Studio Profile
Meet Solid Clouds, the Icelandic studio putting itself on the map with a genre-bending MMORTS
These days, the world ‘cloud’ conjures up a certain image: of servers humming away in basements, of high-powered tech evangelists building castles in the sky. Indeed, back in 2013 when Stefán Gunnarsson founded and named Solid Clouds, he found it hard to get out from under that assumption. “During that time, anything that was cloud-based was supposed to be the magic solution or whatever,” he laughs. But he hadn’t named his new studio in reference to remote mass-computing power. Rather, he’d named it for the personal journey he was about to undertake. “I was brainstorming, and I imagined just when you’re daydreaming and looking at the sky, and you see something, and it kind of becomes solid and real.”
In a previous life, Gunnarsson was a mechanic by trade – but he also had a passion for videogames, playing Ultima Online professionally for several years. He ran a play-by-mail game, in which he had 16 people fighting a Napoleonic war, and was drawn to browser-based MMO strategy games such as Tribal Wars and Travian. “From 2007 to 2010, they were a big thing,” he says. “I thought they were fascinating. But what irked me so much was the game map kind of disappeared – it wasn’t that important. Even in modern mobile games, it’s still not that important. Most people who love strategy games have played Civilization, so I wanted to combine the MMO element with a proper game map.”
Nobody was making the game that Gunnarsson wanted to play, and so “out of frustration” in 2010 he left his job as a mechanic, heading back to university to study computer science and gain some relevant experience. Just a few months later, he would found Solid Clouds with “the most annoying” participant of his playby-mail game, business graduate Stefán Þór Björnsson – and Sigurður Arnljótsson, the original CEO and co-founder of CCP Games. Gunnarsson was one of the Eve Online maker’s first investors, and had followed its journey closely, making connections and using it as a model for the venture he wanted to undertake. “Stefán had the business education, Sigurður had the experience and knew about the processes, and I had the idea and mission,” Gunnarsson says.
Starborne was that big idea, the kind of game that developers were moving away from making. The App Store was on the rise, and large-scale strategy games were becoming rarer as many made the most of the lucrative opportunity. Gunnarsson, however, was still itching to play a polished 4X strategy game set in a massively multiplayer structure. And so he would have to make it. “Thankfully, we could relate to other products which had a decent business model back in the day, so I could convince people that this could make money,” he says. But it was still going to be a huge mountain to climb in terms of the sheer ambition of the project: a million-hex map, with 5,000 concurrent players all building out their own empires across different ships and planets, all created by a comparatively
“ALONGSIDE [STARBORNE] WE’VE ALSO BEEN BUILDING UP OUR OWN KIND OF TECHNOLOGICAL INFRASTRUCTURE”
tiny team. The core aim was to allow players to instantly travel to any point on the map seamlessly.
“Solid Clouds has always been punching well above its weight,” says Haukur Steinn Logason,
head of marketing and growth, as he breezily teleports his Starborne ship 700,000 hexes across the galaxy. “We’re doing an MMO in a genre that’s notoriously content-heavy. And Starborne
was the catalyst for the studio, but alongside that we’ve also been building up our own kind of technological infrastructure.” Their Nordic cousins at Paradox Interactive, who’d built a multitude of games for a variety of audiences in the strategy genre, provided inspiration: the studio knew that if it could build its own tech, it could not only work to achieve its specific ambition with Starborne,
but would be able to consistently expand its repertoire of games, much as Paradox had.
Iceland’s engineering-centric education system and the high numbers of coders it produces provided a strong foundation of early hires. But it was still a small team, and the desire to make a detailed, 4X-type world but at a massive scale
would mean the studio would decide to forgo coding an entire engine in favour of something more flexible. “We opted to do a ‘best of both worlds’,” Logason says, “where we used Unity to handle most of the game creation, but since we’re tackling such a streamlined, focused thing, we built in our additional tooling.” They call it the Prosper engine – “for simplicity’s sake,” Gunnarsson laughs, “but I’m sure some engineer would not be happy” – and it allows the team to structure the Unity-created parts of the game around its own custom code framework that powers its huge, seamless, massively populated world with little cost to performance.
Solid Clouds not only needed to be realistic about how it could build such a game with such a small headcount, but also what it could build.
