Genre: Real Time Strategy (RTS), Simulator, Strategy
Atomic Society
Development & Progress Update #25
We made it. After months of hard work, the next big update for the pre-alpha is now available as we journey towards a Steam release in early 2018. Rest assured not a day goes by without something being added to the game, and a lot of progress has been made lately. We've finally got most of the technical problems sorted so from here on we can focus on more and more new cool gameplay and social challenges. 2018 is going to be a crazy year...
Version 0.0.8 Is Out Now (At Last!)
For those trying out the game before it hits Steam check your Humble Store downloads to try the latest pre-alpha version out. This update brings a ton of quality-of-life improvements and 2 new huge maps, a giant new tower block structure, a new way to handle ethical problems, tons of graphical tweaks and improvements, upgraded AI navigation and construction and we’ve also solved a ton of long-standing bugs too (but also added some new ones!). I really like the improvements to salvaging we’ve made as well.
We’re hoping people enjoy the latest update as we recover during the Christmas holidays. But in the New Year we’ll be straight back to work on the next (and final) update before Steam, which will greatly broaden the number of things you have to do.
Steam Release News
As you can probably guess, due to version 0.0.8 taking so long due to all the technical hassles of completely re-doing the pathfinding system in (more on that later), we’ve had to delay the Steam release until the first quarter of 2018.
I'm sure the delay will cause financial problems for us, but it’ll lead to bigger and better game and that’s all ultimately all the matters. Atomic Society is a labour of love and always has been.
The good news is we’re on the home straight now at last and I don’t think there will be any more tedious delays. There’s no more big technical hurdles we have left to do at last, so the next update can be 100% gameplay, which is very exciting for me (as a designer). The last version before Steam will layer in several new challenges that expand the game’s potential, including events that happen outside your town.
Ultimately I want you to be satisfied with Atomic Society's first Early Access version for what it is, rather than what it could become. And we’re getting to that point.
Last Chance to Have Your Name in the Game!
As the next version is indeed the last pre-alpha version before Steam, that means it’s also your last chance to try the game out early and receive the pre-alpha Special Edition rewards.
We will be removing the chance to add your names into the game and be in the credits after we launch on Early Access. Doing so will make the rewards more special for those who players who supported us when the game was a scrappy young pre-alpha and we really needed help. It’s our way of thanking those who could help us when we needed it most.
So, if you’re interested in that, feel free to check out the Special Edition before it’s gone for good!
Version 0.0.8 Was a Mistake?!
So, now all that’s said, let’s cover the last 2 months of hard work since I last wrote a blog (I know I skipped a month, overtime sucks!)
To be brutally honest, making 0.0.8 has felt at times like a mistake. I’ve had genuinely dark days where I regretted making the most recent version. Don’t get me wrong, I’m delighted with how the update turned out, but a month ago I was thinking this might could be biggest mistake we’ve made as indie devs since starting the whole project.
The original plan for 0.0.8 was to smoothen out the game, especially the pathfinding that helps the AI decide how to move. It’s a simple thing but it affects everything and could make the game a lot more fun to play if we fixed it. If you rewind to August’s blog, you’ll see me reckoning all the next update would be pretty straightforward. After all, it would just be bug fixing, how bad could it be?!
Turns out the old adage of "make a time estimation and then double it" is still true. I estimated 2 months and 0.0.8 took us 4 months, which is a huge length of time to keep pre-alpha players waiting. 4 months redoing something that already worked (albeit badly)? I was really beginning to wonder if I’d made a huge mistake starting this version in the first place.
It all came down to the usual trade-off: want something done fast or right?
Because we’re indie we always have to pick cheap no matter what. We can’t afford to hire staff. That leaves us before the start of every major task having to decide whether to do it quickly and poorly, or well but slowly. Everything has a downside.
We generally prefer to do whatever is best for the game, not us, and therefore locked ourselves into a huge task.
I really don’t know how Nick handled it all. He has literally just spent the last quarter of 2017 redoing the pathfinding system, alongside the construction system and the animation system. Those are major components. All that working in relative isolation (we don’t have an office) with only his own wits to find the answers he needed, and working for little more than expenses. To do that and keep focused and calm with the rest of us (through illnesses and hassles of daily life) is a testament to his character.
The rest us were stuck asking “is it ready?” or “how much longer do you think it will take?” as summer turned to autumn and then to winter. It was growing harder and harder to keep the faith that was a productive use of our time but we couldn’t go back, and we couldn’t go faster, so I had to battle my own personal anxiety and try not to wonder how much these delays would cost us.
Then last month Nick finally finished the massive upgrades and was able to share his labours. And my very first impression about the new systems for placing buildings, citizen animations, and pathfinding was...
... That all the hard work made the game "slightly better".
"Slightly better" for 3 months work did not feel great. I immediately blamed myself. On the surface would the player, would anybody, actually notice the changes?
To be honest, I'm still not sure, but at the time the main problem at the time was bugs. After he'd redone everything the game was unplayable. Everything was riddled with bugs, which is completely natural, but the game was running at under 10fps, the town leader moved at 900mph (which was kind of fun) and engineers were teleporting everywhere. And that's just the start of the massive bug heap. It’s almost impossible to see how good a change is when bits keep breaking like that.
It looked like being out by Christmas was going to be impossible then, as Nick would also have to fix all these bugs, but I just told myself we can’t do anything about it, and even if it makes the game 2% better it’s going to be worth it. We might never get to make a 2nd game. I told myself let’s make Atomic Society the best we can and stop worrying about a future that might never happen.
And slowly it all came together as Nick waded through the bugs, especially in the last couple of weeks. We had to pace ourselves to avoid burnout, and trust that resting would solve more than crunching, but that's easier said than done. But it worked and slowly his redo of the core systems could shine without all the glitches. Suddenly everything tied together and I could truly appreciate the upgrade had been worth it. Sometime has changed in the game and it just feel a lot more dynamic and playable. And boy, did I enjoy ticking off 15+ pathfinding bugs in one go!
Was it quite worth 4 months and a potential loss in sales and buzz around the game?
My answer is: who cares?
As For The Rest of Us?
While all that hard work was going on over the last 2 months, Adam (aka Mr American Coder) was pumping out all the little additions to 0.0.8. In fact the majority of all the new content in 0.0.8 was put together by him (he manages to do so much on the game despite a wife and kids and a full-time job on the side). He even kept patient with me as we tried implementing some new features like changing how you employ workers, and then changing it all back when I realised the new way I'd invented sucked.
And Nani (despite her full-time job too) was able to revisit all the different character models are basically turn them into "next-generation" versions without having any impact on performance. It’s astounding how she has self-taught herself the artistic and technical skill of 3D modelling without any lessons. Every new model she makes looks better than the last and I can truly say I’m happy with how the characters look at last. They have a good balance between realism and style. For a zero-budget indie game I’m happy.
As for me, the delays gave me a lot of time to really prototype ideas for later versions, which will really pay off in 2018. My own design process evolves each week. Plus I’m happy because the design decisions I made in 0.0.8 have worked out. It’s always a risk designing because you don’t know if you made a good or bad decision until you get to the final bug-free, working version. Only then do you experience it as a player will. Fortunately I’m really happy with how the game is coming together and I think I’m going to be proud of it when we hit Steam, no matter what the public thinks.
Most importantly, I’m enjoying playing the game more than ever. In fact I’m having a blast! I rarely ever enjoy anything I create, as - like a lot of creators - I focus on the flaws and imperfections more than the qualities, but I’m having genuine moral dilemmas and exciting challenges as I play despite knowing how everything works. The feelings I want Atomic Society to stir up in you are being stirred up in me, so something’s working.
Winner For Most Embarrassing Mistake So Far…
Alongside all the recent hassles with pathfinding, I discovered a very embarrassing mistake has been in the game for over 4 months!
A month ago you would've seen me scratching my head trying to understand a few German Let’s Plays videos of the game (we watch all videos of the game to see how people are liking it, even the ones I can’t understand!) and I kept thinking “why do the graphics look so bad for them and not for me?”
At first I assumed they were just playing the game on the lowest graphical setting, but it kept happening. I checked some older videos people had made, and they looked fine.
Then it dawned on me...
The graphics settings in the last version were broken ONLY for new players. So if you bought the pre-alpha between August and December for the first time, you were stuck on lowest graphics even though the options screen said you were on highest! Every new player and streamer was getting to see the game look at its absolute worst while thinking it was as good as the game could look. Talk about a marketing fail.
I guess the good news is people seem to enjoy the game despite it looking hideous! And thankfully that’s fixed now, for new and old customers alike, so enjoy the free graphical upgrade!
(Shout out to a player called Vyllan who also helped us track this down just by posting screenshots of his town that made me realise something was seriously up.)
