Dogs Of War Vu
Sim/Strategy/War => Games Discussion => Topic started by: Asid on October 21, 2018, 01:40:40 PM
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(https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steam/apps/514500/header.jpg?t=1539807769)
Society is dead. So remake it. Build and rule your own post-apocalyptic society. Decide the laws and morals of the survivors. Overcome challenges and threats from the wasteland. What kind of society will you make?
Homepage: Here (http://www.farroadgames.com/)
Official forum: Here (http://farroadgames.proboards.com/)
Steam: Here (https://store.steampowered.com/app/514500/Atomic_Society/)
YouTube: Here (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC3Zr-kL1K5l1YCoLpgXk5YA)
Single Player
Steam Launch Trailer
https://youtu.be/NiXgKuSsAe0
About
(https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steam/apps/514500/extras/Steam_Gif_1.jpg?t=1539807769)
SOCIETY IS DEAD.
SO REMAKE IT.
What kind of society will you make? After nuclear war destroyed civilization, the time has come to rebuild.
What will you legalize, and what will you forbid?
Run society the way you want, good or bad, and create a successful settlement.
Keep hundreds of survivors alive in a dangerous wasteland where life is always hard.
(https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steam/apps/514500/extras/Steam_Gif_3.jpg?t=1539807769)
CURRENT FEATURES (More Will Be Added in Future Updates)
• CRIME. Citizens who commit crimes and a wide range of social issues as you play.
• JUDGMENT. Act as judge over a range of social issues including abortion, murder, vegetarianism, drug use, cannibalism, and several other controversial topics.
• PUNISHMENT. Choose between execute, long or short prison sentences, tolerate and even encourage for all the issues that happen in your town. Be whatever kind of leader you want.
• BELIEF. Pick what you believe in and share that with others through violence, exile or education so that your laws are listened to.
(https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steam/apps/514500/extras/Steam_Gif_2.jpg?t=1539807769)
• OUTSIDERS. Build defences to keep raiders out of your town for good. Or make deals with them so they won't attack you.
• CONTROL. Create and name your own leader character. Use this person to help build your town, or explore the world for salvage and special upgrades. Walk around your town.
• SURVIVE. Starting out with nothing, slowly build a large settlement that can keep hundreds of people fed, watered, healthy, housed and entertained, if you can. Convert ruined houses and offices into useful buildings or loot them for supplies!
(https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steam/apps/514500/extras/Steam_Gif_5.jpg?t=1539807769)
OTHER FEATURES
• Custom difficulty mode lets you tweak the experience to be as brutal or gentle as you like.
• Play just for fun, as a sandbox simulation, or complete set challenges to build the ultimate settlement.
• Over 33 types of structure to consider building, each with a unique appearance and use.
• 9 huge, handcrafted environments to try and build a town in ranging from deserts, to tropical islands, to snowy mountains.
• A large degree of randomisation to make replaying and building a different society challenging and rewarding.
• Face up to the problems of poor sanitation, plague and how to treat the elderly.
(https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steam/apps/514500/extras/Steam_Gif_4.jpg?t=1539807769)
Mature Content Description
Atomic Society involves judging controversial real-life social and political issues, including abortion, sexuality, murder and several others. It also allows players to set laws and punishments in ways some players might find disturbing or offensive, though you are free to build society the way you believe.
(https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steam/apps/514500/ss_212a8cf39a8909d56520811a8e1fa0148785f5b8.1920x1080.jpg?t=1539807769)
(https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steam/apps/514500/ss_6924a5472c054f069102057aed2c94e3891152eb.1920x1080.jpg?t=1539807769)
(https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steam/apps/514500/ss_c64a3f555929dd4ea915770596cf2a8d9de967d4.1920x1080.jpg?t=1539807769)
(https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steam/apps/514500/ss_6b3cbaaccaaca5f7377a6887e4ca7184fc160cb5.1920x1080.jpg?t=1539807769)
(https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steam/apps/514500/ss_cdf5344b1764b33a9667d6ceba4c4fefc398c8af.1920x1080.jpg?t=1539807769)
(https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steam/apps/514500/ss_245e35ad9e8f26c2d47bb13452a357fcb565bee2.1920x1080.jpg?t=1539807769)
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48 hours since launch, slowly recovering!
17 October - Far Road Games
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. :)
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Update 1.0.1.2 - Bug Fixes
Atomic Society - Far Road Games
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 include 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.
