Genre: Real Time Strategy (RTS), Simulator, Strategy
Atomic Society
Update 1.0.1.2 - Bug Fixes
A small update has just been released that fixes a handful of the most common bugs that cropped up since we launched a week ago. Our testing audience increased from just 4 people to thousands, so I'm not surprised a few things slipped through the net!
Thanks all the bug reports people took time to make around the place, it really helped us track down some of these issues. It’s been a manic week, but work hasn’t slowed down on the game.
Atomic Society 0.1.0.2:
- Fixed a rare crash that could sometimes occur on saving (it would look as if the save bar had got stuck).
- Fixed a bug where the salvage menu option for the town leader sometimes disappeared.
- Fixed a bug where you could sometimes get stuck on the menu following a raid.
- Fixed a bug where you could sometimes get stuck on the menu following a religious exile.
- Fixed an issue with the save game name entry box appearing on the title screen.
- A few typos fixed.
There are still other bugs in the game of course, but we'll sort them in a bigger patch. Our priority is now gameplay changes and bigger system changes. That’s going to take a while, but I’ll post regular updates so you can see how things are progressing.
Once again, thanks to everybody who took a chance on us and bought and supported the game so far. We did not expect (or even hope) the game would find an audience as big as it has so soon. I know Atomic Society isn’t for everybody, but if you like what’s there already, you’re probably going to love it by the time we’re finished.
I'll be in touch on the forums and things in the meanwhile.
48 hours since launch, slowly recovering!
I cannot believe it's only been 2 days since we clicked the magic green button and launched on Steam. I've probably aged a 100 years since then.
We'd been selling the pre-alpha version of this game on our website before, and had found a really nice, little community of players who gave us feedback.
Then we came here.
And we've sold more in the past 2 days than we have over the last 2.5 years put together... That's a lot of feedback to take in!
It'll be a long while until that money gets to us though, so for the time being, we still had to go to work today (while trying not to daydream about AS all day long in a daze). But soon, maybe, we can start hoping about becoming full-time devs. All thanks to the people who have bought and supported us already, even at the very start of our Early Access journey.
Truly, thank you to every single person who has bought the game, even if you hated it and refunded it - you at least took a chance on us. And super special thanks to everybody who took the time to write (polite) feedback, or write us a good review, or just tell their friends about it. And all the streamers who have made vids of the game. We'll watch them all when time allows.
We're not done with this game by a long shot.
If you'd played the pre-alpha a year ago, and then played it today, you'd see a huge difference. Expect a similar huge leap forward to be there 12 months from now as well. That's what we're working towards anyway.
Bugs
Thanks to our players contacting me (this is why Early Access is awesome) we now know of 4 big bugs in the game that we're already working on fixes for.
I'm not sure when that bug-fixing patch will be out, as we don't want to accidentally make new bugs fixing old ones, but we'll update as soon as is realistically possible. Work is being done on them as I write this.
We always focus on serious bugs ahead of gameplay. I used to be a tester many years ago and I can't break old habits. ;)
Thank You To the Helpful Early Access Community
Atomic Society is going to keep existing because of you. I'm going to have to learn how to cope with a much bigger community of post-apocalyptic town builders (who seem to hate vegetarians?!) but hopefully I can work it all out. :)
To be honest, I'm still in a state of mild shock, and I'll cope with it.
Nobody wants this game to better than us, and the vast majority of feedback I react like "Tell me about it!" but I'm also so thrilled that people can have fun with what's there so far.
I'll be in touch regularly on the forums, at least where people can keep their cool, and you'll be hearing a lot from me in future. :)
Atomic Society - Now Available!
Atomic Society is now available to buy. Hope everyone enjoys creating your own little dystopias or utopias.
Please bear with us over the coming week. We've been working manic hours to get the game ready, so we're a tad tired. But we will be checking the forums and social media regularly to see if there’s any questions/problems all the same.
Please Leave Us A Review!
If you play the game and enjoy it, it'd be a massive help if you left us a review. We're dependent on word of mouth so any review really matters.
What’s Next?
This is an Early Access game so there will be a few bugs and glitches as you play, but nothing that should stop you making a town from start to finish and having a good time. If you hit any snags, a quick save and reload, or restarting the game should sort them out for you.
Our first plan is to see what’s happening on the forums, etc, and then we’ll probably put together a little bug-fixing patch to smooth things out (assuming it’s needed). Then, as soon as that’s sorted, we’ll get back to creating new features, social issues, and ways to expand your town.
We’ll definitely be listening to any ideas and feedback players have too, when they seem reasonable (if they’re doable by our little team). The pre-alpha community has definitely helped us shape and refine this game for years and we’re not going to change that, while sticking true to the kind of game we want to make.
If things go well, I think we’ll probably put out another big update to game between now and Christmas. We like to make big, chunky updates to the game that really make it worth playing all over again, but big updates can take a while to complete so please be patient with us.
(It is possible that big future updates might break existing saves, but we won't do that very often as I know it's frustrating.)
Thanks To All Our Players
Thank you to everybody who buys the game, or leaves us a review, or just gives us their support. It keeps us going.
And now... It's time for us to go and pop the cork of something cheap and bubbly and hit F5 on the sales page like maniac all night as we're broke! :)
Atomic Society Launches Monday 15th of October - New Dev Blog
As I write this we’re just days away from Steam release. It’s a strange mood to be writing a dev blog in and there’s a lot to cover…
Final Release Date Confirmed & Price - Monday 15th of October
After what seems like years of hard work (3 to be precise), we’re finally ready to share our little game with the audience on Steam. There’s no turning back now.
Atomic Society will be released on Steam Early Access on Monday the 15th of October.
After using such professional marketing techniques such as “what should we charge for it?” and “I don’t know, what would you pay for it?” we deduced it should cost $15, (or whatever Steam converts that to in your country). That’s the same price we’ve charged during the pre-alpha phase, and we feel comfortable with it for now. There won’t be a launch discount so feel free to buy it whenever you want to.
We've spent the last 3 long months putting in the last big features before Steam, and I like how it's turned out (after that horrible mid-version period where everything is broken and I want to cry). Every new version turns the game into something better and better, and let's us iron out some long-standing issues. The game is feeling more like something you can really sink your teeth into. I got to watch someone so hooked on it they stayed up until 3:30am playing it the other day, even with its Early Access glitches and missing features, so moments like that make all the hard work feel worthwhile.
We’ve delayed our Steam release about 8 times (literally) in order to add content and fix bugs, and at times that felt like insanity. It has especially felt like insanity since September 1st when we stopped all sales of our pre-alpha and therefore cut off our tiny income entirely in order to leave a clear gap. I don’t know if we made the right or wrong call on waiting so long, but I’m cool with making mistakes, and I’m happy with the current state of the game, so let's hope that pays us some wages for a change!
New Trailer
Behold our shiny new gameplay trailer...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NiXgKuSsAe0
The last trailer I made for Atomic Society was about 18 months ago. The game has moved on a huge amount since then and I can barely watch the old one these days. I kept convincing myself to wait to remake it, because feature X was just around the corner, and making trailers is hard. Really hard. All the playing and recording hours and hours of footage to make a 90 second end result, and by the time you’ve got that 90 seconds, you so exhausted and blind to the whole thing you can’t even tell if it’s good or not. And it’s not exactly as if a town building game is visually grabbing or our graphics are anything stunning. However, enough whining, I did it.
There’s a shorter version on our Steam page. Wanted to keep it even briefer on there so people browsing their discovery queue get straight to the action, and I know from making past trailers most people give it 30 seconds tops before their mind is made up.
Steam Keys for Pre-Alpha Backers Now Available!
I’m so glad this is done. There was always a gnawing fear at the back of my head that Valve might not give me all the Steam keys I needed to give to our pre-alpha players, and that would have put me in deep trouble. Just one of the fun aspects of being totally reliant on an anonymous corporation for your potential income.
But Valve (who have so far been great with us) fortunately had no problem with it, and I was able to dish out pre-alpha keys to everybody. If you bought the pre-alpha when we were selling it on our website, you can go and grab your key right now and add it to your Steam library already (even if you’re reading this before we officially launch). It won’t let you play it before launch, but it will be there in your library looking all pretty and starting with A so it’s near the top of your list.
We’re finally out of the pre-alpha phase! It still hasn’t sunk in. Right now, at time of writing this, I simply do not believe that within a few days our game is going to be on Steam. I know anybody can get on Steam these days but I still have a vague nostalgia for old Steam from the days when I bought Half Life 2 in a shop and the assistant had to explain to me what an online activation was. We were even Greenlit (remember that?) I think they should bring back Greenlight. It got us our initial burst of attention from players and seeing your game climb the rankings of popularity was actually very useful info. Plus it saved us paying $100.
Streamerville
I have never sent out a press key to anybody before.
In fact, that’s a mini-lie, I did actually send out 1 whole press key. I sent a pre-alpha key to the Yogscast when they asked (because it’s the Yogscast and my mum probably knows who they are). But I took so long wondering whether or not it was morally right to send them a key that they got bored and bought the pre-alpha anyway. So I guess that worked out.
Now we’re finally hitting Early Access, I’m suddenly all about those streamers or Youtubers or whatever the kidz call them. I have emails going back to 2015 from random Youtubers that I am now facing the daunting task of actually replying to. I did reply quickly at the time, telling them “we’ll be in touch when we have more to show”. And that took… 3 years. So if you’re a streamer who contacted us over the last 3 years, rest assured I’m currently in the slow process of dusting off my emails (assuming your channel even exists anymore) so you might hear from us soon if we have codes to spare. Unfortunately we can’t send them to everybody who contacted us, but we'll do what we can.
