Noodle Jam: We Gave Our Dev Team 1 Week to Add Anything

After a long sprint of updates — Haven, Gnasherpalooza, and Equinox — the team took a week to run an internal experiment we called Noodle Jam.

The rules were simple:

• Spend one week making or learning something that could benefit Cloudheim

• It could be a prototype, system improvement, weird experiment, something you’ve been wanting to try, or something that’s been really bothering you

• It cannot leave the main game in a half-finished state afterward

In other words: go build cool stuff, but don’t break the game on your way out.

After a pretty intense month of updates, our goal was to give everyone extra freedom to work on what they wanted and follow their curiosity for a bit. (Not that we weren’t excited about development already… but it had been a long month and we needed a little fun).

Some people used the time to fix things in the game that had been bothering them, while others experimented with environments, combat, audio, or progression ideas.

Interestingly, a lot of the work started orbiting around the same thing: a new roguelite mode. (Several devs may have plotted to do this beforehand). Right now it’s codenamed Njord, and a lot of the work from Noodle Jam feeds directly into that mode. And yes, it is really, really fun.

Here’s a look at what the team built over the last week!

Visual and Environment Jam

One of the biggest visual upgrades came from new shader work on the sky and clouds, led by our VFX Artist Sven with some implementation from our Art Director, Adam.

Sven made a new skydome shader that creates a painterly sky that slowly moves and shifts. It’s also much more performant while looking awesome, so doubly cool.

There’s also a new shader for clouds in the distance, like when you’re looking at islands on the horizon. The original version was implemented as a giant billboard, but Adam rotates the cloud layer to give the illusion of depth and movement (the inspiration came from Columbia Pictures and their clouds in case you were curious!).

We also used the same technology to improve Owl Mountain, where Adam painted these clouds to now have actual texture and movement instead of appearing as a flat smudge along the horizon.

Aaand we also used this tech to build a new background for Greenvor, which now has much richer sky detail than before.

Kevin made some new stands for the shop - like a weapon rack, a potion stand, and a special stand that gives a bonus for selling items, and David made two new base statues that influence harvesting rocks and plants, which should help on your gold and stardust journey.

Audio Jam

AJ, our expansive audio team of 1 spent some time improving how combat sound and the general mix is handled under the hood.

The sound effects system now feeds Lfe(sub channel) correctly for any users present and future who may utilize multichannel sound systems. In a proper multi channel mix, we really only want to "rumble the sub" when targeted. A new lfe class now handles this, and he can target them per sound in the mix.

The HDR system that controls how loud and impactful combat sounds feel was also reconfigured so heavy hits and big moments stand out more clearly. Spatial handling for combat and player sounds are increasingly “centralized” for better mix focus.

And since Njord runs needed their own vibe, AJ created some new music variations from existing stems specifically for the roguelite mode, helping give