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Dev Blog #32: First Big Update In The Works + Launch Reflections
(https://i.imgur.com/ldNcI6Yl.jpg)
It’s been a hectic 2 weeks since we began our Early Access journey. In that time collected and sorted through hundreds and hundreds of comments, released a necessary bug-fixing patch, and we’re hard at work on the first big content update for Atomic Society, which will address some of that feedback.
For those who are new to Atomic Society and don't know, every month I release a dev blog about what it’s like making your first ever indie game (this month I've written 2). These blogs also cover new stuff we’re working on. I’ve been doing this ever since the game was a few words in a notebook.
If you don’t care about the behind-the-scenes stuff/personal ramblings and just want to find out about the new content coming to the game, skip about halfway down to the new content section (the title is in caps).
October 2018: The Craziest Month So Far
Last time I wrote a blog, we were a few days away from launching, and had no idea at all what the future held. Of course I hoped the game would find a a sustainable audience, but every indie dev wants that, and the odds of standing out in such a crowded marketplace are tiny, especially without a publisher. I literally had no idea if we would be noticed at all.
Well, to cut a long story short, the Early Access launch went better than anybody on the team could've dreamed about (albeit we had low expectations!). We know there’s a long way to go with this game, but thanks to all the players who took a chance on the game already, we’ll soon be able to dedicate more time and money to making Atomic Society than we’ve ever been able to do so before. We can now consider going part-time with our day jobs and afford all the essential things we need to finish the game.
(https://i.imgur.com/lxoI8Uml.jpg)
The Build Up
Launching this game on Early Access was probably the most stressful moment of my entire life.
The stress really began a few days before. Putting the final touches to the launch trailer, then endless hours writing emails to press, while working late into the night doing the final testing took a heavy toll as I knew it would. The last improvement to the game (a fix by Nick that improved save game times over 90%) went into the game at 3am on launch day. After that we couldn’t physically do anything else. We just had to sit back and hope. If we’d missed something in that tired blur of work, our entire career might be sunk before it had started. At least that’s how it felt.
We had one sign of hope when Keralis made a positive video about the game before launch, and our wishlist numbers went up by about 4-5k (we were averaging about 100 new wishlists a week before then). Maybe things were going to be okay? It was really hard to tell what the word of mouth about the game would be.
After about 1 hour of sleep, the 3 of us gathered at my home for that clichéd indie dev team launch moment. It felt like we should be together. Unfortunately Adam (our second part-time coder) lives in the US, so he couldn’t join us but he was there in spirit. We ate pizza. We waited. We tried to make jokes. Nick coped with stress by falling asleep. Nani wanted to fight. I felt physically ill. With about 60 minutes to go, my heart rate was literally racing around 180bpm while I was just sitting down. We chose to launch at 4pm, which is when we felt America would be waking up - and because Nani had to work nights at her day job. After counting down the final seconds we hit the magic green button.
Outcome Equals
There is that weird period after launching. Everything goes silent and you’re just waiting for random internet people to either rant at you because it doesn’t work and/or they hate it… Or you find out it does work (for most people) and lots of people quite like what you’re doing. We were extremely relieved to be in the second camp and got to see our little game on the front page of Steam. Seeing a game you've made at home on a shoestring budget outsell Assassin's Creed even for a tiny moment in history was fun.
Extremely relieved probably doesn’t cut it. I’ve wanted to create games ever since I was a kid. It was the first proper career I ever went for as an adult. But things didn’t work out for me in the AAA business. I didn't want to crunch for years making games I didn't believe in, and ended up drifting around in a dozen other blue collar jobs until I finally stumbled across the right opportunity and people to turn a game idea of mine into reality. It's been a rough road. However, seeing a childhood dream become reality this month with any degree of success feels like weight off my shoulders. I've finally proved to myself I can make an okay game (even in its present rough state) and maybe we’ll even be able to afford to keep doing this. It's really humbling. Life doesn't always work out this way.
It hasn't been easy or fast. Nobody recommends making a game like this as their first ever full software project. Experienced indie devs have warned us to stop on more than one occasion, but we wanted to make Atomic Society. So what else could we do?
(https://i.imgur.com/Vy38Y6ll.jpg)
Aftermath
The weeks after the launch were comparatively easy, but still tense and emotional. There was one surreal night to celebrate, but work had to go on. We really wanted to get a bug-fixing patch released within a week to show we take problems with the game seriously, and fortunately Nick was able to solve the last remaining serious glitches in that space of time and we've released our first small update already.