The studio has always been eager to distinguish itself from CCP; its history with, and indeed proximity to, the Eve maker has meant that Solid Clouds has been conflated with it more than is comfortable for them. Why, then, would they set their strategy MMO in space? “You don’t have to populate a dense, varying fantasy setting that would have rich textures all over – you can kind of focus on making this individual thing that occupies space really beautiful and polished,” Logason explains. “After that, it’s just space in between those.” Gunnarsson agrees: “That’s one part of it. I also just love sci-fi.” A look around Gunnarrson’s office explains his nickname ‘Stefán Star Wars’; a life-size statue of Darth Vader takes pride of place. “So yeah, it’s a combination of those. Doing a map like this, we didn’t have to connect the cells together that much – they could work individually and you could puzzle them together, while in an Earth-like scenario you have to connect the cells, otherwise you have single mountains everywhere. And back in the day, we didn’t even know how to do that.”
They certainly do now. The game has spanned nine alphas since early 2015. Starborne’s world is not persistent, and its scenarios play out over the course of eight weeks. The first alpha was using Solid Cloud’s first prototype, “which didn’t work very well,” Gunnarsson recalls. “We got the networking up and running, and we just got 30 random people to join the map. And nothing worked.” One plucky player, however, stuck around for a full two weeks just building up his garden, surprising and delighting the team. “That was Alpha 1. So when people hear you’ve done nine alphas… you just have to put it in context. Some would call that a small in-house test.”
The alphas would make clear the importance of quickly establishing a relationship with the potential playerbase: it was a concept the team at Solid Clouds was familiar with, being a relative of CCP, but Starborne would require a mastery of it, it seemed. “You kind of have to layer in the game design to work for the entire [eight-week] period,” Logason says. “But it’s a huge, huge challenge to actually extrapolate, ‘Okay, how are people going to be feeling by week three?’ Or, ‘How much war is there going to be in week five?’ We realised early on that we needed to build a community around the game.” The big changes came in Alphas 7, 8 and 9: Alpha 7’s map was eight times larger than the ones before and the “first really playable” iteration, Gunnarsson says, hosting 4,000 players in late 2017. They managed to implement all the systems in Alpha 8; in late 2018, it attracted over 40,000 players. Since then, Solid Clouds has operated an open alpha development, and introduced more experimental features in the ninth test last year.
Condensing games from three-month rounds to two made them intensive: players needed to be very on top of managing their initial resources for the first few days so as not to be left behind. In addition, Solid Clouds had tried to move warfare away from where it had localised towards the tail end of the server in Alpha 8, incentivising expansion – which proved too frantic when combined with the other changes. “The beta launch is going to be radically different from Alpha 9,” Gunnarsson tells us, with Logason explaining that the team are looking to add in different win conditions based on players’ own personally set goals. With around 1,500 Discord messages per day from over 10,000 concurrent players, they’re never short of feedback.
The support of a large community, one that believes that a 4X strategy MMO can work, has done much to keep the small team motivated. With the help of private investors and development grants, Solid Clouds moved from a couple of rooms in a business incubator to a bright, modern office 18 months ago. And with Starborne’s playerbase on board, it’s starting to think about future projects. Well, Gunnarson is. “Probably the only person dreaming about stuff like that right now is me,” he laughs. “But we’ve been approached by multiple parties with different IPs, and we are looking into some other things.” He’s keen to improve their preproduction phase on the next game. “We are not there yet, but we have started thinking about it,” Logason clarifies. “We’re kind of ploughing the field, sowing some seeds. I’d say we want to be a multi-project studio, but it depends on how well we do when we get there.”
“People compare us to CCP,” Gunnarsson says. “We learned from them how important community is – we knew that from day one. But we also knew that the work we are putting into this has to be useful beyond Starborne, which is maybe not the case for Eve.” Indeed, the studio is already preparing: we’re shown the desk at which local students sit, working on final university projects; Logason tells us they’re also hosting friends starting their own business, and that he’s “talking to other small indie studios [about] mixing what they can do with what we can, and making a small team there for a new project.”
Would they reach for the skies again, we wonder, in attempting another delicate mixing of genres to create something new – despite the years of dedicated effort it clearly takes? “Of course,”
“WHAT IS BEAUTIFUL ABOUT THIS INDUSTRY IS HOW YOU CAN EXPERIMENT. THERE ARE SO FEW BOUNDARIES”
Gunnarsson says. “There’s a reason I entered gaming. The first reason, of course, is I wanted to do something we wanted to play. But the second thing I really love about the game industry is that it embraces, ‘Hey, they do that well, those do that well: let’s just mix it together.’ I love it – I love how creative this industry is. You can just dream something and do it. In some other industries, you have all these patents, and all this shit you have to go through. I think it’s bullshit, because every single idea in human history is built on other ideas. ‘I own that idea, and if you’re going to mix anything with that then I’m gonna sue you’ – you don’t get that in the game industry. EA has tried to patent some stuff, but for the most part, you are kind of free. What is beautiful about this industry is how you can experiment. There are so few boundaries. And this is what keeps me going.”