Mega-Business Mode Activated
For those who want the truly nitty-gritty of making indie games, this was the month we truly entered the dark side of development and hired an accountant. Turns out there’s a heck of a lot of tax paperwork to do with running a company and selling a product even if you’re only enough to cover expenses.
In the UK, 20% of all the profit we earn on Atomic Society has to be paid in tax (and this after Humble take off sales tax and their share of each copy sold... And then the bank takes its share for transferring the money from dollars… I think by the end of it all we get slightly less than half the money you pay for your copy of Atomic Society). All that has to be recorded, and tax reports have to be worked out and filed. We’ve got to work out what is profit and what is a valid expense. And how to pay ourselves dividends. And keep it all in neat and tidy records so the taxman doesn't kick down the door holding a flamethrower.
Until November, Nani took all this and did an amazing job of it considered accountancy isn't usually in the job description for a 3D artist, but it was getting riskier and riskier to carry on without some form of outside help.
So we had to take some time off working on the game to find an accountant we could trust. The image of 3 clueless scraggy game developers trying to think of smart questions to ask a boardroom of accountants in a formal office will stick with me, but it worked out and it’s very nice to have someone handling all that stuff now, (and not as expensive as you might think.)
Another Year of Game Development Comes to an End
So here we are. This time 12 months ago we had just released 0.0.5, the very first version of the game to have saving and loading. It’s been a hectic year, from our first ever sales spike when a random famous Youtuber decided out of nowhere to stream our game, to meetings with game publishers and making big decisions on whether or not to work with them (we chose to say no and remain independent), to a ridiculous amount of work in 3 giant versions. It was the year Atomic Society became a game for the first time. 2018 should be the year it becomes what it is meant to be.
There have been bleak moments. Things taking twice as long to do as we wanted takes a toll on the business and our mental health, and public attention (and how it ebbs and flows) has its downsides and stresses. And we're not quite as unique as we were 12 months ago. But that’s business.
But we still love working on the game, and working with each other, and the worst that can happen is we're poor. This Christmas we'll be meeting up at my place to celebrate 0.0.8 being released (and probably curse over 2-player Cuphead). We’re still a team that can work hard, get on each other’s nerves, and then volunteer to spend even more time together hanging out together. Which is more than money can buy.
And as for 2018? In January we start having fun making 0.0.9, and then Steam in early Spring, almost 2 years to the date after we were Greenlit (back when that was a thing on Steam!).
What will that experience be like? Will it make us (relatively) rich or will we flop? Will the wider world enjoy the game or get bored of it in a few hours. I try to ignore those thoughts and focus on Atomic Society becoming the game we all wanted to make slowly but surely.
I hope all of you who managed to read this far have a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. I'll be back in January.
Dev Blog #24: Final Work On Pre-Steam Version 0.0.8
Where is Version 0.0.8?!
There's a couple more pre-alpha testing versions to go until we're ready for Steam and this dev blog will cover the latest progress on our journey towards that big release date.
This is actually the 24th monthly dev blog since starting this project as a bunch of middle aged folks wanting to make our first game (yay to me writing for these reports for 2 years!). This month we'll look at the last steps to finishing version 0.0.8, which might turn out to the penultimate version before Steam.
Not surprisingly, 0.0.8 is taking longer than we hoped for. Redoing the pathfinding and construction systems from scratch is turning out to be another one of those “oh, didn’t expect this to be such a insanely complicated thing!” situation. Long-time readers of these blogs will know this happens occasionally making this game. It all works out in the end. On the plus side, I am reasonably confident that when you try the new version you won't ever want to go back to the old one.
Another New Map & Various Graphical Upgrades
0.0.8 will now come with not one but two new maps for players to create towns on. The extra time in development gave me the chance to go for it. That means that in 0.0.8 all the maps will be in the game to enjoy at last. No more “coming soon” icons!
The 9th and final map to join the game is called Summit and is set on the side of a moody, frozen mountain. This map has an ominous mood. The survivors must’ve been pretty desperate to call this home. At the moment I’ve made it very misty as the mountains look best hidden by fog.
Thanks to Nani, this map comes with its own brand new convertible ruined ski lodge and broken chair lifts you can scavenge. The tourists don’t need it anymore so why don’t you take it over? Summit joins Valley as the new maps available in 0.0.8.
My current plan is to leave it at 9 maps for now and add more random elements to each of them so they're different and surprising each time you play them. I'd rather make the game with a handful of lovingly crafted maps you can master than to create endless generic random ones, especially as most people will probably only make a few towns. I think when we've got more features in the game we can start to add modifiers to each map, for example, reduced water production on desert maps, etc. I don't want to punish people though for picking the climate they like though.
0.0.8 will also come with some other improvements to all maps as well. New ruins have been added, bugs have been fixed, and all maps now have procedural sky boxes which really tap into Unity's advanced lighting system. On top of that we have also upgraded the water in the game, which looks far, far better and runs better too. These are some of the perks we can afford thanks to our pre-Steam customers funding us. On top of that, I finally have time to start tweaking and perfecting the maps instead of creating new ones. There are about 45+ different places you can spawn in Atomic Society overall, so balancing all of them as one designer takes some time! Perhaps your favourite spawn point will be more fun this version!
New Animation System Progress
Despite this being one of the core tasks that is holding up 0.0.8, I can't say too much about the new animation system quite yet as it is still mid-construction. Nick is spending all his time on this, getting it perfect. What I have however seen looks vastly better than previous versions. We have upgraded all the citizens to a physics-based, organic animation system (IK), which lets them move with realistic weight and body-mass, and adjust their footing appropriately to the terrain. We tried to do this ages ago but had to roll back as it was beyond us. Well, we've levelled up as devs since then and now know how to pull it off (he says nervously, a few weeks away from release!)
Right now there are still a lot of bugs to solve though, but we're making progress. Making a city-building game with a third-person controllable character is double the work (don't do it fellow devs, though I wouldn't change it)! At time of writing we're battling problems with the Town Leader acting like she has lost her spine and Engineers teleporting halfway across the map whenever they finish building something. There's going to be a ton of perfecting to do with this but I'm hoping that when it's done, it's done...
New Construction and Pathfinding System Progress
As for the new construction system and pathfinding AI improvements (the other 2 core upgrades to 0.0.8) they're also a little hard to talk about, as they're also work in progresses. What I have seen however looks awesome. The pathfinding fixes are subtle but fix the most annoying bugs. And the new construction system alone is a dream. Scenery now deforms in real-time as you place a building, and it makes perfect sense where you can and can't place a building, there's new animations when you do build something too, and it feels 100x times better. Nick's labours are definitely paying off here. Building stuff is the core of Atomic Society and in 0.0.8 that core element will feel a lot more fun. I just want to put buildings down for kicks in 0.0.8, as you'll see when it's out.
Town Leader Repairing and Scrap Mounds
This month Adam has been really busy doing a ton of little upgrades that all add up to make the game feel a lot better. I've been chucking lots of tasks to him that I've wanted fixed for ages. The biggest one is that now the Town Leader can manually repair structures that are damaged and fix them manually. Useful when your repair shack workers are off fixing one thing while your storehouse is about to collapse!
In addition to that, whenever a building collapses, or if you manually demolish it, the ex-building now leaves a little mound of debris. Click on this and it tells you what the building used to be, and you can even salvage it as the Town Leader to get a few bonus resources back. You might even now choose to demolish structures to gain loot if you’re desperately short of something.
More 0.0.8 Goodness This Month…
Without wanting to reveal the whole patch notes for the version here, (which are coming a soon as I feel more certain about what’s in them), here’s some of the other slightly interesting things coming in this new version…
* You can now see, by mousing over any ruin, what loot it contains. This saves you the time of running a mile to loot something only to find out it doesn’t have what you want. I worked out that the player should know whatever I know as designer. I know whatever loot is in every ruin, therefore players should know. This change, on top of the Scavenger Focus mentioned last month, makes getting loot a lot less random in 0.0.8. It’s going to take some tricky balancing work to make up for this, but I do think this is a feature that once you’ve tried it, you can’t believe it took us this long to put it in the game!
* New character details: Our citizens have found a little time to hit the beauty salon. They now have higher resolution hair, smaller heads, ears, fingers and refined skin textures. All part of growing up in the radioactive wasteland I guess.
* Random Map Selector: This was a simple enough change, but you’ll now find a new button on the map selection screen that picks a random location for you. Perfect for those who can’t decide.
Changes to Town Leader mode
Adam has also been working on a tricky change that I wasn’t sure about. A few players disliked like how the camera in Atomic Society snapped to the Town Leader when you give him or her an order, and I can kind of see their point. We tried a few different approaches to solve this lately. For example, we temporarily changed it so that the camera never snapped to the leader at all. You simply ordered her about like a unit in an RTS game.