While that was going on, we had to work out if great launch week would translate into a sustainable income. Obviously the vast majority of sales come within the first week or 2. Afterwards the sales curve goes down and down and you just sit there hoping it’ll going to level out somewhere sustainable that you can get by on. So far I think we're going to manage, but we're not taking anything for granted.
And lastly, in the weeks after I launch, I had to face some personal challenges. Being a shy, overly people-pleasing kind of guy, I had to cope with a much, much bigger audience on Steam and the obvious fact not everybody can like the game. Most people are great even if they have big problems with AS, they want to help the game better and they phrase it that way. And some people just want to personally insult me and the game. Bad reviews happen, and rightly or wrongly I read them. If I’m feeling particularly masochistic, I even read the refund comments. I know this happens to every game, and I didn't expect our review score to be as high as it is, but I've had to stop being so sensitive.
I’m actually finding it therapeutic in a shock-therapy sort of way. I’m still anxious every single time I check our Steam discussion forum, and wince when I open certain threads, but it's getting easier each day. Maybe I'll finally get some thicker skin at long last!
And on the plus side, the community around the game continues to be really level-headed around the political/social side of AS. I thought I might have to be moderating comments, but people from all walks of life seem to be enjoying it for what it is and living out the post-apocalyptic fantasy.
(https://i.imgur.com/0Or3XIYl.jpg)
NEW CONTENT PROGRESS
There has been so much feedback on the game since we launched that it took me weeks just to process it all and turn it into concrete steps we can work on. I still have hours and hours of YouTube footage to go through and study, but we’ll get there. It’s been eye-opening finding out what so many different types of people want, and I’m glad we’re on Early Access so we can do something about it.
The next content update is going to be a mixture of things. Some of it will be tweaking and adjusting things that players have (quite rightly) suggested and requested. And the rest will be adding in more of the features we really want to add to flesh out the experience.
Here’s some of the things that we’ve been working right now. Rest assured this is not the full list of what’s coming in the next update by a long shot, it’s just the things we’re working on over the last week as we put it together. We tend to release big, chunky updates that hopefully make it worthwhile for existing players to restart the game.
Unlimited Population & Respawning Loot Ruin
I guess the "story" of Atomic Society is about creating a little township and society that could be the seed of a new nation. Each update we make should increase the time it takes to get that little township going and make it a more epic journey. However, we understand there's still a lot of content missing, and some players just want to keep building and growing their town forever, so this week Adam has been working on making migration to your town essentially infinite. In the next update you'll be able to keep growing and build a town of 1000s if that's what you want. There will still be a "story" goal to get about 350 people and build that small settlement (and we'll expand the things you need to do to get there), but after that you can keep growing. Be warned though the game is not optimised yet and it is going to take a beefy PC to build a huge town with all those people in it!
Letting players build mega-towns obviously means changing how loot works in the game too, because right now each map only has so much salvage on it. Therefore Adam is also busy tweaking the ruins so they respawn with loot. We're balancing it so you’ll still have to venture deeper into the wasteland as the game goes by, but eventually the ruins nearest you will get their loot back. We’re also adding in a few extra ruins in spaces where we think players need to travel too far to get them.
We have some early plans for alternate ways to get salvage coming in future updates as well, but respawning loot is the first step.
Day/Night Cycle
This has been on our to-do list for ages and Nick is finally working on this. It’s just a cosmetic feature obviously but it should add some atmosphere to the game in the next update. Don’t worry, it will be optional. We’re going to let you pause the sun if you don’t like playing at night, or you want to freeze the game with a cool sunset, etc. It should be fun seeing the sun and shadows move around your town though.
(https://i.imgur.com/0Or3XIYl.jpg)
Rebindable Controls
Nick has just finished this feature in the past few days, and it will be included in the next update. It's one of those things we just ran out of time to put into the launch version. You’ll soon be able to assign anything to whatever you want. I’m hoping this will solve a few people’s issues with our own choice of controls.
Lots of UI Tweaks
Nani has been really busy this week tinkering with the UI. As people requested it, we have made the text size bigger throughout the game, making it more comfortable to read no matter what your monitor size, and various elements of the UI has been made more visually interesting and we’re rewording things that didn’t make sense. All these little changes add up. We know there's a lot of polish to add.
