Nice Games Club - a gamedev podcast! Nice Games Jam: "Head in the Clouds"
Jun 26, 2025
00:00
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.
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