Funnily enough the first ever streamer type person to contact in July 2015 was none other than Karak of Angry Centaur Gaming back before we was a big internet man. He was the first person to see the potential in our game even when it looked like a budget N64 title and for that he is awesome in my eyes. At the time, he said in this email that he had a channel with 50k subscribers to impress me. He now has 500k subscribers. Time moves on. Moves on so much he doesn’t even seem to cover obscure indie games anymore, so he won’t be interested in us. Progress!
What About the Game?!
I know this dev blog has focused mostly on business and marketing stuff so far because that’s where my brain is right now. I haven’t been this amped/scared/stressed since our wildly popular Kickstarter (look at those beautiful 175 backers – heroes all of them!). That’s after a rough month where all I’ve been thinking when it comes to the game is “why is this piece of crap so buggy?!” (it’s not anymore, thank you coders) or “This UI looks like arse!” (it’s not anymore, thank you artist).
However, there is actually a bit of game stuff to talk about. There has been some progress that wasn’t even in the most recent patch notes.
Terrain System Improved
This sounds like a boring change, but it’s possibly the most game-changing one out of everything in the latest update. We have finally solved a long-standing issue in the game that people couldn’t build structures close enough together. Check out old screenshots and you’ll see in some of them all the towns look a bit spread out. The days of spreading out are over!
We actually knew what the problem with this was for years (map resolution), but never got around to fixing it because building X isn’t close enough to building Y never seemed to excite us. But I didn’t want to launch on Steam and face more people complaining about stuff we already know about, so fear of social pressure encouraged change. It should now be the case that you can build much, much more compact towns. This doesn’t sound like much, but in a game that revolves around placing buildings, anything that buffs the core game mechanic feels great. I’m extremely happy we could get this done in time.
Save Times Drastically Improved
Right now we are mere days away from release and Nick casually mentioned that he’s managed to improve saving times by over 90%. This is huge for us as saving and loading has always been a weak spot in our game and could take ages in the pre-alpha if you had a big town. In all honesty, adding saving and loading to the game was the closest we came to burn-out as a team, our darkest hour. For one reason or another, everything that could go wrong on that task did and it delayed everything by 5 whole months. It’s never been 100% since then, but Nick kept going and I think players are going to be a lot happier with it.
Considering he only told me this was in game a few hours ago, I can’t say for certain it will be in there day 1 of Early Access, as we shall now try to ruin his hard work by finding bugs with it, but it’s coming soon.
Mini Patch Notes 2.0
Here’s some of the things we added just in the last few weeks…
- Saving and loading times have been improved by up to 90% in certain situations.
- Terrain system has been improved, letting you put buildings much closer to together so you can lay out your town just the way you want.
- Improved Town Leader control. You can now give your Town Leader a new task while they’re doing an old one, and they’ll go off and do it (no more waiting for them to finish the first task).
- Sound effect changes: The building has collapsed sound is now not so loud it will make you tear off your headphones in shock (not so sure about this fix). The “you got raided” alert noise is now less likely to stress you out.
- Fixed: A bug where the camera could start out of the environment when you loaded a save game.
- Fixed: A rare bug where people in the Elder’s End could die to external forces, thereby cursing every single person in the town to age at the rate of one year per day, causing town extinction.
- Fixed: The Town Hall stats screen cutting off the bottom info.
Several rare potential crashes fixed.
- More typos fixed (the change that gets in every set of patch notes).
Religion and Goals Working Mostly Well
After stressful weeks of fixing bugs, last minute tweaks and general hoping that designs I made months ago would actually turn out okay in reality: Religion and Goals, Breeding and Sex Issues are now all finished and actually making me happy. The new Goals feature adds some much needed direction to the experience and also makes the game last much longer as you’re forced (assuming you follow the goals) to get into areas of the game you might have ignored before. Breeding is actually not that dramatic – in reality it's just more kids to die in your town – but it needed happening. Sexual issues are working well, as they make compelling moral decisions. And the religion feature is adding that extra layer to the game that I really hoped it would. There’s definitely more we can add to it in future updates, but just giving players that extra way to think about their society is nice.
At least I think so... I'm sure the Steam reviews will tell their own story in a few days!
Verge of Release And Feeling… Calm
That was the original title of this paragraph when I started drafting this blog weeks ago. If you’d spoken to me 2-3 weeks ago, when the version felt like it was never going to get finished, I was feeling oddly chilled. “It’ll get done when it’s done”, and “we’ve been through worse”, etc. Now we’re days away from launch I am in that state of mind anybody’s who been to a job interview or driving test might be able to relate to. I’m confident, but I’m also bricking it. I’m insanely happy to have even made it this far, but also conscious if the game flops on Steam, my hopes of being a full-time game developer are going back on ice for a few years, or possibly permanently. Everybody on the team needs this game to sell, sometimes badly. And nobody has any idea what it's going to sell. We have no idea what our financial future is.
The slightly comforting news is if 10% of the people who wishlisted us actually buy the game, we'll be doing okay. But will they? I have
no idea how wishlist numbers are going to convert into sales either.
I will reveal all in next month’s blog…
What About After Launch?
Atomic Society is not done, not by a long way. We waited 3 years so the base experience you get on Early Access is going to be fun and worth the money, but there’s so much more we want to do with this game. We just love the setting and possibilities of it so much that I could work on it for years to come. But that depends on many things.
Rest assured even if the game sells 5 copies on Steam, we’re committed to this for at least another year of updates. We’d rather be a good looking unpopular corpse of a game than cut and run. People call me grim for saying this, but it’s still the truth that only the death of a team member could stop us from finishing this game. I have a feeling by the time it’s all over, we’ll have spent 5 years making Atomic Society in total. And 5 years to make a videogame you’re proud of, when you love games so much, is a worthy transaction of mortality in my view.
In next month’s blog you’ll get to read my reflections on the Steam launch and what a terrible disaster that was, I’ll start discussing what changes are coming in the next big update, I’ll probably confirm everybody on the team is still alive, and we’ll finally find out if we're getting paid!
Stay tuned and enjoy playing the game when it hits Early Access on Monday the 15th. Here goes nothing...
Small Update on the Steam Release
It’s coming up to a month since my last dev blog, and I want to give a quick update on what’s happening. It might be a while until I can relax and take time to write a proper dev blog this month.
Our current goal is to release in late September (think the last week of September) on Early Access. We’re that committed to that as a team that we’ve actually stopped selling the pre-alpha version of the game on our own website. We’ve essentially cut our own tiny income line.
Steam is where our future lies or bust.
Whether or not we actually achieve a late September release depends solely on how many bugs we find in the game between now and release. 95% of the new features for this update are in the game already, but making those new features bug-free is a complete unknown. You can think the game is perfect and then play it one more time and discover something horrific.
Summary: If the game is delayed until October please don’t moan at me. The next version comes out when I can play through it 100% and have bug-free fun.
There is so much to do between now and release that I’m trying not to lose all my hair just thinking about it. I am in the process of making a new trailer, we have YouTubers to contact, Steam keys to give out to pre-alpha players, a huge amount of testing to do (and this is all on top of us having day jobs to work at).
But the game is worth it.
Anyway, here then are the patch notes for the next version of the game. I understand they won’t mean much to people who’ve never played Atomic Society until now, but they testify to what you can expect in a major update from us as developers.
Atomic Society – First Alpha Release – Patch Notes
(This is on top of everything that's already in the game)
<*> Belief System feature added. Citizens will no longer pay any attention to the laws you set unless they share the beliefs as you. At the start of the game, you can pick what you believe in (ranging from atheism to a variety of existing real-world religions). After you build a Town Hall, you can see what the people in your town believe. To convert people to accepting your legal authority over them, you must choose how to handle the competing religions/belief systems in the game. You can choose to exile the others, educate them, or torture them. Exile is fastest obviously, but will you’re your population number a lot. Torture is fastest, but can cause people to become terrorists. Educate is safest but slowest. Educate and torture require the Town Leader to do the dirty work in person and be inside the Town Hall so you won’t be able to use the Leader for other tasks. Alternatively, you can sell out and change what you believe in at any point if you want a shortcut to being popular.
<*>Goals feature added. A series of optional challenges have been added to the game to help direct you in how to make the ultimate post-apocalyptic settlement. You will now see a new Goals tab when you begin a game. Complete all 5 goals (more goals coming later) to “complete” the game. Watch out though, as goals can become uncompleted if your town starts to get worse.
<*> Citizens will now start breeding and having sex. After you build a hospital, citizens will believe it is safe enough to start giving birth to children. Children will be born periodically at medical buildings. Migration has been re-balanced to make breeding essential if you want to grow your town quickly. A new section has been added to the Town Hall stats screen giving more information on the various factors that can affect breeding. After giving birth, women will be unable to work until they have physically recovered.
<*>Abortion social issue implemented. Pregnant female citizens may now decide occasionally to abort their child. This naturally affects the number of children being born but allows the woman to work without interruption.
<*>Homosexuality social issue implemented. Homosexual survivors may now decide to “come out of the closet”. If they do so, this will affect your town’s birth rate, but it will make them happier/more productive workers. You can decide how to handle this at the Town Hall.
<*>Transgender citizens can now affect the town’s birth rate. Transgender citizens can now affect the birth rate if they begin to transition at a medical building.
