Cloud Jumper
IN DEVELOPMENT · PC · HYPER LUMINAL GAMES
A relaxing exploration game about flying between floating islands
Cloud Jumper is a cosy exploration game where players soar between floating islands, uncovering ancient secrets. I worked on it at Hyper Luminal Games as a generalist designer alongside Pine Hearts, designing systems across the whole game, from core features I owned outright to inherited designs I rebuilt into shippable shape. The game is in development and announced for PC.
-
Role: Game Designer
-
Studio: Hyper Luminal Games (publisher: Little Nook)
-
Engine & tools: Unity + proprietary visual scripting tools
-
Platforms: PC (announced)
-
Dates: Sep 2023 – Aug 2024
-
My focus: Systems design, Feature ownership, Prototyping
What I did:
-
Owned the dialogue system from scratch: conversation structure and the call-priority rules for how main-quest, side-quest, and ambient lines queue, interrupt, or yield. Documented and aligned across UI/UX, Art, and Code through to implementation.
-
Designed the island-scanning activity and its minigame from scratch.
-
Developed the on-foot walking layer introduced after a mid-production creative pivot: movement, interaction, and the puzzle elements, all designed around its fixed on-rails camera. Proved the system with two test islands, one minimal, one enormous.
-
Redeveloped inherited stub designs into full, playtested systems, including a spline-based wind tunnel traversal mechanic and a level built around it where the mechanic is load-bearing.
-
Designed and balanced the merchant economy (buying, materials, and radiant quests tuned to keep the economy healthy) and worked on ship elemental upgrades.
-
Authored primary story quests beat by beat, contributed quests to the narrative, and worked with programmers to make the visual scripting tools more designer-friendly.
Deep Dive
The goal:
Cloud Jumper began as a game about flying. Mid-production, the creative lead wanted more puzzle content, and flying between islands couldn't carry it. The game needed on-foot exploration, and almost none of that existed yet.
The design:
The direction was set: on-foot sections with a fixed, on-rails camera. My job was making that actually work. I designed the movement and interaction for a cosy pace, worked out what a puzzle could be when the player can't control the framing, and turned the camera constraint into a tool, using the fixed frame to control exactly what a puzzle reveals, and when.
Prove it small:
Rather than pitch on paper, I built a small island showcasing the complete loop: land, walk, read the space, solve a simple puzzle. The team could feel the pacing in minutes and greenlight against something playable.
Stress-test it big:
Then I built the opposite: a deliberately enormous island that pushed the on-rails camera as far as it would go, with long sightlines, big traversal, and complex framing. The point was to find where the system bent or broke before production committed to building a game's worth of islands on top of it.
The walking layer took Cloud Jumper from a flying game with puzzle ambitions to a game that could deliver them.
Gallery
Outcome
Cloud Jumper is in development at Hyper Luminal Games and announced for PC.