Nice Games Jam: "Head in the Clouds"

Nice Games Club - a gamedev podcast!

This week, your Nice Hosts have a new prompt from a new source. Lydia's husband, Ian, draws from a rainy source of inspiration and the Hosts are all-in. We brush up on the water cycle, requisition the equipment, practice our Trans-Atlantic accents, dunk on hot dogs, and puzzle over water-based cloud economies.

• Big Pharma

  -

  Steam
• Le Ballon Rouge

  -

  Wikipedia
• Water Cycle

  -

  Wikipedia
• Loop Hero

  -

  Steam
• Human Resource Machine

  -

  Steam

Prompt

to match the current weather - what goes on inside the clouds during a thunderstorm?

Game type

Design document

Player count

1

Rules

• You control a cloud factory and manage what the cloud distributes
• Mission-based, scenarios
  • Plenty of fun fantasy options
• Condition options
  • Sunshine
  • Water
  • Static (use a balloon?)
  • Wind
  • The shape of your factory/cloud
• Water is your core resource
  • Use it to build the factory, use it to make the rain and complete tasks, use it to expand
  • Gain it from water vapor and such (water cycle)
  • Your factory is also water, you can reuse it
• You go through a campaign
  • Pick between a set of jobs each time, bigger jobs give more rep
• Isometric view
• Level 1: rain on the hot dog cart
  • Have the cloud rain over an area for a specific period of time
  • The mission before you just needed to dump some water
  • The player needs to collect water to have enough rain on the hot dog cart
  • Automation is the game
  • You need to shape the cloud to fit all of the machines that you order from a catalog
    • Catalog has a ton of options, with their own efficiencies
• Level 2: rain on a hot dog festival
• Level ??: Flood the Nile