a0 Primordia<\/i>‘s robots provided a good excuse for monomania; it’s a bit harder with real people.\u00a0 Still, I was pleased with the roster of knights errant, mad poets, rusting AIs, bumbling tycoons, plucky urchins, longsuffering priests, gas-choked miners, touring freaks, and the like.\u00a0 With Vic at the wheel and Cory Webster riding shotgun, our designs were great.<\/div>\n
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Perebor, like the world of Primordia<\/i>, is a dying world: in fact, it’s dying for the second time.\u00a0 Humans are scavenging the planet, but they’ve held on too long and are being pulled under by the very corpse they’re clutching.\u00a0 That message was sometimes delivered by the game with a light touch, but sometimes (as in the case of the slaughter of Perebor’s “whales”), with a heavier hand.<\/div>\n
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The graphical quality we could hit arose from a few things (aside from Vic’s genius): a built-from-scratch engine by coder Steve Poulton; additional concept work from Cory Webster, and fantastic sprite work from Ben Chandler.\u00a0 (Below, Dahlia Hein, the game’s protagonist.)<\/div>\n
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It all actually came together in a working, high-res build with ambient sound, music, dialogue built using our new editor, and so on.\u00a0 (I’ll save the screenshot for a later post.)<\/p>\n

So, what happened?<\/p>\n

There’s no great explanation.\u00a0 It was a very ambitious project that could succeed only with all of us pulling together in the traces, and that never seemed to happen.\u00a0 For the months we spent on it, most of what I have is hundreds of pages of design, ten thousand emails, a few dozen pictures, a lot of music, and a few invoices.\u00a0 Ultimately, several different things coincided in Vic’s life to create additional challenges, and for a three-month span, I didn’t hear from him at all.\u00a0 (I hear from him occasionally now; he’s mostly doing murals.)<\/p>\n

The truth is, independent game making is a tricky thing under the best of circumstances.\u00a0 We probably would’ve been wiser to aim smaller\u2014<\/span>perhaps with that sequel to Primordia <\/i>I always refuse to contemplate.\u00a0 But I hope that someday I’ll be able to dust off what I did on Cloudscape <\/i>and make something<\/i> of it.\u00a0 If not our beautiful, ambitious adventure game, perhaps at least some kind of a sourcebook for other people to pick over.<\/p>\n

The Storm<\/u><\/p>\n

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I dreamed a new behemoth,
\nof wing and eye and claw,
\na creature wreathed in seething mist
\nthat poured out from its maw.<\/div>\n
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The thing I dreamed\u00a0regarded me
\nwith sneering awful mirth,
\nas I in youth once viewed alike
\nmy fellow sons of Earth.<\/div>\n
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In fear I tried to rouse myself,
\nto flee its burning gaze.
\nYet then I\u00a0knew I was<\/i> awake,
\nand stared at naught but haze.<\/div>\n
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The vision was an eidolon,
\na pipe dream, nothing more.
\nBut the pipe is just a boatman,
\nand the night has awful shores.<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n
\u00a0* * *<\/div>\n

Anyway, all is not lost: as it happens, the despair left by
\nCloudscape<\/i>‘s untimely death eventually turned into a surge of energy propelling me to my next project, which I hope to announce very soon.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Primordia ate up a huge amount of my time, energy, and passion for two years, but at the end, there it was, our baby!\u00a0 Unfortunately, the follow-up to Primordia\u2014a project called Cloudscape\u2014also ate up a huge amount of my time, energy, and passion, for almost a year.\u00a0 At the end, there’s really nothing to show […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-121","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wormwoodstudios.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/121","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wormwoodstudios.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wormwoodstudios.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wormwoodstudios.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wormwoodstudios.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=121"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.wormwoodstudios.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/121\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":311,"href":"https:\/\/www.wormwoodstudios.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/121\/revisions\/311"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wormwoodstudios.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=121"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wormwoodstudios.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=121"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wormwoodstudios.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=121"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}