However, this change turned out to be a load of rubbish. It made the Town Leader feel like a tool, rather than a character. You were moving them about without any connection. It’s important that players get to see their town from a character’s height occasionally. However, because I’m probably in the minority here, we did find a happy compromise. It’s now that case (and all this can be toggled off in a new Interface section of the options) that the camera will break out of Town Leader mode whenever she enters a structure. This prevents you from accidentally interrupting her. On top of that, you can now deposit loot in the Storehouse in any mode, no camera snapping.
I will find out in the next Youtube videos whether I have made a terrible mistake here!
Final Words
This and last month are still just a taste of what's coming in 0.0.8. It's not going to be a version that radically remakes the game or adds a new feature that changes everything, but it is shaping up to be a much-needed refinement of existing stuff. I don't expect any Youtube streams of this version because it's an evolution rather than a revolution, which is fine, as it gives us breathing space for the Steam release.
I’m not quite sure when 0.0.8 will be out, perhaps sometime in November. After then it’s straight onto work on the final (!) pre-alpha version, aka 0.0.9. I can’t believe we’re almost ready to stop calling Atomic Society a "pre-alpha" and to move onto the next stage in the life adventure that started way back in Feb 2015. The end of 2017, or early next, is going to be the biggest shake-up to our lives since we first went public. As little indie devs working from home in our spare time after work, everything changes soon. It might not be a life-changing shake-up, but my life has been already been improved enough meeting my teammates and making this game.
Creation is its own reward. The more I make this game, the more I love making it (that hasn't changed). We're getting over the hard stuff slowly but surely, and it's proving to be a lot more fun expanding what exists. If I were looking for a game to play, this is the one I'd be after.
0.0.9 will be a smaller and slightly faster version (so let’s say 2.99 months instead of 3.0) and then it’s out onto the big world of Steam. I’d like to launch before Christmas but I think it’s more sensible to say we’ll be ready in January now. I’d love it to be faster but what game developer doesn’t? Thanks to all our pre-alpha players and players who are waiting. I hope you enjoy what's in store in 0.0.8.
I'll see you next month.
Dev Blog #23: Version 0.0.8 Progress and Early Access News
0.0.8 Progress
The next big update to the game is coming along nicely and we're progressing through the last few big things to do list before Steam Early Access (more on that later). The focus for this update has been sorting some big old bugs and generally making the game feel less like a pre-alpha and a more like an alpha. We also found some time to include some extra little features at the same time.
At time of writing, I estimate that 0.0.8 is about 60% complete. That puts us on target for this version to come out mid-October, somewhat quicker than usual. As always I’ll post the patch notes for it as soon as I have a draft of them.
Path-Finding System Greatly Improved
This was by far the biggest task for this version. The way AI navigated in Atomic Society needed a big overhaul. Workers tended to take strange routes, get confused, bug out and walk through walls, etc. Small things but they happened constantly. It made everything in the game feel just that little bit annoying.
However, Nick has been busy in his underground lair and managed to drastically improve the way the AI picks its routes. This makes the whole game feel better. Watching people live out their lives looks more natural and realistic.
For example, before this version every building was shaped like a box to the AI regardless of the actual detailed shape of the model. Now the AI can accurately detect the shape of the building can even walk in and around its grounds and side-step obstacles. They’re much more aware of what’s going on around them, including their fellow citizens. They also no longer ghost through each other but step around one another, etc.
The same improvements apply to controlling the Town Leader, which is now more logical and consistent. And as an added bonus, all these improvements have given the game a small frame-rate boost too due to efficient coding.
The 0.0.8 pathfinding system doesn’t drastically change the game, but it does make everything in it better to play, so it was definitely worth doing.
Construction Improvements
Another overdue problem with the game involved placing buildings. Often players would be unable to put a building exactly where they wanted for no obvious reason. There was a reason of course, a bug, and how the game handled the radius of objects.
Thanks to Nick's tinkering with pathfinding, we were also able to improve how the game scans the landscape. It should now have a much better idea of where obstacles are and the shape of the ground. We’ve also improved how the terrain deforms when you place a building so when this task is finished, you should be able to build towns more or less however you want to lay them out.
Scavenger Focus
We’ve added a new feature this month that a lot of people have been asking for. In 0.0.8 you will be able to tell your scavengers to focus on one particular resource. No more getting angry at them as they fill their bags with scrap metal if you needed lumber.
To do this you just open your storehouse menu and tick the resource you want most of all. The scavengers then obey your orders and use common sense to work out where the nearest ruin containing that item is.
Aside from curing some player frustration, this also adds a little gameplay as you are now in control of your resources to a degree. You can send them off to get one thing while you gather another as the leader. Though I might need to do some re-balancing when this is finished, the game might be a bit too easy now you're not fighting the stupidity of your scavengers anymore!
Early Access Release
We’ve been thinking about bringing forward the Early Access launch. We were aiming for early 2018 but Atomic Society is already quite fun in its own limited and slightly buggy way, so why not make it easier for people to get the game?
I first thought about bringing the release forward while I was browsing Steam. I like diving into Early Access and seeing what weird and interesting games are out there that don't get the attention of the front page. Seeing all these games, it struck me how Atomic Society is already a lot more polished than a the majority of games out there and they seem to be doing okay, by my standard of "okay".
It doesn't matter we've still got a lot to add. For those who enjoy Early Access games (like me) it's fun supporting a game and seeing how it grows up, each patch can be fun to check out. And bad reviews don’t phase me anymore. I’ve seen games with negative reviews turn it around with a few good updates because Steam focuses on recent reviews. I'm not going to be scared away by a red thumb symbol.
The other reason we were holding off was to get the marketing right and have lots of content in the game before the mainstream press found us. But the mainstream press already found us 2 versions ago against our plans, and we survived that. Plus, I don't don’t care about lots of marketing these days. I’d be perfectly happy if things just carried on as they are now but with the added ease of Steam.
Anyway, long story short: Expect an announcement about our Early Access release in the not too distant future. We'll need to get 0.0.8 out first, and then do a mini-version to prepare the game for Steam, but after that we’ll be ready to start announcing dates. It will be this year (so in the next 3.5 months) unless something unexpected happens.
New Map
0.0.8 brings a new map for you to make towns on. This map is called Valley and is a forest biome. It’s a verdant woodland set on the steep sides of a valley around a huge lake. You can see right across the map from one side to the other, at least you can if you settle your town high up.
The aim of this map was to make the most vertical landscape in the game so far, and to make a nice relaxing location! After months making deserts and frozen tundras it’s nice to be back in peaceful surroundings.
I think the unique, crater-like layout of this map will lead to some interesting town shapes.
New Gameplay Building: Luxury Tower
A ultimate type of shelter has been added to 0.0.8. This is a huge building, the biggest you can make so far. It’s essentially a lot of luxury homes welded together into a battered tower. “Luxury” is a state of mind in the post-apocalyptic world after all.
It’s designed to an end-game building, for those times when you have a lot of resources and you want to quickly provide housing for all the remaining homeless citizens without having to build a ton of houses, so its very expensive to build. It also looks cool.
New Attitude to Game Development
This is the personal section of this dev blog (skip ahead if that's not your thing). I’ve had a much needed attitude adjustment lately. In short: I've stopped worrying about how well the game sells and it’s amazing. I feel like a new man.
I used to worry every single day about how the game was being received, how it was selling, what I needed to do to make it more popular and liked. Long-time readers of these dev blogs might’ve noticed how stressed I sounded at times. My stress was getting worse the more copies we sold. I was always watching what "rival" games were up to, what indie devs were panicking about, worrying about what people were saying on our forum, worrying if nobody was speaking on the forum, worrying if nobody made Youtube videos of our game, being scared when people did make videos. And so on and so on.
At long last I got it into my skull that worrying about the future and trying to control it hasn’t made me even one tiny bit happier. So I’ve resided myself to accept whatever happens. If AS sells lots, all right. If 3 people buy it on Steam and then refund it, all right. Either is fine. And as soon as I truly accepted that my stress disappeared.
I guess I’m becoming… Optimistic?! Not about success, just optimistic that things will be fine however they pan out. I’ve stopped chasing the latest news, I’ve unplugged from Twitter, I let things happen as they happen. And because of this I’ve probably had my happiest few weeks of work on the game since the day we started.
New Convertible Ruin: Mansion
Nani has spent a lot of time adding a big new ruin to the game in 0.0.8. You will soon be able to convert (if you find it) an abandoned Victorian mansion into a post-apocalyptic home or storehouse. It should make a fine centrepiece of your society. It’s the biggest ruin in the game yet, and also the most detailed.
Making a convertible ruin is a lot of work. Like all ruins, Nani has to sketch out how the ruin should look, based on my concept. She then makes a fully intact version of the building in the art program we use called Blender. Players never get to see this version of the building, it looks as the building would in its prime, before the bombs fell. When we’re happy with how that looks, she smashes it up and adds decades of neglect!
