Palace of Tides
One palace, told twice. First in candlelight and gold, then in moonwater and nacre.
An original Australian digital game set between a French Baroque palace and the Great Barrier Reef, where fashion competition, performance and transformation unfold across two versions of the same world.
A contest, then a transformation.
A live six-player fashion contest set in an original French Baroque palace, where posing is the skill and the winners graduate to an underwater court on the Great Barrier Reef.
You are invited to a couture competition at an enormous original French Baroque palace. You choose a gown, walk a mirrored gallery in front of the court, and are judged. Then midnight comes, a sea-god fountain in the gardens opens, your gown becomes something else, and you descend into the Great Barrier Reef.
And the reef is the palace. The mirrored gallery is a gallery of nacre. The chandeliers are jellyfish. The hedges are coral. The gold has become pearl.
The second act is not a new location but the first rebuilt in living material. Form survives, material transposes, and every reef structure has a palace ancestor.
Six moments, end to end.
The funded slice is one world and one complete six-player round. The reef itself is the next stage of work, not this one.
Dressing chamber
A theme is set and a five-minute dressing timer runs. The wardrobe is layered, so looks emerge that were not anticipated.
Mirrored gallery and runway
A turn-based parade with hold-and-release posing. Posing is the skill, and nobody can fail the walk.
Blind peer voting
Players mark named axes rather than one overall score, with defences against tactical under-voting.
The podium
Scored results. Unlocks are earned by placing and are lateral — more options, never better numbers.
Night gardens and fountain
Midnight, and the sea-god fountain opens. The gown is never removed in the transformation. It becomes.
Reef reveal
The graduation sequence down to the Coral Court, where the palace returns in living material.
What is built, and what is not.
Pre-production, with the riskiest technical milestone already built and passing its acceptance test.
The round engine
An authoritative server and browser client run theme, timed dressing, a turn-based parade with hold-and-release posing, blind peer voting and a scored podium.
- Six real browsers complete a round with identical, independently derived state digests
- 47 automated assertions
- Independent adversarial code review
- Scoring integrity and collusion resistance working
The game itself
The creative direction is locked and documented. The build is the next stage of work.
- No avatar, no 3D, no animation yet
- Art Direction Bible complete — eleven sections, including the palace-to-reef translation table, six colour scripts with specified hex values, lighting and material specifications, eight original gowns, the transformation beat sheet, typography and audio
- Technical scope set: hybrid rendering, turn-based multiplayer architecture, per-scene performance budgets, milestones with explicit pass and fail gates
Palace of Tides was submitted to Screen Australia’s Emerging Gamemakers Fund in August 2026 and has progressed to assessment. No funding decision has been made.
Simulation is capability.
Palace of Tides is where Cloudsail works on problems that matter well beyond a game: authoritative server state that six independent clients agree on, real-time systems that stay in sync on low-specification hardware, scoring that resists manipulation, and simulated environments built to an explicit specification and then held to it.
Those are the same disciplines behind interpreting a sensor feed, testing a system before it is deployed, and trusting what a machine reports. It is deliberate that the hardest milestone was proven first, and that the acceptance test was written before the result was known.
Work with us.
For partnership, investment, government and industry enquiries, or questions about Arthur or Palace of Tides, send a message and we will come back to you.
Cloudsail Technologies Pty Ltd
ABN 63 615 833 782
Queensland, Australia