Cradle

PROTOTYPE DEMO

Cradle is a small city builder set in ancient Sumer.

It is built from the kind of records the first scribes pressed into clay: barley counts, beer rations, wool, salt, silver.

Lay roads and canals, place farms, bakeries, breweries, weavers, potters and smiths, and watch your people move in and grow their houses.

Feed them, keep silver above zero, and send the barge to Dilmun to trade. Then raise the ziggurat, stage by stage, to finish the game.

• Build a living river town from clay pits, barley farms and canals.
• Keep the fields healthy: irrigation brings salt, so rest low-yield fields with Fallow.
• Trade by barge to Dilmun for goods you cannot make at home.
• Houses grow to a higher tier when their needs are met.
• Finish all the ziggurat stages to win.

Controls

Action	Input
Select, place, confirm	Left click
Cancel the tool	Right click or Esc
Pan the map	W A S D, arrow keys, or drag with the middle mouse button
Zoom	Mouse wheel
Next / previous building	B / N
Road tool	R (drag to draw a road)
Canal tool	C (drag to dig a canal)
Demolish tool	X
Overlays: roads / water / services	G / I / V
Stock panel	Tab
Trade panel	T
Lock a selected house	O
Pause	Space
Slower / faster	- / =
Save to slot 1	K
Load slot 1	L
Load the autosave	Shift + L
Pause menu	Esc
Debug info	F3

The game autosaves every 5 game minutes. Settings (volume, UI scale, fullscreen, tutorial hints) are in the main menu and the pause menu.

Credits

• Design, code and art direction: PsichiX.
• Engine: quaso, spitfire and RAUI (Rust).
• Font: Roboto (Apache 2.0).
• Music: made with Suno.
• Sound effects: Kenney, kenney.nl, CC0.

Important

This game uses AI generated graphics and music, because it is a prototype and so these are temporary - their only goal is to describe the mood, the feel the proper game aims for. The gameplay is here to focus on, so we know if the direction is right and we are making proper, good city builder mechanics.