This would be enough for ordinary ruins, but for ruins the player can convert, Nani then needs to work out how a bunch of post-apocalyptic engineers with limited supplies might try and restore it. And do all that with an extremely tight polygon count and range of textures. However it's all come together and our collection of ruins grows larger.
More Improvements in 0.0.8
That’s not all coming to 0.0.8. We’ve also been able to upgrade the game to the latest version of Unity which has a few minor benefits for players and will probably boost performance on older machines. The upgrade went smoothly for a change though Adam had a few problems on his 5 year old laptop with in-built graphics (only the finest hardware at Far Road Games).
Having watched people on Youtube get caught out by the new repair mechanic in the game, we’ve added in more useful information to explain why buildings are disappearing.
Adam has made it so players can now type in a number of loot to destroy, which is very handy if your storehouses are overflowing.
We've made several useful UI improvements again and fixed (*checks notes*) 7 important bugs at time of writing.
There’s more to come in 0.0.8 though. I’d like to try and squeeze in adding the ability for the Town Leader to help maintain buildings and possibly add little mounds of debris when a building collapses so you can salvage something back. We'll see how times goes.
A Look Ahead...
By the time next month's dev blog rolls around I predict that 0.0.8 will have just been released, or at least be very close to going out the door. We'll then talk about an Early Access release date and begin integrating the game with Steam. There are 1-2 features I want in the game before Steam, nothing too serious, just stuff like rebindable controls. It should be a fun (and stress-free) end to the year!
See you next month.
Atomic Society Pre-Alpha Update 0.0.7 Progress
New Pre-Alpha Update Now Available!
After a busy few months, a new update is now available for those testing the early waters of our pre-alpha version (available here). This is the next big step forward on our journey towards Steam early in 2018. We're taking our time to make the game as good and stable as it can be before hitting the much bigger audience here on Steam as it will help the game succeed in the long-run.
Key New Features at Glance:
5 new social issues to manage and set laws for: drug use, slavery, transgender people, vegetarians and suicide.
4 new buildings to expand your town with: Info Station, Chemist, Giant Storehouse, and Repair Shack.
Building maintenance is now an issue.
New map to build towns on: Dunes
You can now Encourage any social issue you want and see what happens.
New story elements added: hidden skeletons with journals, citizens now have a biography.
Lots of gameplay and balance tweaks and lots of important bug-fixes.
This is still early days for Atomic Society, but we're pleased to show you how progress is going so far.
FULL PATCH NOTES
Dev Blog #21: Euthanasia, Publishers, Drug Use & Janitors
New Pre-Alpha Version Approaches, Patch Notes Arrive
We’re entering the final month of development on pre-alpha version 0.0.7. Still work to do before we let it out, but here are the tentative patch notes showing everything we’ve managed to squeeze in:
The goal with this version was above all to expand the social side of the game so players can get more of a sense that shaping the morals and laws of society is a key part of Atomic Society.
Also, to add a little more complexity to the city-building. Last version was us just finishing the foundations of the game. Now we’re starting to fill in the gaps.
It might not be the best for our marketing, but we're happy adding a big new update to the game every 3 months (2 months work, 1 month crushing bugs). We want every new version feel like a mini expansion-pack for the game that make it worth your time to revisit. And being just 4 people with day jobs, 3 months gives us time to take risks, make mistakes, and be creative.
The above are tentative patch notes of course. 70% of the stuff in the notes is already done but who knows what might explode. We'll do our best to squeeze in the most content.
All being well, before next month's blog rolls around, our pre-alpha customers can try it out and see how it feels. I look forward to the feedback.
Vegetarians, Euthanasia, Drug Use and Transgenderism
Slavers joined the game last month.
Now Vegetarians and citizens who wish to be Euthanised are almost complete too.
Drug users and Transgendered survivors are also in the works for this version.
We took a scatter-gun approach to the issues in this version to demonstrate the variety of social problems in Atomic Society. Some issues will be pure post-apocalyptic fantasy. Others will be present-day issues. It all adds to the desired feeling of "you run the world" feeling we're going for.
You can judge them all how you see think best and each issue visibly affects how people live.
Vegetarians refuse to eat meat or work at the livestock ranch. The good side to vegetarians is that you won’t need to build livestock ranches, (a slow and polluting building), to feed these people.
Euthanasia is going to be a factor in such a depressing future, and it's a current political hot-potato, so it also made sense to include. This issue is a little different to others, in that it isn’t the person who committed the action who gets impacted by your judgements (can't arrest someone who committed suicide), but the doctor who killed them who gets in trouble. The upside of euthanasia is putting very unhappy citizens out of their misery. The downside is obviously the death of someone who might have overcome their depression if you'd just waited.
Drug users are big fans of the new Chemist building (see below), and can have a great life, if they don't overdose and if you're willing to burn medicine on them.
Trans people will be a rarity in your towns but this issue had to go into the game. These people will be unhappy unless they transition. It's up to you whether to spend medical time and supplies letting them swap genders.
Obviously we're dealing with some meaty topics here, hence the good thing about being a little-known pre-alpha. We can sneak these issues out, get feedback, see what happens, and continue.
My political mantra remains: just make a good videogame.
Chemist & Industry
We definitely wanted to include a few more buildings this version as people were burning through pre-alpha content in about 2-5 hours depending on addiction levels.
So now, aside from the Information Station and new Encourage solution, and that new Decorative building I mentioned in the last blog, Nick has gone and coded the new Chemist structure.
The Chemist is the first of several “Industry” buildings coming to the game, in the sense it’s a building that needs other buildings to function. It takes herbs from your greenhouses and converts them into homemade medicine. Workers at your medical buildings will come and collect and use all the medicine they can get their hands on. If they don’t have medicine, now medical buildings are much less effective. This also makes salvaged medicine much more useful if you can find it in the wasteland.
It’s really satisfying seeing 3 entirely different buildings working together like clockwork according to Nick’s code. Seeing the simulation work feels good.
More industry buildings are in the works, so you'll soon have "factories" (e.g. buildings that convert something into something more valuable) to burn through all your salvaged resources.
A bit like the real apocalypse, the longer people stay alive, the fussier they'll get.
Maintenance Shack - Day Job Incarnate
The last building we want to squeeze into this version before it goes live is the Maintenance Shack (pictured above). This is a building that might be familiar to people who played the old Pharaoh/Caesar games. The workers here will patrol your town and repair buildings before they fall down.
As someone who works as a janitor when he's not making Atomic Society, I will soon be able to see my day job in my game. "Yay", I guess?
Collapsing buildings are not just a problem in that they cripple your town - a collapsing building has a chance to kill anybody trapped inside it when the walls tumble. Janitors can save lives.
I'll do what I can to find the perfect balance between this being a problem and it being an annoyance.
Dancing With Publishers
I have a prejudice against publishers.
To be blunt, I assume they're all vultures who want to swoop in and get a cut of our income.
Like I said, it's a prejudice.
But we're not earning any profit from the game, so we're wary about handing over what we do earn.
And the days are gone when a game dev needed a publisher to be released or noticed. Steam and Youtube/Twitch solved those problems.
What use are publishers these days? Especially in a world where I can pay far less for a good marketing company to do a one-off press push if I really wanted to?
This month we had a couple of offers from publishers that really stood out from the herd though. Atomic Society has had a dozen unsolicited offers from publishers over the years but I've turned them all away. I didn't feel we were in that league.
But these 2 seemed different.
So we had a chat with them. I was just curious to find out what it would be like talking to a publisher. It sounds like something a game dev should do! We were all nervous beforehand. This is our first game, we’re a new business… No one taught me how to talk to business people.
So we listened and tried not to make idiots of ourselves. My main goal was to find someone who knows business. I basically want someone to say "leave it with me, I'll handle all your marketing, I'll make you a star" and to charm me out of rev-share. I want that stereotypical talented Hollywood producer of yore to sleaze his way into my good books.
Unfortunately, (or fortunately), that didn't happen this month. It all comes down to money. A publisher is probably going to want 10%+ of your income for their efforts as a minimum. That's a big chunk of change for something they "might" be able to do, and if your game flops, you're barely going to earn enough to pay expenses, so then you definitely don't want to be handing out 10% of your livelihood to somebody who has done a fraction of the work you have. At least that's the way I see it.
I might be a dumbass to think like that but neither publisher we spoke to was able to convince me I was misguided, so the meetings didn't go anywhere. The publishers were nice and talented folks, but we just can't afford to take that risk.
Or maybe we're just arseholes who can't work with others.
So now it's back to my random efforts to get publicity, and the luck we've had so far. The game has marketed itself. That might be enough, and if it isn't, I don't care. Game 1 for Far Road Games Ltd is all about learning how to make games. Atomic Society is our Master’s degree in indie dev.
And if the very worst happens, we’ll all have come out of it having made a good videogame – which is beyond a dream come true.