<*> Population cap has been increased again to 350 survivors. We have once again increased the size of the settlements you can make. We will keep doing this as long as we think the game is optimised enough and there is enough content to make it worthwhile.
<*> An Oil Lantern upgrade has been added for the Town Leader. Another special item for the Town Leader can be found if you get lucky while salvaging as the Leader. The lantern reduces the time it takes the Leader to salvage ruins.
<*> Placing latrines now requires more strategy. You can now only place 4 latrines in the same area. Due to pollution and disease, you must now spread out your latrines a little more.
Other Improvements and Gameplay Changes:
<*> The Town Leader will now automatically stop what he/she is doing and change task if you give them orders while they are in the middle of something.
<*> Raiders will no longer attack your town at all if all your buildings are protected by fully upgraded Guard Towers. They will only be activated if you have an unprotected building. A new section has been added to the Stats screen showing the number of unprotected buildings in your town. Aim to keep this at 0.
<*>Repair Shack workers now have a max range. They will not attempt to fix buildings if they would have to walk too far to get there. This will stop problems where you must wait for a worker to walk 2 miles to fix something when another repair shack is right beside the damaged building.
<*> On the Easier difficulty, Scavengers will gather loot much faster now, so you will rarely be starved of resources.
<*> The Builder’s Yard and Scavenger’s Hut can employ more workers now, on all difficulties, making these buildings more useful. In addition many other buildings have had their max number of workers tweaked.
<*> Raiders will no longer destroy buildings on the Easier difficulty anymore.
<*> Guard Towers and converted Garrisons now only need 4 weapons to provide max protection (down from 6).
<*> Food and drink buildings have been considerably re-balanced. Food structures were generating too much, and both food and drink now take longer to make anything.
<*> Hospital and Greenhouse model have had minor visual improvements.
<*> The visual appearance of the sun on several maps has been enhanced to make it more atmospheric.
<*> We have added labels beside the names of engineers and the town leader when constructing so you can identify them more easily on the construction menu.
<*> The opening story box will no longer appear if you play a custom difficulty game as the text wouldn’t make sense if you change the game rules.
<*> If you go into Town Leader mode while he/she is repairing a building, it will now open the menu for that building.
<*> Some news messages have been made less spammy.
<*> Various minor typos fixed and text elements tweaked.
Noticeable Bug Fixes
<*> Fixed a bug that made clicking on the repair icon open the menu for a building other than the one you were clicking on.
<*> Fixed a bug where the amount of housing/shelter you were providing was showing slightly incorrect information.
<*> Fixed a minor UI glitch with the custom difficulty menu popping open when it shouldn’t.
<*> Fixed a bug that prevented scavengers finding salvaged weapons in ruins.
Dev Update #30: Preparing For Steam, New Features + Making Of Stuff (Video)
Welcome to the latest dev blog for Atomic Society. Right now, we’re all becoming a bit manic as we prepare for the Steam release. It’s been a hectic month as usual.
Latest Video Version
My little experiment recording myself reading the dev blog last month seemed to work out well. Some YouTubers randomly re-posted it, and over 6000 people discovered it on one person’s channel alone, which was rather nice although slightly terrifying at the same time.
If you want to hear and see this blog in video form, you can find it here...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTrT6XrBrXg
New Bug-Fixing Update Released
We’ve spent the whole of June fixing bugs, and have just released another large update to the game. Anybody playing the pre-alpha can upgrade to version 0.0.9.1 right now if they download the game again.
This new update contains over 25 bug fixes, including solutions for issues that have been in the game for ages, the kind of fiddly bugs that always got put at the bottom of our to-do list when we were feeling exhausted. There's still a lot to do of course, but the game is definitely running more reliably than ever before.
If you remember last month's blog, I was concerned about the number of bugs in the game as Atomic Society became bigger and bigger. I didn't know whether to divert onto fixing them, or press ahead and get as much content in the game as possible before Steam. Both routes had advantages.
In the end, we chose to focus on bug fixing, and I'm glad we did. It’s amazing what a month of bug-fixing can do for our sanity. Every bug fixed is one less thing to store in our heads and fret over. I feel slightly more confident about the game surviving its Steam launch now, though we’ll have to see.
Full patch notes for the update can be found here.
Some of the most bizarre and complicated bugs we've fixed involved raiders stealing corpses out of the old people’s home, and drug-users overdosing on their own supply even though they were dead. Nick (our main coder) also did a complete redo of the storage system to make it much more robust. You’d think NPCs using a storehouse would be pretty simple, but it isn’t when various things can happen to that NPC on the way there. Perhaps he’s murdered, or arrested, or raiders kidnap him, or disease gets him, or he simply decides to wander into the wasteland. The storehouse has to be aware of where every item is. Multiply that by 300+ citizens and you'll get a few bugs. I think we've fixed most of them now though.
To help find bugs for this patch, I started playing the game in a way I absolutely hate. For each gameplay decision, I worked out what I really wanted to do, and then did the complete opposite. I built the worst post-apocalyptic settlement possible and hated every law I implemented.
It felt horrible and was also surprisingly tiring having to override your own views constantly, but at least it helped with the testing process.
Current Views on the Project
Considering we're on the verge of what might be the biggest shake-up to our lives as indie devs since we started, I’ve been thinking about the process of making this game quite a lot lately.
Steam has been on our minds since early 2015, but we kept delaying our Early Access release over and over to add more content, which annoyed a few people. I've always had in my head that the game should be worth $15 when it hits Steam, but it took us 3 years to get to that point in my opinion. Fortunately we had pre-alpha players who were willing to pay based on the game’s potential, and that kept us going.
We've definitely changed as people since 2015. We began as clueless beginners, and had that naive optimism that helped us get going. We had no idea how complex and time-consuming Atomic Society was going to be at the time, and there was still a romantic air around making indie games back then. Blind optimism started to fade around Summer 2016. That’s when the market became obviously oversaturated with games, and I started to realise how long it would take us to get Atomic Society in a good state.
To be totally honest, I still don't know if the game is good enough for Early Access. I've been playing the game so much recently that I've lost my objectivity. I still like playing it, which is a good sign, but perhaps I have terrible taste. I need to take a break from playing it for at least a month to gain some perspective, but I can't see that happening anytime soon.
I keep telling myself nothing bad can happen when we launch on Steam. Even if the game is a disaster, it's not going to hurt, but I'm having a weird sense of renewed optimism and hope, and with that comes a risk of being disappointed later down the line. There is a remote possibility I could be a full-time (paid) indie dev by the end of the year. That would be my dream job. It's hard to be a pessimist with that career possibility even being on the table. I feel like a man who’s been waiting 3 years to find out if he succeeded at a job interview.
New Features Ready For Steam
Focusing on all the things to do before Steam has kept me grounded. While Nick was working on that bug-fixing patch, Adam (our other coder) has been busy working on the new social issues I mentioned last month. I'm pleased to say that abortion, homosexuality and breeding are now fully working. They need balancing and bug-testing of course, but we were able to get the core work done in a month.
For breeding, it’s now the case that when you build a hospital, survivors will decide it must be safe to start raising families, and young kids will begin spawning periodically. Back when I was first designing this game, I planned a massively complex system with citizens falling in love and forming relationships and so on, which sounds great on paper, and then you realise players would barely notice any of it. When they’ve got 300+ people to keep alive, there isn’t time to inspect who's sleeping with who. Fortunately player's imaginations fill in all the gaps.
Abortion is now working too. Female citizens who have just given birth won’t be able to work until they’ve physically recovered. Obviously a woman who has terminated her pregnancy will be available. If you're short on workers, or just overwhelmed with new kids to feed, there could be a cold practical reason to tolerate or encourage abortion in your town. This was also the first social issue where I had to decide who should be punished if you choose to condemn it, the woman or the doctor? In the end, I decided to go with just the woman, as I felt that would make the choice more dramatic.
Homosexuality was a bit challenging because there has to be a town planning aspect to everything, and it’s not always easy to connect someone’s sexuality to building a settlement. In the end we made it so that gay survivors will come to your town but not all of them will come out of the closet, to speak. Some of them will keep it hidden, and this will affect their productivity. If they do come out, it will affect your town's birth rate slightly, and you can decide how accepting to be.
I’ve struggled a bit trying to make it so the morals and laws you pick are meaningful, but you can still go in whatever direction you personally think is best. I don’t want this game to be sentimental or full of guilt trips. My hope is the important social issues come with built-in emotions, because we’re all human at the end of the day, but it means accepting people are going to do awful things with our game.
Choosing A Release Date For Atomic Society
We have finally decided to commit to a September Early Access launch. It will be one day that month, unless the whole team dies between now and then (in which case, I shall put it in my will to release the game). We have a basic target at last and it will not change, even if we end up coming out on the last day of September. No matter how much better the game could be, or if feature X was ready, the time has come to face the music. I don't know if all teams decide like this, but for us we emotionally need to share this game with a wider audience. I’m tired of hiding away.
Technically, the game is on Steam already. This week Nick integrated the game with Steam, and it is currently sitting in our personal game libraries. It doesn't actually work, but merely seeing it there is exciting. I've also started looking up how to give our pre-alpha players their Steam keys, which will be important when we switch from Humble to Steam. The process doesn't look too difficult at the moment, but there’s a lot to learn.
