CLOUD GARDENS

The co-creator of the Kingdom series sends out new shoots towards the sky

- Thomas van den Berg

Developer/publisher Format Origin

Release

Noio PC Netherlands 2020

No one could accuse Thomas van den Berg of being unambitious. Looking at the delicately hued, lo-fi dioramas scattered across these pages, you might find the following hard to believe: Cloud Gardens started life as a massively-multiplayer online game. “I do often have ideas on paper, but then I already don’t want to start on them because it’s too big, it’s already some crazy plan,” van den Berg grins sheepishly.

While teaching himself Blender by modelling various plant life, he was also experimenting with Improbable’s cloud-based multiplayer game platform, SpatialOS. He ended up building a prototype for a persistent world construction MMO, which he entitled Garbage Country: players across the world would construct towers from junk, and help each other transform them into beautiful hanging gardens. “It was way too big for one person [to make],” he admits. “But the plants were cool, so I was like, ‘Can I not save some part of this year-long experiment, and have something to show for it?’”