Gameplay Balance Incoming
Thanks to AS going viral last month, I had hundreds of hours of Youtube footage to study. Out of many things that stood out, one was that players were drowning in loot. This might actually be realistic - there's going to be a lot of scrap in a post-apocalyptic world - but it doesn't necessarily make good gameplay.
This wasn’t unexpected. Being a pre-alpha there aren’t enough buildings to soak up all the loot yet, but it does get a bit annoying having to build a storehouse every 5 minutes.
Players of the next pre-alpha build are going to have much tougher time getting salvaged and homemade resources. This slows the pace down of the game quite a bit, and means your Town Leader is required more often to help search the wasteland.
I’m a little worried about how hard and slow this makes the game. And then releasing that to the public. But every update is a gamble in game dev. People will soon let me know if I've got it wrong.
Skeletons Implemented/Story Writing
I flexed my creative muscles this month writing the story for the skeletons, which are a new feature in 0.0.7. I'm misguided enough to have a first-class degree in Creative Writing which unsurprisingly hasn't been a skill I’ve needed much since then (as I mentioned, I'm now a janitor).
But it was fun to dust off the old writer in me, and I’ve now added a short, 9-part story, that conveys a little bit of backstory to the game world and the nuclear war that must’ve happened and hidden it around the game.
I hid it because I didn’t want players to feel the story was necessary. I like games where you only stumble across a feature weeks after playing it.
Reading them all will also make a neat achievement one day.
Game (Almost) Earning a Basic Wage?
Above you can see Atomic Society's pre-alpha sales peaks thus far from release to June, alongside the 2 times the game went "viral" (without us doing anything).
I can't reveal the actual sales/income figures because money-earned is a Poker card in business, and you'd be dumb to hand it over. But we're still a long way from the day when we can consider giving up our day jobs nonetheless.
As you can see it's been pretty busy May/June thanks to Youtube madness. Could there be a future where making Atomic Society earns as much as a basic menial job? This recent period was the first time that idea moved from "dream" to "something that might happen."
It seems strange to actually dream for the stage where you can earn minimum wage, but that's indie dev. The market isn't getting less crowded. At least compared to the world of apps, or books (my forte), the indie scene is still a desert of content.
I remember when Atomic Society had sold less than 50 copies and it was utterly bewildering to us that strangers would buy something we'd made. We're a bunch of strangers who have never made a game before! I still remember when we sold 6 copies in a single month. 6 copies! (Thanks, you 6 by the way).
I have an unproven, and probably wrong, theory that the best paid jobs in life are actually the shittest if you actually dig down into them. There's a reason you need to pay people that much to do them. They might seem glamorous on the outside, but in terms of what they do to your soul, you need the money to keep you from committing suicide.
Making indie games is not one of those jobs. I'll take minimum wage for life if I can keep doing this. Making indie games is wonderful.
My dream is just AS sells enough that the 4 of us can make game 2 with a basic, low-paid salary and so on. All we need is that magic recipe: One unique idea that resonates with a lot of people (including those beyond our immediate circle), then to hit the market at the right place at the right time, and then to have the luck/skill to execute on the idea.
In other words: 3 things we can only slightly control.
I don't know if AS will tick any of those boxes. This is our first ever game. We were clueless idiots when we started it. If we do succeed, it's based on hard work and good instincts.
But at least this month alone... We ain't poor.
Interview About the Making of Atomic Society:
I did an interview with a little but cool indie game website where we discussed what makes Atomic Society unique and the chances of nuclear war:
One day I’m going to read through all these “next month” endings and laugh at everything I had planned. This time I'm going to guess by the time next month's blog comes around that version 0.0.7 will have just been released, by the skin of its teeth, and the whole team will be exhausted wrecks as usual after crunching.
And then who knows what will happen? Will the random Youtubers who made videos of it come back for more, or will it be a quiet period again? Will we go "viral" again and earn enough?
Let's find out next month, readers of the apocalypse.
Dev Blog #20: Slavery, Propaganda, News Feeds, Chemists, Sounds and New Maps…
It’s been a fun and exciting month! Here's a look at some of the things we've been adding to the game lately, plus some behind-the-scenes stuff, as work on the next pre-alpha update for the game on the slow road to Steam.
Slavery
In the next version of the game you won’t just have Murderers to worry about, you’ll also have Slavers prowling your town. Adam just finished coding it. Some survivors are happy to threaten others in your town to do their bidding. These Slavers capture the unemployed and build up a little posse behind them.
It’s funny when you see a nine year old with five adult slaves trailing behind her. It’s less amusing when you see an adult with multiple child slaves...
Slavers get their needs boosted due to having slaves helping them. Bad news for their Slaves though: they’ll die young and their own kids (when we implement breeding) are likely to become slaves as well. However, slavery also stops people being unemployed and in Update 7 unemployed people have an increased chance to commit their own social issues, so by enslaving them you’re “policing” your town.
You decide who to keep happy.
The bit I like most about this is that it brings a big decision-making aspect to the game, which I've wanted. Now you can't resolve all social issues at once. You’ll have to choose what matters most to you and then wait until you have enough "authority" to implement another solution. The more issues we add, the more you’ll have to plan ahead.
We have more issues we want to add to the next update. Stay tuned.
Encouraging Crime
Update 7 will introduce another ethical solution yet to the game – encouraging a social issue. You will soon be able to encourage your citizens to commit a deed more in future. Want more Murderers or want more Slavers? Go for it! But the fallout (no pun intended) is on you.
Although this might sound like an option for players who want to create a dark or chaotic town, it will become enticing later on. For example, when we add in positive social issues, there might be some behaviours you want to encourage.
Nick is still hard at work coding this so it’s too early to share concrete details, but currently Encouraging will make issues happen more often and it will also cause more migrants to arrive who like what you’ve encouraged. For example, if you Encourage murder, you’re going to have waves or murderers who hear of your town being a sanctuary for their way of life and come flocking towards it. You'll start to resemble the things you approve of.
Propaganda Station Building
As existing players will know, condemning an issue requires a Prison or a Punishment Centre. Encouraging (and later, Tolerating) an issue will require its own building too – a Propaganda Station. You can’t convince a whole town to do your will without getting your message out.
The ultimate point of this is (aside from giving you a new building challenge) is to make it so a very permissive town looks different to a very authoritarian town. Different buildings for different styles. The design of the Propaganda Station is based around an old cellphone tower and it has noticeboards outside telling citizens what to do on it.
News Feed Feature
Update 7 will also, thanks to Nick, feature a new UI element in the bottom left of the screen (see above) that reports about the most recent events in your game. This really helps you learn about all the crazy deeds that are going in your town. I tried to avoid putting this feature in for a while as it seemed a bit of an old-fashioned feature, but in a game where you have 100s of people constantly doing different things, a news feed is essential. I think players are in for some shocks when they see what is really happening in their towns in Update 7.
Biography Tabs
In Update 7, all citizens have their own randomly generated Biography. This was one my favourite little tasks to add to the game. I like how adding just a few characteristics can give an otherwise bland person a personality. These characteristics don’t affect gameplay, they're just fun to read and make your citizens feel more like people. We've written lots of answers so there should be a lot of possibilities.
Making the Game Stay Fun Over Time
One thing I’ve been giving a lot thought about lately is how to make the challenge of the game scale over time.
At the moment Atomic Society is tense and tough until players figure out how to get going, and then it gets easier until you hit the population cap. It's still fun, growing a city, and the social issues add a lot of randomness, but I want to bring back that initial panic that players experience at the start of the game from time to time.
It’s way too early to discuss what we might do to improve this, but we have plans in mind. I’m raising it now as I’d love to hear any suggestions people have for ways to bring back the panic.
New Buildings...
Mariana has been artwork crazy over the last month and has created 5 new models for buildings that will be coming to the game over subsequent versions (see screenshot below). These are the “second tier” of buildings for the game and they'll fill in the gaps in the build menu. But with new buildings will come new problems those buildings will fix so the game is going to get tougher.
Things you can build at the moment are core structures every town needs just to survive. Over time, we’ll be adding in the next tier of buildings – things you’ll want to make the town thrive. These buildings generally rely on first-tier buildings to function, so you’ll have to start thinking about supply-chains.
Of course not all of these buildings in the screenshot will make it into Update 7. It takes weeks to design, create, code, and test a single building. But a start has been made.
Our goal for for now is to get the Chemist building in the next update (for reasons that will become very apparent) and a Maintenance Shack. The Shack is inspired by Caesar/Pharaoh games. Build several of them so workers can maintain your structures and or your town might start falling down - killing people inside. This help keep the gameplay lively even when your town is self-sufficient.
Sound Effects & Video Options:
Update 7 will at long last have sound effects for several core interactions. Nick has now prepared a really awesome system for adding and tweaking them and I've been going through sound libraries to find just the right effect. Although this isn’t the most exciting feature, I think it’s going to add a lot more to the game than people realize. It makes everything that little more satisfying when there's an accompanying noise with it.