I think the mood on the team has changed now we’ve committed to a release month. There’s an energy in the air, and the 4 of us seem more focused on the game than ever before. I still see Early Access as a journey, not the destination, but if we're this excited now, I can't imagine how manic launch day will be.
Progress On Religion
The religion feature has now been fully designed. I'm really hoping we can squeeze it in before Steam, as it will fill a missing gap in the game. Out of everything I've designed, religion has been the hardest thing to get right. I'm not sure why. Perhaps the challenge has been turning something so personal into gameplay without resorting to clichés. The system I've come up with is either going to be really good, or really awful.
When we’ve coded it, religion or your ideology will help explain why the survivors listen to your Town Leader when he tells them to imprison vegetarians for example. Your moral authority - and therefore people giving a damn what you say – will be linked to people sharing your belief system. However, rather than converting people, I'm more interested in making players decide how to get rid of those who disagree with them, for better or worse.
Hopefully this feature will be in the Early Access version on the day we launch, but that will be very tough, considering how big the feature is. I could just delay the game until religion has been finished and tested, which might be the smarter option, but right now we’ll keep hoping. I always believe we can do it, no matter how many delays there have been in the past. Worst comes to the worst, religion will be the first patch after Steam.
There’s also another feature to add as well, which could really make the game last longer, but I’ll talk about that next time.
Dungeness
Although it sounds like the boss of an RPG, Dungeness is actually a place in England. Nani (our artist, also my wife) went with me on a short break recently, because even poor indie devs need to get away when they work and live in the same place day after day. We travelled to the south-east of England, where I used to live, mostly to meet family, but I also wanted to visit Dungeness, which is a very weird place I used to visit as a kid. It's sometimes called the only desert in England, and you can't build there. The people live in shacks in the shadow of a giant nuclear power station, which you can walk right up to and even see people fishing in bubbling hot waters where the station vents into the sea. The area is a bit more touristy these days, but it still has that Cold War bleakness that appeals to me. As you can see from the photo above (which I found online), it basically looks like a level from our game. As a post-apocalyptic fan living in boring old England, Dungeness is the closest I’ve found to stepping into a Fallout-like environment, minus the rad scorpions.
Stuck in the Past With Unity
We have finally locked down the version of Unity we're using, which was already a year out of date. Updating it any more would give us some nice treats, but would break too much of the game's code, so it isn’t worth the hassle.
It's strange that we'll never have to upgrade Unity again on this project. It ties into what I was saying last month, that we're coming to the final phase of development.
We don't have any regrets about using Unity, especially considering it hasn't cost us a penny yet. The only small hassle has been working with third party assets. A few shaders in Atomic Society were made by others, and most of them have been abandoned by their creators over the years. We had to fix them ourselves to keep them working, but it didn’t delay us too long. I’m sure we’ll use Unity again, if we ever make a second game.
End Result of Gaming Abstinence
Earlier this year I wrote about how I’d taken a complete break from the gaming industry and social media. I stopped checking gaming news and forums, and gave up buying new games. I had to do it because I was going crazy spending about 10 hours working on a game, and then trying to relax by spending even more time with games. Day after day, year after year. That's the problem when your hobby is your job, even if you're doing that job for love.
This detox lasted about 6 weeks. It was amazing how much extra time I gained back in the process, but I couldn’t find anything else to plug the hole video games had vacated. I love games too much and I can’t suppress my passion for long, even for my own mental health. I still get the same pleasure seeing a video game today as I did when I was 7 years old and saw Pong for the first time. Some things just fascinate you, there’s no explaining it.
So I'm back to being a gaming addict again. The break has done me good though, I don’t feel burnt out right now, but we’ll see how long it lasts before I need to retreat again.
Wrapping It Up
That's about it for now. Next month’s dev blog should be a fun one because we'll be days away from taking a gamble on Steam. Where will our review score even out? Will I be able to give up my day job anytime soon? I haven't got a clue. Whatever happens, we're launching next month. That fact feels like a black hole. We can't escape it.
I’d like to give a huge thank you to everybody who’s bought the game so far and enabled us to get to this point. The pre-alpha phase has been a fantastic 2 years on the whole. I genuinely feel like everybody who’s bought it has been doing me a personal favour. We’ve met some really nice players, and been able to improve the game in ways that definitely wouldn’t have happened if we’d hidden the game away. That’s why we won’t be carrying on the Special Edition rewards after we hit Steam, even though it might benefit us financially. They’re just for the people who helped us get to this point.
I'll see you next month.
Dev Blog #29: New Gameplay Footage, 0.0.9 Released, Steam Approaches
Hello and welcome to another development update for Atomic Society. This blog is a few weeks overdue because we’ve been busy finishing the latest - and possibly biggest - update to the game so far. Version 0.0.9 is the final big update we’re going to release before coming to Steam later this year.
Audio Version of This Blog Now Available!
I've decided to try an experiment with this month's blog and recorded myself reading the words below, over some footage of me playing the latest version of the game. It's a little rough and ready, but if people enjoy it, I'll keep doing it from now on. It's the exact same content as the written version.
Or if you prefer to simply read about the making of the game, then read on...
New Pre-Alpha Update Released
After several months of hard work, update 0.0.9 is now available for our pre-alpha players to try out. This update brings several new features including: hostile outsiders to make or break deals with, 4 new buildings to construct, custom difficulty mode, story elements, town leader upgrades, and numerous other improvements.
Pre-alpha players can download the new version by finding the email from Humble, which would’ve arrived when you purchased the game. New players will access the latest features as soon as they buy the game.
Full patch notes for the version are here for those who want to read them.
Right now, we’re taking a few well-earned days off to recover our strength (writing dev blogs aside) and then it’s back to work turning this pre-alpha into an alpha.
My Thoughts on Making 0.0.9
The game has a life of its own nowadays. There's so much code in Atomic Society, and so many gameplay elements rubbing up against each other, that the game pretty much tells us what we should add to it next. It’s not a blank canvas for ideas anymore. If we want to add anything now, it has to fit in with so much that already exists. The “invention” stage is gradually coming to an end. Now we’re entering the long “improving” phase.
It definitely feels we're working on a downwards slope, which is great after wandering in the wilderness for years, with so much to create, and only hope and a few strong ideas to keep us going. I can see the end of the project when I play the game now. It's just a case of filling in some rather large gaps and applying a heap of polish. I think that by summer 2019, 12 months from now, Atomic Society might be at the point where we could say “yep, it’s done”.
That doesn’t mean we will stop there. There's still tons I want to do with the game if it’s financially possible. I have pages and pages of ideas, as there’s so much you could do with this game, but it's going to be more and more a case of improving what already exists rather than inventing completely new systems. For years the team has been swimming in a big ocean but now we can see land. We can finish this!
That’s quite a comfort, because there's a short time during every version where I think “making games sucks”. It’s a feeling that comes when things are taking massively longer than I predicted, when the new features are half finished and unbalanced so the game isn't fun, when sales and media coverage are relatively slow, and when the team is busy with their own tasks (or real-life troubles) and there isn’t that social aspect to making a game.
And then, about 10 days before release, the whole thing comes together and I can actually play the game like a player and not a frustrated developer. Then my motivation becomes sky high, and I want to make games for the rest of my life, and I truly love what Atomic Society is becoming. I become a cheerleader for the game all over again, the team is happy, and I think AS could actually pay a salary one day. This pumps me up so much that I'm desperate to start on the next version and make the game better and better.
There’s light at the end of the tunnel now. Whatever happens, we're going to have a computer game out of this crazy project, plus some new friendships and supporters. More importantly we can spend the remaining time making the game more fun instead of having to invent the fun out of nothing (which is a lot harder).
I guess the only analogy my frazzled brain can think of at the moment is moving house. We have finally moved in most of the boxes. Now we get to unpack and make the rooms feel like a home.
Or maybe it's way too hot in the UK this week and I need to move on.
Making the Final Features For 0.0.9
It's been a while between blogs so there's a few features that slipped into 0.0.9 which I haven't discussed before.
You have to be pretty careful what you put into the game near version release, as testing takes ages, but we had some negative feedback on the game and nothing makes you want to work harder than fixing something people dislike! I love getting well written, polite, intelligent feedback, even if it’s negative. Perhaps I don’t love it at the time all that much, but afterwards it always makes the game better, and as I don't have a private army of user-testers to get feedback from in my home, I rely on the public.
Here’s a look at some of the last things we squeezed into this version…
Custom Difficulty
Based on feedback, we made the custom difficulty feature a priority, which is now in the game. This lets you make the game ridiculously easy or impossibly difficult to suit your taste. You can now start a game completely on your own, without any citizens for that Omega Man vibe, or start with 49 trained engineers instead if you like building things really quickly. You can also make it so the migrants who come to your town drop dead instantly, or make them as well fed and rested as pampered VIPs. My theory is that you know how hard you want the game to be better than I do, and if you don't like any of our balanced presets, there's now an alternative.
Story Elements
Because context is important, and words are cheap to produce, we also added in a few story elements to this version, which should help explain things like why you start the game standing in a field with a bunch of strangers (play the game to find out). This is the closest our budget will get to cutscenes. You can totally ignore this story, or read it if you want to get immersed.
Adding story elements forced me to write fiction which thousands of people will experience. This was daunting, as I’ve never knowingly had so many people read my words. However, it was also enjoyable. I’m a writer at heart, and coming up with post-apocalyptic fiction is a pleasure to someone like me.
