ION LANDS

ION LANDS

ION LANDS is an independent game development studio based in Berlin, Germany. Founded in 2015, the studio is led by Marko Dieckmann and operates with a team of approximately 12 people. Despite its relatively small size, ION LANDS has built a recognizable identity through its cyberpunk-themed games, starting with Cloudpunk in 2020 and continuing with Nivalis, the studio's second major release.

Studio History

ION LANDS was established in 2015 in Berlin. The studio spent its early years developing its distinctive visual approach: a combination of voxel-based art with atmospheric, story-driven game design. This period laid the groundwork for Cloudpunk, which would become the studio's breakout title.

Berlin has a growing independent game development scene, and ION LANDS is part of that community. The studio's small size is deliberate. With around 12 team members, decisions can be made quickly, creative direction stays unified, and the overhead that comes with larger studios is avoided. The trade-off is development speed: ambitious projects take longer with fewer hands, which is part of why Nivalis has experienced multiple delays from its original 2024 target to its current 2026 window.

Team

While ION LANDS keeps a small core, each member wears multiple hats. The team combines programming, art, design, writing, and audio talent into a tightly integrated unit.

Thomas Welsh, the lead writer, brings a notable background to the project. He is also the author of the Metiks Fade science fiction novel trilogy and teaches Interactive Digital Narrative at the Glasgow School of Art. Welsh wrote what he described as "a hundred little side stories" for Cloudpunk, building the layered world that Nivalis now inhabits. For Nivalis, he has written roughly 200,000 words of dialogue across 135-plus characters, a volume that required years of work.

Harry Critchley handles both music and sound design in-house. His soundtrack work for Cloudpunk and City of Ghosts (totaling over 109 minutes of music) established the sonic identity that carries forward into Nivalis. Having the composer embedded in the development team means music and game design can evolve together rather than being produced in isolation.

Cloudpunk (2020)

Cloudpunk was ION LANDS' first major release. It launched in 2020 as a story-driven game set in a cyberpunk city where the player works as a delivery driver, flying a HOVA through the rain-soaked skyline. The game was well-received for its atmosphere, writing, and distinctive voxel art style. Critics praised its world-building and narrative ambition, even while noting that the gameplay loop was relatively simple.

Cloudpunk established many of the elements that carry over into Nivalis: the city itself, the voxel aesthetic, the focus on characters and story over combat, and the themes of class inequality in a technological society. It also proved that there was an audience for this kind of experience: a cyberpunk game that was more interested in the people living in the city than in the guns and gadgets.

City of Ghosts (2021)

City of Ghosts was a major expansion for Cloudpunk, released in 2021. It expanded the story, added new areas to explore, and introduced new characters. The expansion was significant enough that some players and critics treated it as a standalone experience. It deepened the lore of the Nivalis universe and gave ION LANDS more time to refine their storytelling techniques before tackling the much more ambitious scope of Nivalis. Development of Nivalis began after City of Ghosts was completed.

Visual Pipeline

One of ION LANDS' most distinctive qualities is their visual style. The voxel-based art direction they established with Cloudpunk has been carried forward into Nivalis, but with three years of evolution and the added capabilities of Unreal Engine 5. The studio uses MagicaVoxel to create individual voxel assets, the same tool used for Cloudpunk. For Nivalis, the voxel density has been increased significantly, taking advantage of Nanite's ability to render large amounts of geometry without traditional level-of-detail optimization.

The studio works with a 256-color voxel palette. Each color has physically based rendering (PBR) values assigned to it, which means voxel surfaces interact with Lumen's real-time lighting in a physically plausible way. Metal reflects, wood absorbs, glass transmits. This PBR approach applied to voxel art creates a visual style that is distinctive: geometric and stylized in shape, but grounded and tactile in how light behaves across surfaces.

Characters are an exception. Human characters in Nivalis use traditional polygon meshes (non-voxel) for more expressive animation. This hybrid approach allows for detailed facial expressions and body language that would be difficult to achieve with voxel geometry, while keeping the world around the characters in the signature voxel style.

Motion Capture

For Nivalis, ION LANDS conducted motion capture sessions at Mocaplab in Paris. Actors Christel Wallois and Florian Hutter were among those who participated in the sessions. Motion capture data informs character animations and adds physicality to the game's 135-plus characters. For a studio of ION LANDS' size, outsourcing motion capture to a dedicated facility like Mocaplab was a practical choice: the studio gets professional-grade animation data without needing to maintain its own capture setup.

Studio Details