In addition to that, Nick has also expanded our video options a lot more so players on low-end hardware, or just those who want to tweak how the game looks will have a bit more customisation soon.
Mysteries in the Wild
Update 7 will also introduce a small feature that will help tell a little story in the game... If players can find it. We're hiding it across the maps. This feature is just there to give the world a bit of backstory and flavour, and to give you something to hunt down if there is a lull in your town.
This month we’ve made Decorative buildings (formerly known as cosmetic) useful beyond just looking pretty. Now every time a citizen now walks past one of the artworks there is a chance to be “refreshed” and gain a boost to their needs. You actually need to think now before you place a Decorative structure. There isn’t much point putting one in a region where nobody will walk past it.
We've also implemented another player suggestion and created a new Decorative building, a planted tree growing in a flower-bed ringed by salvaged car tyres. So you can bring a little greenery to your outposts soon.
New Map & Ruin:
Update 7 is bringing the new map "Wasteland" to the game. It's one of the biggest maps so far. A river down divides the land in two, aside from very narrow land-bridges. This is the final desert themed map we’ll be adding to the game. I do like a good desolate region for some reason. Only 2 more maps to go after this and we'll have implemented every area in the game at least in a basic form.
Mariana also created a new salvageable ruin for us that was also based on a player suggestion, so thank you. I'm not going to say what it is yet, you'll find it eventually.
Prison Tweaks:
Adam loves dirty jobs. Plague? He made that. Diarrhoea? He implemented that. Slavery? Yep. We try to give him non-grim jobs but he goes into a mad rage and so this month we had to pacify him by letting him add a starvation aspect to the prison. It was the only thing that would calm him down.
This was something we didn’t quite have time to add the game for Update 6, but in the next Update you will see prison workers going out and fetching food and drink for their inmates. And you’ll also see a pile of corpses if you run out of food and drink.
Youtube Madness
Lastly, a little behind-the-scenes stuff before I wrap up.
In April one tiny Youtuber made a video of the game just by chance (we’re not sending out any codes for the game). Then a second, slightly larger Youtuber made a video. And so on. And so on. Until we were receiving emails from people like the Yogscast with their 30 gazillion subscribers.
Thanks to this, and a lot of positive reactions to the videos, we have doubled our pre-alpha player size in less than a month. Aside from the fact this means (for the first time) we might actually be able to pay ourselves something over the summer, the most important thing is seeing people enjoy the game even in this early form. That helped motivation so much.
I finally got to see strangers actually having fun with the game and wanting more. The core is there. It just needs polishing and expanding. I spent hours watching every single video and reading all the comments (a scary job) and it's really given me a lot of confidence that we're on the right track even though there are bugs (we're not on Steam yet for a reason) and with a bigger player-size comes a lot more pressure/emails!
Combat
Because this question comes up every week from someone, I made this thread on our official forum giving our position on combat. In short, please don't buy Atomic Society expecting battles or combat or raiders.
Next Month…
June should see us squeeze in the remaining features for Update 7, and then July will probably be spent ironing out all the new bugs and re-balancing the game so it’s fun again. And then we'll release the new update. That’s usually how it works.
I hope you enjoyed this little peek and what we've been working on. There's a lot more to share about Update 7 coming soon.
Dev Blog #19: New Pre-Alpha Updates & Behind the Scenes Battles
It's only been a short time since we released the latest big update to Atomic Society, so this month's blog will focus on behind-the-scenes stuff. Next month we can start to show off the new content. However, there's still plenty to talk about...
Update 6 Launched
The 6th big update to our fledgling pre-alpha version is now available if you missed it. Existing customers will need to re-download the game. The latest patch notes are here. I hope everyone enjoys testing it as we keep shooting for that Early Access release in the 4th quarter of the year.
Discord Server Now Available
If you fancy a relaxed and friendly place to hang out with the devs and any other people interested in Atomic Society, there is now a Discord server (aka a glorified chat room) for the game here. Feel free to pop by and say hello. We'll see if it gets used or not.
One Year of Being on Sale
April 20th marked 1 year since we started selling our pre-alpha to the public. It's been a hell of a year.
We hadn't intended to go public with the game until about now, but coming off a failed Kickstarter in early 2016 we were left with 3 choices: try Kickstarter again, give up development, or sell what we had and hope it would keep the lights on. Believing it was better to live by what we were able to produce than rely on Kickstarter hype, we of course put the game up for sale way earlier than intended.
That marked the moment Atomic Society moved from being a dream to a reality, where money was on the line and people could actually judge what we were doing.
Out of all the decisions we’ve made, selling early still ranks as one of the best. Player feedback has produced good ideas and helped us focus on problem areas with no downsides (aside from the time it takes to replying to messages). And of course the tiny bit of money AS brings in each month covers basic expenses, like replacement PC parts and bills that would otherwise put us in personal debt - or kill the project entirely.
A lot has been added to the game in the past year, more than I could list here. Big things like 3 new maps, execution and prison systems, improvements to citizen behaviour, new buildings and ruins, many more new UI elements, tweaks and gameplay improvements, more music, and most gruelling of all – the damn saving and loading system.
Saving and loading is the crucible for a lot of indie games in this genre I think. If a team can manage that, they’re probably going to make it.
Last Minute Stress
The last tweak for Update 6 was actually added to the game a few minutes before it was uploaded. Not being on Steam yet with its superior systems, it isn't simple for us to just release a hotfix or micro-patch. Any update we release has to be the final. And being a perfectionist, I was tweaking the lighting on our new Iceberg map right up to limit. It's tense as games are essentially a house of cards, a single change can knock everything over.
After I'd successfully uploaded the new pre-alpha version, I was about to announce it when I realised we had a problem. One of the big new features in Update 6 wasn't triggering. I'd totally missed it. Innocent citizens were supposed to be killed for crimes they haven’t committed if you choose execution but it wasn't happening. The police force in our game is one of the most complex, and fragile systems in the game and this flaw had gone unseen.
The new version was already online at this moment. Thank God the programmers were still conscious and online (working long-distance that's not something you take for granted). However, Nick and Adam were able to fix the bug at once and then I had about 90 minutes to test it and balance it. Mariana was stuck in front of the computer, recording on a notepad how often the effect occurred. She crunched the numbers. I trusted my feelings, uploaded the now-fixed version again and collapsed in a heap.
Coming at the end of an exhausting final sprint to get the version ready, this wasn't easy on the emotions. The game is getting big now, and there's so much to check.
Testing Vs Making
To be fair, despite the pressure and exhaustion of the testing period, it does pay off. To date we have never needed to release a fix for a released version. When it's out, it's out and we can start working on new stuff. There are lots of moderate bugs in the game of course, we have a huge list, but nothing game-breaking for the vast majority of players. This could change though as more and more people try the game out and we face more and more obscure hardware configurations. We'll see.
Bug-fixing is essential. I used to be a tester at Rare, so it's drilled into my brain, but bugs damage a game's reputation more than anything else (over-promising in marketing aside). There’s nothing more frustrating than seeing a player unable to enjoy the game - not because the gameplay is bad - but because a stupid issue got in the way.
The Youtubers Are Coming...
We receive quite a few emails a month from Youtubers who want free codes for the game. That's fine, but I have to keep telling them all we're not marketing the game yet in a big way (I'll save the limelight for Steam). Sometimes that doesn't put them off though. So this month, 2 little Youtubers decided to make videos of the game. They bought the game out of their own pocket so I can’t control what happens after that!
I feel like a patient expecting bad news from his doctor when I watch strangers play our game. Are they going to understand it? Will it bug out? What unexpected thing will they try to do that I would never think of? But both the Youtubers seem to ultimately come away with positive things to say.
Early User Reviews
As the game slowly spreads to new players, I've been collecting positive comments that people post about the game in various places. They're a great motivator and I find it absolutely amazing some people enjoy playing a game we made. Making videogames is still magic to me, so that we're creating a thing people can enjoy is freaky. You can read the latest ones here.
Making and Selling an Indie Game With Anxiety
This might seem like a weird topic to talk about here, but it does affect the making of Atomic Society on a daily basis, so I thought I'd bring it up. Like plenty of others out there, I personally suffer from social anxiety. I'm speaking broadly here, but social interactions, online or otherwise - even with good friends - can cause me to literally pass out with panic. It's rarely ever that bad, but it's often unpleasant. My whole body feels as if something terrible is coming to kill it.
Like most long-term mental illnesses, you learn how to cope with it. Get good at it, and people will even think you are relaxed, when on the inside you're terrified. Making an indie startup has been a huge challenge with this condition. I had to find strangers to work with, work out contracts and make tough business decisions, have daily discussions, including giving negative feedback and disagreeing. I have to reach out and do "networking". I have to be constantly talking to customers on social media.