Enforcer Outpost
We don't usually dare throw in a new building into the game right at the end of a version, as it can generate a lot of bugs, but this one was an exception. The Enforcer Outpost is essentially a stripped down Town Hall. It acts like a mini police station, which lets us keep the existing Town Hall building as something unique and special. We had plans for doing this eventually, but hearing someone in a YouTube video talk about it made us push the feature forward.
I still watch every single YouTube video about the game by the way, even the ones in Spanish or German (and I still feel horribly anxious while doing so!)
Bugs Are Getting Nasty
The longer we make the game, the harder the bugs become to squash. Finding them isn’t too difficult, but getting them to repeat on command, which lets us see if they’re truly fixed, is becoming harder and harder. I tested this version to the point of exhaustion, but as soon as the public got their hands on it, serious bug reports from players started to arrive. It’s a little disheartening.
We always fix the most obvious bugs, but there’s still dozens of cryptic ones lurking in the code. For example, we really struggled with a bug this version where someone died in the old people’s home, which caused the whole town to die of diarrhoea (I guess at least our bugs are humorous).
We thought we’d fixed it, but we couldn’t be sure as it was impossible to repeat on demand. Turns out it’s still in the game, in a modified manner. If you’re playing the pre-alpha right now, please make multiple and frequent saves, for your own sake!
However, even when we fix the big bugs, we discovered they were concealing 100s of small ones. When the game was an early pre-alpha, we could ignore certain bugs, but I don't think we can anymore. The public’s tolerance for bugs drops as we become more mainstream with each version. Unfortunately, fixing bugs takes time that could be spent making new features, so I have a decision to make. It'd be really nice if there was enough content in the game we could devote ourselves to bugs, but there isn't really. Not yet.
Which brings me onto...
The Last Pre Alpha Version!
Well, despite what I just said about bug-fixing, we still have to squeeze some new content into the next version, even if it ends up a bit buggy…
In fact, Adam has already started work on the first new feature for 0.0.10. The breeding system.
At long last, the citizens will start having sex with each other.
This is going to be quite a shake up for the game, which until now has relied solely on migration to control town growth. I'm quite nervous about it actually. It could change the feel of the game quite dramatically. This feature has to be done though. We can't make a game about setting laws and moral choices while leaving out sexual topics.
But whatever we add has to affect gameplay as well, and the most obvious way to do that is to tie sexual moral choices into birth rates. If you want to grow your population in a more predictable way than random migrants, you'll need more babies. But that requires certain laws. And if you don't like those laws, its back to migration for you.
As regards AS, we're going to skip the infant phase, because there isn't time for them to grow up while you’re playing the game. It will probably be the case instead that older children spawn at hospitals (if you have them) and we’ll see how it goes. I'm hopeful I can balance it into something fun.
Citizens shacking up leads me on to 2 social issues I've wanted to put into the game for a while. And it’s probably easier if I do it before Steam…
Homosexuality and Abortion
There are going to be gay men and women in the next version, who you can choose to make welcome or condemn. If you at least tolerate them, they'll be happier individuals and more productive workers. However, in Atomic Society if you encourage something, you get more people who are affected by that issue coming to your town, so it could affect procreation.
As for abortion, I've always wanted to put really big life issues into Atomic Society, and this has to be something players decide for themselves. Having lots of pregnant women and new mothers is going to hurt the productivity of your town, and there will be women who choose to abort their pregnancy. We leave the motivations of the citizens up to the player's imaginations, as it makes for better storytelling, but I can imagine some grim towns coming in the next version!
I guess I am a little anxious about adding these issues because you know what the internet is like with anything remotely controversial, but so far the audience for Atomic Society has been really mature and chilled, so I think it'll be okay. Anyway, it's what the game needs, so I've just got to roll with whatever happens. I'm bored of games that ignore topical issues.
Cut Features
If you’ve been reading past dev blogs, you might remember me discussing features like religion, radiation and electricity. Rest assured these are still in the early stages of development, there just wasn’t time to put them into 0.0.9. When the time is right to work on them again, we’ll do our best at finding fun ways to add them into the existing simulation.
Steam Draws Ever Nearer
After two years of our game only being available through our website, we are finally working on getting the Steam release ready to ship. Last week we met up in person, as we do from time to time, and discussed what could be the biggest milestone in our journey as fledging indie devs. We sketched out the new version and pencilled in a possible release date. As soon as I think we can hit it, I’ll make sure everybody knows, but I’d like it to be within the next 3 months.
In the meantime, I have to work out what to do about the Special Edition version of the pre-alpha. We put a time limit on selling it, because I want to reward our earliest backers by making the rewards unique for them, but the Special Edition sells well and has kept us going at times.
There is so much to do. At least launching on Steam must be easy from a technical point of view, given the incompetent garbage that pours onto it every week, but it's still a huge thing as it could decide whether game development becomes a job for us, instead of being a hobby that pays expenses. The overly optimistic and overly negative parts of my brain are at war right now, trying to predict the future. As the designer, I'm probably more terrified of the reviews than the money, but money has its uses. It's not like I'm going to starve to death whatever happens, but I’d love indie dev to be a little more financially secure so we can make a second game one day. Ultimately I haven't got a clue what's going to happen. Am I going to be kicking myself for turning down various publishers or dancing around the room? Does it matter either way?
Anyway that's enough rambling for now. I am still incredibly proud of the new version and the work that went into it, to the point I even dared do some marketing and social media afterwards. I'm really looking forward to making the game bigger and more reliable over the next year, and the work is always worth it in the end no matter how it all turns out.
See you next month.
Dev Update #28: Almost Done With Another Pre-Alpha Version, New Building & Tweaks
The final parts of 0.0.9 are now coming together. 0.0.9 is going to be “part 1” of the big, final update before Steam. I was originally going to save up all the latest content and just have one massive update before Steam, but it’s more practical for us if we break it up into 2 parts.
That means after 0.0.9 is out (probably in May) there will be one more large patch and then the Steam release at some point will definitely come in the summer. We haven’t decided a specific month or date yet of course for Steam, but we need to start thinking about that soon as I’ll need to book time off work (my day job) for it and we need to make sure nobody on the team's going on holiday, etc!
Anyway, here’s some of the things we’ve been finishing up this past month.
New Elder’s End Building
This is one of 4 new buildings players can build in the next content patch. It's a surprising one as I didn’t actually have plans to add this building. It was an idea that came out of nowhere really. And then Adam coded it this month.
Basically, the Elder’s End is where your elderly citizens - the survivors who have been with you the longest - will go to die in peace. At the moment the old people in your town just drop dead in the street. If you build this structure though, they’ll be looked after by the workers and get buried in the catacomb/vault underneath it (that’s what the trapdoor is from last month’s blog), saving you the need to cremate them.
I felt this building was needed to complete the journey of the survivors who come to you town. Your town starts with chaos and misery, and then over time you improve it, and people live longer and longer, and then at the end there’s hope that the old people can die in peace. If the majority of your town are dying in an Elder’s End, you’ve clearly managed to bring civilisation back to the wasteland.
This idea came to me after we changed the score in the game from being Approval Rating to Survival Rating, or “Hope Rating” as it’s now known (name change #5). In other words, the new score in the game shows how hopeful people feel about surviving until old age and dying comfortably in this new Elder’s End building. The more survivors who make it to old age, the more hopeful people think about the future of your town.
It was important to us it wasn’t just a retirement home though, more like a place where survivors go to meet their demise when it’s time. That felt more appropriate for the setting. We added the vault door to bury them off the idea that the survivors want to rest in peace forever underground because they feel that’s a place of safety since the nuclear war!
On the UI for this new building, you can see how long they’ve been a citizen in your town, and there’s a quick shortcut button that takes you to their Biography, so you can read up who this person was (though you better read quickly as they tend not to hang around for long in this building!)
This building does consume food, water, and medicine and is relatively expensive to build though, so it won’t be a luxury you can afford at the start of the game, but if you want to give your survivors a happy ending, you'll need it.
Raiders Progress
The huge (work wise) Raiders feature is at the moment the main thing still keeping the version from coming out. It’s taken us about 3 months to put together and it’s probably 80% done at the moment, though it’s going to take weeks to balance and bug-test (remind me not to design a feature that I have to play through the whole game to unlock).
Raiding is not a feature you need to worry about for most of the game. It doesn’t even kick in until the final stages. We wanted it to be a dramatic shake-up of the game in the latter stages, when you kind of think you’ve got everything worked out. Skilled players will keep it mind though that the new Guard Tower and Weaponsmith building are there for a reason, and you should expand with them in mind.
I know some players are worried about this, as they fear having to do combat, etc. Let me just stress again that this is a game about decisions, not combat, and if you’re a total pacifist you will be able to totally avoid combat... but at a cost. There’s cost to every choice, aggressive or otherwise. You can also upgrade all your Guard Towers and keep the raiders out for good (in fact that’s what you’re supposed to do).
There’s still a lot left to fix and tweak and test with this though between now and release, but all the hard work is done now. I’m really nervous about this feature actually as I still haven’t been able to experience it properly as a player would due to bugs. We have debug tools of course that let me trigger the raiders whenever I want, but I can’t get the emotional sense of how a player is going to feel when raiders turn up after 2-3 hours of regular play.
Lots of Smaller Improvements This Month
While Nick has been coding the raider feature, Adam has been ticking off lots of smaller tasks now that the big stuff is done. I won’t go through everything added here or I’ll just be making this into patch notes, but here’s a few of the more significant alterations.
One of the bigger (in terms of player requests at least) is the new camera snapping option we’ve put in. At the moment if you give the Town Leader an order, the camera snaps to them so you can control them manually afterwards. I personally like this as I think it connects you to your leader, but there is a sizeable chunk of people who think this utterly sucks and so now we’ve now put in an option so you can now stop the camera snapping to the Leader and basically direct him or her around like a unit in an RTS game and the camera will never leave Overview Mode.
Another player request we’ve put in this month is a new button on the main UI panel that if pressed will open the employees menu of any structure that has locked worker slots. This probably won’t mean anything to people who haven’t played the game, but for those players who like to micro-manage their workplaces, this should enable you to quickly zoom through all buildings that have closed off worker slots.
We’ve added a tips box feature, next to the tutorial, where I’ve can put information on some key concepts that can trip up newer players and stuff that only appeared for 2 seconds on the loading screen. I’m a little worried about this as it might spoil some of the game challenge, but my belief is that if I know something as a designer, you should know it too, so now you can read them if you want. Experienced players won’t find anything new in there though.
We also added new buttons to let you randomly choose a name for your Leader because if you’re like me, naming your character can be one of the hardest decisions in a game! This also lets us get some extra use out of the names of our Special Edition as players will see them if they hit this random button.
Obviously nothing too exciting here but when put together with everything else in the version, it all adds up.
So many menus to make in this game...
Nani’s Art Improvements
Now she’s done most of the big tasks this version, it’s fun seeing Nani, our artist, keep herself busy. Some of the most creative work gets done at this time.
One biggish thing she’s done this month is improve the readability of the whole UI. We agreed with some complaints that text was hard to read and so we’ve lightened the whole UI and done what we can (so far) to make text easier to read. She’s also added some fun details, like sticky notes to the stats screen to double down on the appearance that the whole UI is a burnt clipboard.
Aside from that, eagle-eyed players will notice several little tweaks and additions to existing buildings. Our Theatre building now has props on the stage for example, the ruined church has a bell in its tower, and the animals in the Livestock Ranch actually look a lot more like animals now and are no longer making my eyes bleed! Little updates like that forced her to redo her textures though as until now every single building uses about 3-4 textures, for everything, which is rather limiting as you can imagine. It’s fun to be adding a bit of polish to things though at long last.
Behind the Scenes News
Not much happened of note behind the scenes this month. Still no publisher news now (the big publisher I mentioned before forgot to get back in touch with us), and given we’re months from release, I can’t see anything new on that scene happening at all. It is funny though how many marketing company emails you get as you approach release. We’re not particularly interested in that kind of stuff. Youtube and blogs have always served us well enough when it comes to spreading the news of this game, plus our Wishlist numbers are high enough, relatively speaking, that I think we’ll avoid destitution.
Taking a Breather
For the past month I made a somewhat bizarre change. I have stopped acting as if I care about videogames. I stopped playing games. I stopped reading/watching game news. I detoxed from the games industry.
The effort to stay on top of the latest game industry news, reading expert hot takes, what’s the latest hyped videogame out there… I constantly felt as if I was studying for an exam on “how to be a successful game developer” but the exam was constantly adding new questions. Twitter was the worst. So many people on Twitter seem anxious (including me).
So I decided to just close the door on all those internet voices, and for about a month I have more or less acted as if videogames (other than Atomic Society) just didn’t exist. I uninstalled everything, dragged Youtube off my bookmarks, stopping buying/renting games (that certainly helped my bank balance) and I went from a guy who would check gaming forums and websites 5-6 times a day to voluntarily living under a rock. Consequently, I’ve never been so out of the loop gaming-wise in my adult life. I have no idea what’s going on in the industry, what “rival” games there out there, or what the latest hot tips on marketing are. (I still respond quickly to our customers and answer anything that gets posted, but that’s about it.)
And unsurprisingly nothing terrible happened. AS kept selling, more or less the same rate. The team kept working. I didn’t suddenly lose my ability to design a game. What I gained was peace. I stopped caring about trying to “survive in the marketplace”, my mind was free of 10,000 random opinions, or contests over whether game X beats game Y. The games industry never slows down, it’s relentless.
To get this point I had to tell myself in advance “It’s okay if you never sell another copy of AS” but I got there. We've already sold enough for me to think "making a videogame" has been ticked off my list of random things to do with existence. And that was the final part of my peace. It's crazy how chilled you can be when you don’t care if people buy your product or like you.
Now, before some smartass comes along and asks me why I don’t give the game away for free if I don’t care about financial success, I still want all my teammates to get their fair share so they get by. They’ve put years of their life into this game now, so it would be nice if they get anything out of it. We don't get salaries from making AS.
However for me, I think I’m going to keep up this laid-back approach and stay unplugged a bit longer, maybe even to the end of the project. We'll see how it goes.
Conclusion
I didn’t think I was going to have much to discuss this month, hence me being a bit late with this blog, but it seems when I start to write, more’s on my mind than I realised.
I will be posting upcoming, tentative patch notes for 0.0.9 soon and then by the next time you hear from me, it should be me announcing the new update is out there for those people already trying out the game before it hits Steam.
Thanks for reading and I’ll see you next month.
Dev Update #27: Raiders, Religion, Radiation & Ratings
It's been another busy month as we get ready for our summer 2018 Early Access release. Some big and vital elements of the game are just taking form.
Raiders
This might be the biggest feature coming to the next pre-alpha version, and perhaps one of the largest features we've ever added. Nick spent the whole of this month working on it. I'd say we're about 50% done with it at the moment.
Raiders are what I call a “milestone” feature. In other words they're a game-changing challenge that will occur at a certain point. If you lead wisely and overcome them, they'll be a "milestone" in your town's epic story. Atomic Society doesn’t have traditional levels, it’s one long experience, but I do want to throw memorable moments like this at players to spice up the town building. Raiders will be the first such moment we add.
(Spoiler Warning: If you don't want to know what raiders are going to do to your town when you play, skip this next section!)
So, in version 0.0.9 it will be the case that when your town has grown large enough to be noted by existing forces in the wasteland, you will be contacted an aggressive band of raiders who look greedily at your outpost of civilisation. They won’t attack you immediately. Instead, they will make 1 of 3 random demands of you. It's random what they'll pick.
Give them a percentage of all you have in your storehouse. Or give them a slice of your population to use as slaves (which will be ironic, if you legalised slavery!). Or change a law to please them.
You then decide whether to agree or resist. If you resist, then occasional destructive raids will start on your town on a periodic basis.
You won’t get to know exactly when they're going to attack, and there's no actual combat. Think of it more like a "disaster" in other city-building games. Admittedly, the first time Nick got raids up and working it destroyed his whole town in one go, but we won't make it quite that harsh at release! They'll keep raiding you until they think they've taught you a lesson. Then give you a chance to give into their demands again.
If you’re feeling tough, you can tell them to get lost. However, to resist you will need to start building defences. This is where the new Guard Tower structure we're making comes in (we've also added the ability to convert existing ruins into defences too, which is cool). These defensive buildings will protect nearby buildings when a raid occurs. You’re going to have to arrange your town around these protective structures and also find workers for them.
But it doesn’t stop there. Guard Towers are only good enough to partially reduce raid damage. Not block it entirely. To make them totally effective you’ll need to upgrade these new defensive buildings you've made. To upgrade them requires another new building that’s coming to 0.0.9 – the Weaponsmith... And a lot of scrap metal to make weapons! So you can see it's a pretty big feature that should add a fair bit of complexity to the latter stages of the game. I’ll talk more about it next month, when hopefully it's finished.
It'd be good to know if this approach to raiding sounds interesting to you. It’s been a struggle to design a system for raiding that fits as this is a town-building game, not a game about combat. The eureka moment for me came when I worked out to let players choose whether to resist the raiders or not. Atomic Society is about tough ethical choices after all.
For example, are you going to be willing to change your laws and values to avoid being attacked?
Release News Update
It wouldn't be a dev blog without the latest thoughts on our Early Access release! To be honest, I can't wait until the game is on Steam and I can stop living in a state of constant anticipation. As a team, we've been building up to this for over 3 years now and I'm sick of thinking about it!
As mentioned, we're still on track for this summer (May-July). We'll get the next big pre-alpha version done, spend a few weeks integrating it with Steam, then release, try and market it, and see what happens.
It will definitely be this summer. I couldn't cope with delaying it any longer. I know releasing on Steam will probably cause me as much stress as it solves, but at least the day we press "launch" will be one to remember. The dev blog after release should be interesting!
However, if you're already playing the game because you bought the pre-alpha, that does mean a 5-6 month gap between 0.0.8 and the next update. You'll appreciate why when I post the patch notes for this upcoming version, it's a big version with lots of new stuff to do, but how do our current players feel about such a long gap? Personally, I like games where they release fewer but much bigger updates because it makes playing the game all over again worthwhile, but what are your views? If I get enough feedback, we might try and release an interim pre-alpha version between now and summer, though I'd rather not.
Likewise, how often do the people who are waiting for this game to arrive on Steam feel about long waits between updates - but getting updates that will be really packed with new stuff? What do you prefer? Obviously I'm not counting bug fixing patches, we'll release them as soon as we can.
Survival Rating Added
Another new addition that happened this month is Survival Rating. Or that's what it's called right now as I'm writing this. It changes its name about once a week at the moment!