All of that scares the crap out of me, to point sometimes I just can't function. But I also gladly volunteer to do a lot of the social stuff because as game designer, I understand the vision of what we're doing better than anybody, and I have occasional quiet periods where there's little to do - unlike a programmer who is always overburdened with tasks.
Social anxiety does hold us back. There have been opportunities that I have turned down because I can't face talking to strangers and I market the game sparingly for fear of "bothering people". I also assume everything I write or do is going to be mocked.
Yet here we are, still making and promoting the game. We soldier on. Anxiety slows us down but it can't stop us. And though it might cause us to miss out on opportunities, it can't control if we make a good or bad game. And that's ultimately all that matters. Anxiety might win a few battles, but it can't win the war.
Forum News & Stories
Our website forum was busy this month. A few chatty folks bought the game evidently. There should be plenty of new threads and feedback if you haven’t checked it out for a while, so take a peek if you're curious. In a strange coincidence two recent users happened to be writers and posted their post-apocalyptic fiction. It was quite surreal.
We also had a bit of random publicity because of the new update, which is always pleasant, with a small sites covering it and IndieDB tweeting about us, making us at the time the 2nd most popular game on their entire site! It's always surprising when stuff like that happens.
In Conclusion...
We're hard at work on Update 7 and the first few elements of it have been added, but there's a long way to go. We'll share the first fruits next month. If it all works out, Update 7 (or 8 at worst) could, in theory, be the final one before Early Access. But we'll see how stupidly misguided I was in saying that later in the year.
See you next month!
Dev Blog 18: Prison System, Innocent Folks Executed, Culture Snobs & More!
Prison Sentence Solution
Been a busy month (and a bit)!
We’ve recently added in the second and third ethical solution to the game. Players now have a choice how to deal with citizens who behave in unacceptable ways (whatever "unacceptable" means to you). You can now execute people, lock them up for a long time (simulates life imprisonment), or lock them up for a short time (simulating a light sentence).
I like how uneasy this decision making process feels, how it takes city building to a weird place. One of the primary emotions I want to evoke in this game is unease and black humour.
If you imprison citizens (aside from how that makes you feel as a leader), the main upside is you get your useful citizen back when the sentence is over, and you create jobs (in the form of wardens). The downside is that the building takes up a lot of real-estate, and prisoners need food and water. Build prisons without the means to keep the inmates alive and you’ll have people starving to death in their cells. And if you run out of workers, we made it so the prisoners escape.
Being civilised has its drawbacks...
One of the harder challenges of designing Atomic Society is working out how to turn real-life aspects of society into gameplay. For example, we used to have an exile solution in the game, you’d kick the person out of your town. But in terms of gameplay, it was identical to execution – all that happens in reality is you lose a citizen. It's tough coming up with possibilities that are exciting and unique from a gameplay perspective. At the moment a short prison sentence vs a long sentence is merely a matter of taste and time, but we'll make the choice much more meaningful.
It’s also hard making sure the player even notices the new content! For example I’ve been designing racism (...typing that feels odd). That involves citizens arguing with each other. But how is the player going to know that it's a racist debate going on and they’re not just chatting about the weather? Challenges like that often crop up. We could code the entire DNA structure of a citizen if we really wanted, but it doesn't matter one jot if a player won't notice it. Gotta keep it simple. One thing that will definitely help with this is putting in text box that reports everything that’s going on. It's on the table for Update 7.
Execution Solution Expanded
On a related note, we expanded the death penalty solution this month. Every solution will now have a practical and social downside. After all, no justice system is perfect. Designing these downsides inevitably gets political as we can't code everything in the world and have to make value judgements. For the death penalty I decided that the risk of innocent people being executed for crimes they didn’t commit was the key criticism. Not the only one, but the one that could have the most emotional punch with players.
So we modelled that in Update 6. Now if you build a gallows, there is a chance that an innocent citizen will be arrested and hung. The game gives you a nice guilt-inducing message when this occurs but I’d like to add more to that, such as it telling you if they had a kids, etc. Relationships and breeding are on the cards for the next update so we can revisit it then as it’s about time these citizens started humping.
Culture Critics
I wasn’t really happy that the player could just get away with building one type of morale boosting structure so this month we added in a new Culture Critic effect to the game. Basically, citizens now have different ideas on how to party, some prefer the tavern, others the chapel, etc, and if you don’t build an even amount you’re going to get unhappy patrons. It does seem a little amusing that survivors of a nuclear war give a damn about where they relax, but it does make more sense as your city grows and you have less life 'n' death problems to handle and can work on more leisurely hassles.
New UI Progress
The New UI is almost finished now. This was a long, arduous task but it’s paid off as we’re now. Here’s a few examples of what’s changed:
New storehouse and resource icons:
New object highlighting effect and improved options screen:
New justice solutions picking menu:
Ageing
Citizens are no longer vampires. They now age at a rate that feels realistic considering this is a world where a day lasts 30 seconds. When they get to a certain age they have an increasing chance to die. This is a bit severe at the moment, it means no one lives to be 90, but perhaps that’s realistic after a nuclear war. It definitely makes the game harder though, as you no longer have 300 year old grandmas around to help out. In fact Update 6 is a lot harder with the new faecal-based diseases so I’m having to do some last minute re-balancing to smooth that out before we release.
Salvage Improved
We adjusted how your playable town leader salvages as well this month. He or she now enters the ruin and stays in it until their bags are full, instead of you having to click to keep entering. This makes it less of a hassle, but it’s also a lot more passive. I’m not sure if I like it but it’s definitely less annoying. This is a system that needs to be re-visited at some point down the line. I've never been happy with it but I know it could be good.
New Patch Notes
If you missed it here are the full patch notes for the new version covering everything that's coming. When we're on Steam, where it's much easier to update the game, I'd like to put out smaller updates a bit more regularly than we currently doing. At least that's the plan.
New Song
To celebrate his “baby” being fixed, Dawid sent us a new bonus song for the soundtrack this month. By baby I mean his vintage 1980’s synthesiser that is apparently extremely rare and difficult to repair these days. It took him ages to just find someone with the knowledge, and these babies aren't cheap. This is the same type of synth Vangelis used on the Blade Runner soundtrack. Dawid was heartbroken when it fried but it’s back together now and the fruits of it can be heard on a new track called Nuclear Nights and will be added to Update 6 and of course the special edition soundtrack.
The Month Ahead
We’re now at the stage where it’s the usual case of mopping up the last remaining bugs and tweaking the latest content. I hope that we kick Update 6 out the door in the next 2-3 weeks, assuming everything goes perfectly, (of course it will). Hard to think it’s almost been a year since we put the game on sale.
As for Update 7, we all have big plans for that. It's fun now we’re getting more into the juicy gameplay side of Atomic Society. The basics are all in and we're running out of stuff to redo but our Steam release feels far off still.
I'll see you in the next dev blog.
Pre-Alpha Update 6 - Patch Notes Preview
Here's a list of the the latest content added to Atomic Society over the past 2 months as we journey towards Steam. These features will be applied to the pre-alpha version soon. It’s our goal to get a big update out about every 3 months. This should give you a general idea of what an average Atomic Society patch will feel like when we're on Steam.
New Content:
• Long and short prison sentences added. You now have the option to lock up your citizens as well as execute them.
• New building added: Prison. Required to lock up citizens. Also requires food to feed its inmates or they may starve to death behind bars.
• Difficulty settings added. You can now choose easy, medium, or hard. Difficulty settings currently affects how much loot your character starts with, and how happy citizens are at the start.
• Execution solution improved. Choosing to execute people for certain issues now scares the entire population, reducing the chance all people who might commit that same issue will want to do so. E.g. execute murderers and all potential murderers will be more wary of killing people. In addition to that, the Execution solution now has a negative side-effect: there is a chance of innocent people will be hung for crimes they did not commit. You will be told when this occurs.
• New building added: Latrine. Ensure that your town has enough public toilets or have a rather smelly (and potentially fatal) health risk on your hands as citizens catch faecal diseases.
• 3 new cosmetic buildings added to pretty up your town – statue, public artwork, and flaming torch. Give your town that bit more atmosphere.
• New location added. You can now choose to build a city on a frozen island in the middle of the ocean if you’re feeling hardy.
• New atmospheric synth song added to the soundtrack – Nuclear Nights, by our composer Dawid Dahl.
• Citizens now age and have an increasing chance to die after they turn 70.
• Your Town Leader can now destroy items in his or her inventory, similar to how you can with the storehouse. Useful if you salvage a bunch of junk you don't want to take back to town.
• Improvements to salvaging as the Town Leader. The Town Leader will now salvage continuously until his or her inventory is full. (No need to keep clicking the salvage button anymore!)
• Citizens now use the best/nearest shelter to them. There’s no need to wait for them to traipse halfway across the map to go to their first home. This removes a big bottleneck in gameplay.