This feature (and the insane amount of design work it subsequently caused), started off when I began thinking “if our game had a high score, what would it be?” That opened up a whole can of worms, causing me to spend a lot of time nailing down the essential element of skill in our game. What separates a good post-apocalyptic town leader from a bad one? In the end, I figured it came down to survival. If you want to be a complete evil tyrant, or the kindest leader ever, you’re still going to need people who aren't dead.
This led me to scrap the old Approval Rating system we had and replace it with this new Survival Rating. The old system was pretty pointless and doesn't really fit with the setting, as this isn't a game about making people happy necessarily.
Basically, this new rating now tells you how dangerous life in your town is. It shows the odds of someone surviving to old age. A town with a 70% Survival Rating means there's a 70% chance the average person will make it and have a chance at dying the way nature intended (a rare thing in this game).
I felt this was the fairest measure of a player’s skill for now. The next step will be to connect it to actually completing the game. So you have to get good at survival to win. Over time we can add in scores per map, so you can see “oh, I managed to have a really good rating on this map” etc or something like that.
So much to do. I sometimes feel we're only getting started on this game after 3 years of building the basic foundations of it, but fortunately things will accelerate towards the end. This version is proof of that.
Also, Survival Rating is also going to be connected to another brand new building coming in 0.0.9 that I’ll talk about next month. The model has been made, but we need to bring it to life...
Who's going down that hatch?
[H1]PC Apocalypse
In this month's behind-the-scenes news, it finally became time to replace some of our team's PC hardware after years of making this game on glorified hairdryers. Unfortunately, it came at a bad moment, with graphics card and RAM prices going nuts, but what can you do?
Luckily, our pre-alpha has sold just enough to provide new PCs that let us keep working, so it's a good job we decided to start selling early! But we weren't exactly keen to burn money on hardware as funds are still tight. However, my old PC was refusing to stay on for longer than a few hours, causing me to lose lots of work when it went down (fun when working on a game!) and Nani’s PC just couldn’t handle Unity. The latest pathfinding update to our game broke it. The game is a mass of code and systems nowadays and running the game in Unity's editor adds a huge performance overhead.
And she doesn't even have the weakest PC on the team! Adam likes to code on a laptop so old he literally had to create a way to disable all the game’s shaders just to make the game run (literally called “Adam Mode”)
Getting some new hardware meant we had to stop working for a few days and force Nick to stop coding so he could help us select the best PCs on our limited budget. And then he also had to build them so we could carry on working. We had a little a team get-together at our house/office and spent a day assembling new hardware, but at least we're more productive now than ever thanks to it. Plus, we were able to get an ATI card and an Nvidia card to help us debug any problems in the infinite hellscape of differing PC hardware.
It's weird finally getting to see your own game run at a framerate you've only ever seen in YouTube videos until now!
New Social Effect Feature Added
I talked about this new feature briefly last month but Adam has now made a lot of progress on it to the point where it's mostly done. Only 1 aspect left to tackle.
The first aspect of this new feature is called “Grim Surroundings”. Basically, you'll want to be careful in the next version where you put your Prisons and Punishment Centres. We've made it so seeing these brutal buildings is going to drain citizens morale faster than usual. You don’t want to build them in the middle of your town anymore.
The second feature we've put in is called “Influence”. Right now, that means that your Town Hall is going to have an influence on people next to it. It will slow down how often they decide to commit a social issue. So for example, a murderer is less likely to go and shank someone near the Town Hall.
On the flip side of that, the Tavern now actually encourages the rate people commit social issues. So you’re going to get a lot more acts of murder and vegetarianism (for example) around the Tavern. Maybe you want that. Or maybe you don’t. Just be careful where you put these buildings.
The last aspect to add, which is still work in progress due to some technical hassles, will affect where you place crematories and latrines. In short: people don’t want to be near these buildings, so build them far away from other stuff or they’re going to negatively affect them. My ultimate hope is this will add an extra level of strategy to where you place stuff.
More Publisher News!
Anybody who’s been reading these updates for a while will know the talks we've had with publishers over the years. We've had several offers but haven't really been convinced they're going to justify their share of our income yet. Some of the publishers have been great people who have done good work on other games, but I think we like working on our own a bit too much. We’re antisocial and like working on our own at our own pace, and I don’t particularly want a lot of marketing fuss! Having a popular game doesn't always = having a fun life.
If a publisher ever does win my heart, they’ll probably be someone who convinces me they really can make my life genuinely easier. Less stress. No one has yet managed to do that. If there's any publishers out there who want to make my life easier in exchange for money, let me know!
However, to prove I’m a hypocrite, this month a pretty big, well-known publisher contacted us out of the blue and wanted to talk and I got all excited like a starstruck indie dev again. Funnily enough, I’d actually pitched to this particular publisher years ago (the only one I've ever approached) and was turned down by the time! But I think they've forgotten about that, or the game has moved on so much, as they’re approaching us now. We’ve got a meeting with them in a couple of weeks. I don’t think it will lead to anything on this particular game, but on our next game… Who knows? Offers like this are educational even if they don't go anywhere. I'm avoiding saying who it is yet in case it gets me in trouble but stay tuned.
Another Essential New Feature Added This Month:
Forget raiders, forget everything else. The most important feature for 0.0.9 is already up and running...
We have now made it so you can now choose your Town Leader's hairstyle!
Adam dusted off his crappy laptop to program this feature as well. So above all the big moral choices in the game, you can now decide: want a beard or no beard? Want long hair or short hair? It's challenging stuff.
There's more coming though, lots of little upgrades. Sometimes I reckon the bottom section of a game's patch notes can make more impact than the top part.
Game Design Evolution 3.0
We might be slightly odd as a team of 4 in that we have a game designer (me) who can’t code. However, being the dreaded “ideas guy” isn’t always an easy life. Game design is a race when you have a tiny but hardworking team constantly producing stuff. When they’re done with their present tasks, I have to be immediately ready with the next job for them, all written up nicely with detailed steps that make sense to someone who doesn’t actually live in my brain. And it better be a good use of their time.
It’s a stressful job (not that the others team have their stresses). I have to make all kinds of decisions on what people - who are basically unpaid volunteers at this stage - should spend time doing, based on mere instinct and theories. Then I have to hope after 4 weeks (for the really big features) that what I told them to do makes the game any better! Sometimes I have the extra fun job of saying “sorry, that idea isn’t’ working out. Can you redo XYZ?” and add lots of smileys to the comment.
As a guy who suffers from anxiety, I’ve occasionally tried to combat all this pressure by finding a formula that makes game design a bit more predictable. This month I spent an insane amount of time studying games, trying to find their common elements, and even worked out a list of 108 elements a game needs to be good! It busted my brain and took a huge amount of time. And guess what?
Formulas produce formulaic answers. No matter how much design time I spend theory-crafting, it doesn’t help. Every game is different. If there is a universal formula that Tetris, Chess, Doom, and Hitman all share I haven’t yet found it. Looking for it almost drove me insane.
I guess I'll have to keep stabbing in the dark and relying on instinct a while longer.
Not a good idea to stand this close to one of the new radioactive ruins, but somehow so alluring...
Radiation and Religion
To end this month's blog, I’ll talk about 2 upcoming features I’m hoping we can squeeze into the next update as well (told you it was going to be a big one). These are still in the early stages of development but they're on the conveyor belt of stuff that is coming at least.
First up is radiation. Nani has made the art for this but the coding is yet to start. My goal is that radioactive ruins will add a random element to every map. You won't know where they'll spawn each time you play. Naturally these unique ruins will be radioactive and impossible to build near, so you’ll have to plan your town around them. There will be a way to remove them, but at a cost. I'll hopefully discuss more about this feature next month when we're a little deeper into it.
Religion is another "milestone" feature, like raiders, that currently in the design phase. It's definitely something I definitely want to add. Choosing a religion/ideology is a massive element of every society. But I’ve found this one of the hardest elements to design. There might be a reason why so few games make religion a core part of their gameplay! In fact I can only think of the Civ games where religion is big part of gameplay and I personally find their use of it a bit superficial (though Civ 6 was better). Reducing belief to numbers, and all games revolve around numbers, is tricky stuff. We're prototyping various approaches at the moment.
What would you like to see from religion in a post-apocalyptic settlement game?
Time to Get Back to Work!
That about ends it for this month. As you can see from the length of this blog not a day goes by without something being added to the game. And the truly hectic time is yet to start.
Launching on Steam is going to be insanely busy. I don’t really know how I’m going to fit it in around my day job.
However, our passion and love for the game remains. We think we're making something unique and worth all the effort and late nights. The game should be something fun and unique on Steam, and that keeps us going. We just need to take breaks occasionally!
I'll see you next month.
Development Update #26
3 Years In the Making
This month marks 3 years since we began work on Atomic Society and I’m more excited about 2018 than any other so far. Not just because we're coming to Early Access in the next few months, but mostly because the basics of the game are where we want them, people are having fun already, and now we can look forward to 12 months of adding new interesting challenges into the mix so the game is longer and deeper. In 2018 I really want to expand the player's drama of making a town.
This week alone I was watched a random person playing the game and they were crying with laughter at some of the black comedy, and then gasping at how horrific it can be. That’s what I’m after (the emotions, not the streamer!) That makes all the stress and work worthwhile. I'm hoping that building a post-apocalyptic settlement in Atomic Society will eventually feel like an emotional journey as you start with nothing, and overcome challenges one by one, fighting for your community's survival.
In all, I'd guess we're probably 65% done with the game, but only 40% done content-wise (in other words most of the work so far has been on behind-the-scenes stuff). This blog will cover some of that new, upcoming content.
Version 0.0.8 Was a Nightmare
We've only just recovered from 4 months of working on pathfinding and bug-fixes that really drained us. 0.0.8 was necessary of course, and people liked it, but the Christmas holiday was not quite long enough time to let us recharge. Especially when January has been really difficult in some personal ways.
0.0.8 wasn’t 100% polished when we sent it out. It was playable, and a lot of people gave positive feedback on it, but there were still a ton of bugs. So over January, although we were sick of it, we had to go back to a version that we’d already spent 1/3rd of a year making to smooth out all the remaining problems. That was tiring.
But now it’s over at least, the game is smoother and more stable than ever. It was really great to fix some bugs that had been hiding for years in the code. Plus, on the whole, 0.0.8 has been popular.
There seems to be levels of people who play games. Until now, only the really committed fans who play random pre-alphas could persevere with the game, but we couldn’t really attract people beyond that. I think 0.0.8 has moved the game on to the point where people who expect a more polished experience can enjoy it too. Not perfectly polished by a long, long shot - but good enough to let us get back to making new gameplay.
We don't feel human again. We destroyed that part of us 3 years ago! But we're operating at peak efficiency again and we might even be able to chill out for a bit!
Patch 0.0.8.2 Released
A January spent fixing bugs means there’s now a new patch available (0.0.8.2). It’s mostly bug-fixes, so don’t get too excited, but if you are one of those wonderful maniacs who enjoys pre-alphas (and keeps us in business), you can check out the full patch notes here. To get the patch you’ll just need to download the game again. New pre-alpha customers will get the update if they decide to buy the game (*subliminal messaging*) before it hits Steam.
Release Date Scheming
I will tentatively (i.e. incorrectly) say that we’re still on track for a late Spring Steam release still. That’s a roughly a year behind where I guessed we would be when we started making the game, but it’s been a necessary delay. My only concern about the release is that I do need to keep a safe distance around a game called Frostpunk, as that game is (on paper) a bit like us and is going to wade in and demand all the press’s attention for a while with its big-budget power pants.
Then, when the dust settles, we’ll appear and see if anybody is still around to throw spare change at us! I'm optimistic as they seem to be going in a different direction with the idea, so there's probably going to be room for us both in the in the digital wasteland of Steam. We can hopefully be the "cult movie" alternative for all you post-apocalyptic society fans out there.
Work Begins On The Next Version
Things are going pretty smoothly with 0.0.9 so far, considering Adam and Nani have been handling it themselves while Nick completed the patch. He has now joined the content-squad and we can really crack on. Nick hasn’t been able to code a single piece of new gameplay for at least 6 months (making indie games is fun!), it’s all been systems and bugs. However, I can’t wait to work side-by-side with him on features again, like the early days.
There’s a lot of new features coming for me to cover in this version and most of it is still dangerously unfinished, so please be cautious. I might end up talking about features that change, or that aren’t as cool as they appear on paper, or we just run out of time to make in this particular version. As the game designer I’m childishly excited about this version and that’s going to hype-up how I write.
So let’s get started with the things that are slightly further along the production chain…
Cannibalism
It says somewhere you can’t make a post-apocalyptic game without cannibals. It's illegal. So this month Adam started making them for us too!
People have requested this social issue a lot, and I now think the time is right. In a game where being swamped with dead bodies is a regular occurrence, having a few citizens who might like to dine on the dead is actually fun. They're more like street cleaners... They help keep your town plague-free by devouring the dead before they spread plague.
But everything in Atomic Society has to come with a downside (mostly), so it is the case that anybody who witnesses the cannibals eating a corpse might get just a little bit upset at seeing their neighbour turned into steak and become “Distressed”. In other words they take time off work for a few days. It's a productivity vs free food/corpse removal kind of choice if you look at these things in a completely psychopathic way like I have to as designer.
Town Leader Upgrades
This isn’t a standout feature of 0.0.9, but it is something that should make the basic act of salvaging more enjoyable for a lot of people. Oh, and Adam's almost finished it so I can actually talk about it.
It’s now the case that when you loot a ruin as the Town Leader, there’s a small chance to find a nice bonus item that will enhance the leader’s abilities. At the moment the rewards are backpacks (more inventory space), a toolkit that lets you repair faster, and a construction textbook that lets you help build stuff even faster. Out of these the large backpack is probably the best one as it will let you grab more goodies, which will be really handy in the end-game when useful ruins are spread-out. And it will just be a nice treat occasionally.
New Buildings Coming
Things happening beyond the walls of your town is a big theme of 0.0.9. The maps are pretty big in Atomic Society and right now it's mostly empty space. I want to get the player at least thinking about things beyond their borders.
On that note, Nani has been a 3D-modelling machine this month. There could be - if we pull it off - at least 5 new things to build coming in 0.0.9. The 4 new models in the screenshot above are being worked on right now (some still need tweaks). It’s too early for me to start telling you how they work with any confidence, or why you’d want to build them, because we haven’t started coding them, but there’s definitely going to be brand new problems and threats to deal with as a player.
Being as vague as possible, the buildings above involve food waste, dirty water, the need to make weapons, and radiation. That will probably give you some idea of the new range of problems we’re trying to add in 0.0.9. Oh, and some of them are going to need electricity, so that’s another feature being worked on right now (start planning ahead how to harvest vehicle batteries!)
My goal is just when you think you’ve solved one thing in this game, another post-apocalyptic problem leaps out and catches you off-guard and we'll expand the game like that. Keeping people alive is the reason to play Atomic Society. It’s your primary job as a Town Leader. I want to make that as complex and interesting and dramatic as we know how to.
But don’t worry if you’ve never played the game before. I’m pretty happy with the opening few hours of the game at least, so I won’t be adding much more to that except polish. Right now I really want to expand the mid and end-game phase of town development.
And on that note, you will be able to make towns that are 29% larger in 0.0.9* (aka 350 people) so we have space for this extra gameplay. That itself should 1-2 hours of extra play.
*Subject to the frame-rate not plummeting through the floor.
Time to Get Defensive
It’s happening, finally. This is the gameplay task Nick is working on right now. That mysterious category on your build menu called “Defensive (Coming Soon)” should hopefully have something in it when 0.0.9 rolls around. Fear not, if you don't enjoy combat in this type of game (like me). No wannabe-RTS combat is involved. But you simply can’t make a post-apocalyptic game without some form of defence much like you can’t make even a peaceful nation without any military whatsoever. Think of it as security, not combat. You’re going to build things to scare threats away.
Combat, or the lack of it, has taken me a while as I want to get this feature right, and feel comfortable with it. Anybody who goes way back in these dev blogs will see me writing years ago stuff like “there won’t be any defensive stuff”, followed by me changing my mind and so on. It turns out it just needed the game to mature a bit before I could see the right way for us. Out of all the tasks I’ve designed for the game, it’s taken by far the most amount of words to get right and its going to take a long time to code it too.
Don’t expect big cinematic battles or anything. In fact, if you do get raided it’s probably going to be a text box and a sound effect. But the impact on your town will be the same. And I'd also like to add in ways to get rid of raiders, so there's a moral-choice element.
Making Building Placement Matter
I’m actually in two-minds whether I need to even put this feature into the game, as people seem to imagine building placement matters already! I have never yet seen a stream of the game where anybody builds a prison in the middle of town for example. Everybody naturally builds it on the outskirts and everybody tries to put their Town Hall somewhere noticeable.
0.0.9 is going to make you do that whether you have an imagination or not. Where you put certain “dirty” buildings (crematory, latrines) and certain “mood affecting” buildings (town hall, tavern) is soon going to matter. This should hopefully deepen the town-planning side of the game considerably.
Leaving It There
I better stop talking about 0.0.9 and get back to worrying and agonising over how slowly things take to make. I hope this gives you a hint that this version should be a big boost for the gameplay. This dev blog doesn't cover half of what we have planned. And if it doesn't make it into 0.0.9, rest assured it is coming later on.
Right now, the focus is definitely on the town-building side right now, but there's plenty more social/moral content coming too. It’s too much work to do all sides of the game every patch, so each update sees a certain side of the game boosted. Last time it was general bugs and polish. Now it’s town-building. Afterwards it’ll be expanding the social side of the game again. And we’ll keep going around like that until we’re millionaires or in an asylum.
New Youtube Streams
0.0.8 attracted a few new streamers, and some existing ones, to cover AS so I've finally updated the little list of streams I've found about the game. Check it out here. There's also some more French and Spanish and German ones on that list now, if it suits you.
A Little Note on Suggestions
Sometimes I think it's a good idea (without wanting it to be excuse-making) to lower people's expectations for Atomic Society. Please be aware we are just 4 part-time beginners doing this for love, working from our homes. Pre-alpha sales of AS could pay maybe 1 person’s minimum-wage salary, but we have to split that cash 4-ways and cover all development costs from the same fund so most of us have day jobs to stay afloat. That slows us down a lot.
My only reason for saying this is I want potential customers to know what they're getting into and to make people aware of our limitations when giving suggestions. Sometimes I get some really great suggestions, but they're suitable for a AAA studio. A single social issue in AS (like cannibalism) takes about 2 weeks to design, 3-4 weeks to produce, and 2 weeks to bug-fix with our current means. That’s why AS has the bare minimum of animation - we focus on making it fun as possible and move onto something else.
I hope you like low-budget entertainment as much as I do!