• New “Culture Critic” effect added. Citizens are now fussy about the morale structures you make. If you build too many of one type of morale structure, a percentage of your citizens will now disapprove and gain significantly less morale in future. Check your Town Hall stats screen to keep on top of this.
• The UI for the game has been completely rebuilt from scratch to make the whole game more stable, faster, and prettier. You should notice many improvements to every aspect of the UI when you next play and many UI-related bugs have been fixed in the process.
• The UI can now be re-scaled to suit your preference. You’ll find this in the options screen.
• Selection highlighter added. Adds a radioactive glow to anything you have currently selected.
• Mouse cursor now indicates when you have moused over something interactive.
• New pause button added to the UI (pressing P as a shortcut still works).
• We're testing out the hospital building being locked until your town is half a year old to boost the feeling that your town is evolving over time and because this building is so powerful. (The excuse for this is that it takes 6 months for your survivors to master wasteland medicine.)
• Improved auto-employ system again. You can now block off slots if you only want X number of workers at a building.
• The game now warns you when all your storehouses are full.
• Made it so you can build structures much closer to each other for more compact/realistic towns.
Notable Bug Fixes:
• Fixed: Issue with auto-employ that stopped it hiring new migrants.
• Fixed: Moving cloud system was not appearing correctly. All maps should now have moving clouds.
• Fixed: Menu issue that made it hard to click on an item that was behind another item.
• Fixed: Menu issue that would cause a building to be placed instantly.
• Fixed: Bug with migrant spawning that meant they only ever came from one direction. They now approach from various spots on the map.
• Fixed: Typing in your town name using WASD keys no longer moves the camera.
• Fixed: Children and engineers were being counted as unemployed even though you cannot hire them.
• Fixed: Dead bodies were rotting on the ground for a different time depending on how high you had the game speed. They now disappear after 60 in-game days regardless.
• Fixed: Migrants were always arriving with 100% needs regardless. This now differs according to difficulty.
• Fixed: Menu items would sometimes appear on the screen when the game first loaded before you could even use them.
Dev Blog 17: 2017 Begins, Latest New Content Added, Etc...
Dev Blog 17: 2017 Begins, Latest New Content, 2 Years in the Making Review!
Welcome to the 17th monthly dev blog for Atomic Society. Another year done, another begins. 2017 should be one of the most hectic but rewarding years for us yet as Atomic Society gets ready for Early Access in the summer. But there's a lot to do first.
Aftermath of Version 0.0.5
Before Christmas we released the 5th chunky update for the pre-alpha version of Atomic Society, the one that finally brought saving and loading and various other stuff that I've talked about in previous blogs. After it was out I decided to bite the bullet and do a marketing splurge to announce it, which is always a fight against shyness. Showing off that trailer wherever I could think to post it without seeming rude. I’m not sure how I managed to do it all in hindsight as we were all so busy. But, like it or hate it, the marketing paid off (pun intended), enough cover a few small bills at least.
On the downside, we exhausted ourselves getting the version out and even a 2 week Christmas break wasn’t quite enough to recover fully. But a slow and steady January helped and progress is smooth and steady again.
Something positive gets added to the game every single day, big or small, and that's good enough.
2 Years in the Making
Looking back, it's still astonishing to me that it's 2 years since we started work on Atomic Society, even longer since the planning stages began. I’m not sure where all the months went. So much happened, from learning how to use Unity, to forming a company, to recruiting, to putting the pre-alpha on sale and updating it. And that's just half the lessons learnt! One step at a time.
Taking time estimates for anything in game dev and doubling them still proves to be a good rule. I thought we'd have the game in its present state after a year of development. Not that we’re slacking, I just was clueless about how time-consuming it all is. Would I have made a simpler game now, looking back? Probably not. If you're going to spend years of your life making a game, for practically no pay, with no idea of whether it will succeed, make something you love! AS deserves to be finished.
...But game 2 might be a tic-tac-toe simulator.
Work on Version 0.0.6 Has Begun
There’s a lot planned for Pre-Alpha Version 0.0.6, over 20 features of various shapes and sizes. Perhaps too much! I won’t share all of it here, as I don’t want to disappoint if features get delayed. Everything mentioned below has already been added. All in all, I'd say we're about 1/3 of the way done with the new version.
Latrines and Diarrhoea
Back in December, we designed and coded a neat little virus system with different infection rates, and origin points. This month we've expanded and altered it so we can have multiple, different diseases on the go. Atomic Society now features another killer - poor sanitation.
We've implemented a new building to cope with it though, latrines, (which Nani made and Adam coded) are now buildable. Each latrine provides “sanitation coverage” . The bigger the population, the more toilets you need. You'll have to use your imagination for what happens inside. We considered making citizens physically visit the loo but it just slowed the game down too much. For now, you just need to build them, if you don’t have enough, there is a chance citizens will get stomach bugs and diarrhoea, one of the biggest killers in the third-world. On top of corpse-related diseases it's a big problem.
Gameplay wise I'm happy with this new structure, even though it wasn't in the plan (players wanted it). The way we've done it makes it a new challenge, and the way it scales with the population size keeps it interesting.
New Cosmetic Buildings
We've also put in (or rather returned them after they bugged out) 3 new “cosmetic” buildings for players to make. They’re "cosmetic" in the sense that they don’t affect gameplay (although there are ideas on the table). At the moment they're just for players who want to make their own settlement more unique/more atmospheric.
Currently we've added a post-apocalyptic statue, public artwork, and a burning torch that casts a little light on gloomy maps. We’ll add in more of these over time as they’re relatively easy to make so if you’ve got any wishes for props let me know!
With the new latrine, that brings the total number of unique, buildable structures into the pre-alpha version up to 22 and there might be more coming soon.
Difficulty Settings
Nick’s total reconstruction of the game last year paved the way for difficulty settings this month. In Update 6 you’ll be able to start picking how challenging you want the game to be. Some people want a real survival experience where hundreds of lives can be lost if you run out of food. Others want a more chilled building experience where messing up isn’t so fatal. At the moment our 3 difficulty settings affect how much loot you start with, and how weak your survivors and new migrants are. We'll add more flexibility as the game gets settled.
New Map
It's not a new version without a new map. Update 6 brings the second snowy map to the game, "Iceberg". It’s a circular map with 2 levels so you’ll end up building ring shaped cities if you last long enough. The plot it is that the mainland was just too violent and/or radioactive so survivors commandeered a ship to the ruins of an island fishing village. Desperate migrants presumably follow in boats. I’m getting happy with the look of this map, though getting snow to look like snow is tricky!
New UI
This huge task is taking up most of Nick’s time so far in 0.0.6. We've had to remake it from scratch. The look of it was fine, but it was the system behind it that sucked. The old way was essentially to make a custom menu item for everything, which was time consuming, and if you wanted to change the way a button looked, you’d have to go and replace it on every single UI element. It wasn't flexible, slick, and it caused a lot of glitches.
Nick's big rebuild means Update 6 will have a snappier, faster and hopefully bug-free UI. E.g. clicking on things and nothing happening, stuff like that, will be gone. There are also some cool animations you’ll see. It's just generally better to use.
Fingers crossed this is the last big “make it all over from scratch” thing we’ll have to do after the huge rebuild required for saving and loading. There are elements of the game that need a lot of TLC but nothing that needs to be smashed up and started again. I think.
Other Tweaks for Update 6 So Far...
These changes were mostly based on a lot of playtesting and were easy enough to do:
* We've made the storehouse tell you when it’s full of junk.
* You can now build your structures 33.3% closer to each other than before, down to a couple of meters apart. Some people complained that our towns looked too spread out when they saw the trailer. That shouldn't be a problem anymore.
* We've changed how shelters work. It used to be the case that citizens stuck to the first house they were assigned to. This was fine, until the citizen had a job on the far side of town and then had to hike all the way back just to sleep. We’ve found a solution for that which removes the tedium so you should find the game flows a bit better.
* Clouds are back (again!). We at last had breathing space to upgrade our game engine to the latest version and it fixed the glitch with our moving cloud system so you’ll now have a more atmosphere in your towns. The engine upgrade may also boost performance for certain players.
And of course there are plenty of bug fixes, nothing too exciting, you can find out about them in the patch notes when they arrive.
The next 2 imminent things on the list are making citizens age up properly, evolving from kids to adults, and finishing off the execution solution so that the society-wide problems it creates are working.
There's more to come after that but I better shut up for now!
Next Month
As I said, we're about 1/3 of the way through the next pre-alpha version, so maybe 1-2 more dev blogs before it’s out? When our pre-alpha version is really good, we'll come over to Steam.
In next month’s blog things will have progressed enough I can share more info on what's in store. There are much bigger features planned for this version but it all depends on how the UI rebuild goes.
The more things change the more they stay the same. Here's to another year of hard work and successful updates!