Rebalancing Work
Every version we adjust and improve the balance of the game. So far medicine has been made stronger, as it didn’t last long enough, and some of the side-effects of picking certain laws (such as innocent execution) have been toned down. We have some new buildings in mind as well which will create new challenges.
Other Feedback
As I mentioned there's a lot more planned for this update, and several more updates to come. We’ve been hearing a lot from players that they’d like to see the religion system in the game expanded, and they’d like the laws and social issues feature to be deepened as well. All I can say about this right now is we totally agree and we'll do what we can. We also hear you about the camera, and that you’d like more info on what your buildings are producing and doing and who’s working where, etc.
Conclusion
Expect this first major update to arrive in December, in time for Christmas. I know that’s a 2 month wait since launch, but it takes 2 months to get in the big changes we really want to make and to give people a substantial leap forward in the game. I will be posting here in the meantime though so you can see how progress is continuing. If something happens and we can release it sooner, I'll obviously let people know.
Thanks again to those who decided to support development and offer their time to make a review, give feedback and constructive criticism. We have more enthusiasm and resources to make the game than we've ever had before, and we're going to keep pouring all the love and time we've got into expanding this game.
I'll be in touch, and if you want even more up to date news on development try our Discord[discord.gg] or Twitter as I'm around there on a daily basis.
Thanks for reading.
(https://i.imgur.com/44eu2Yyl.jpg)
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Update 0.1.0.3 Released (Endless population, loot changes, bug fixes more)
Atomic Society - Far Road Games
It's been a busy month and we're pleased to say the first of many coming content updates is now available for Atomic Society. Your game should update automatically.
Major Changes:
• Unlimited city population sizes. You can now build a huge settlement if you want. There is still an in-game “story” goal to achieve 350 citizens, but you are free to have as many people as you can keep alive and your computer can handle! Please note the game is not properly optimised yet and building a huge settlement of 1000s will require a powerful PC and increase save times considerably, but you can now expand forever.
• Ruins now slowly (after 3 in-game years) can be salvaged again. This means you can never totally run out of loot totally and can a build a huge settlement forever if you wish, although you will still have to keep searching deeper and deeper into the wasteland until they’re ready to salvage again. This change allows players to keep build gigantic towns.
• New custom difficulty option added that lets you decide how quickly ruins should respawn with loot. If you set this difficulty slider to its lowest, as soon as a ruin is empty it will refill with loot in a matter of days – essentially letting you play with infinite nearby resources if you want to build to your heart’s content.
• You can now (provided you have built at least 1 guard tower) stop migrants from coming to your town. A button has been added to main the UI panel (bottom left) to do this. Feel free to use this feature if you feel overwhelmed with dead bodies, or just think you’ve grown large enough. Be wary though, it will take time for word to spread that your town is open/closed for strangers, so plan ahead.
• Rebindable controls. All the main controls in the game can now be fully rebound to whatever you want. The tutorial will also now automatically adapt to the keys you’ve picked.
• There is now a new third method for handling raiders called “Ignore”. If choose this option you will simply refuse to speak to the raiders again until they actually manage to do some damage to your settlement. If they do damage you, their demand menu will pop up again. This will prevent the raiding text boxes from popping up when you’re fully safe and defended.
Other Changes:
• The max zoom out distance of the camera has been greatly increased on all maps letting you see a lot further.
• A new interface option has been added to hide the “You exiled believers!” text box if it bothers you. The duration between exiles has also been increased so it happens once per in-game month.
• The font size has been increased throughout the game, to make it easier to read on smaller screens.
• Medicine (both salvaged and homemade) now lasts twice as long, so you need less of it to keep your medical buildings stocked.
• Various menus have had visual improvements to make them more visually pleasing/understandable and certain icons have been re-made to make their functions more understandable.
• The “Mormon” religion has been re-named to “Church of Jesus Christ” as per latest information.
• Some new ruins have been added in certain places on various maps where we felt it was too hard to get specific resources.
• The chance of all side-effects occurring (such as innocent execution) has been toned down slightly.
• The chance of terrorism if you torture people into converting has been reduced.
• Certain aspects of the belief system feature have been re-worded to make it more logical/understandable.
• Adjusted the belief menu so you can see all 5 religions without having to scroll down.
• A warning has been added to the frozen island map description to warn players you should only pick this one if you’re an experienced player.
• Improved a ground texture on the Iceberg map.
• Citizens no longer clip inside of each other when they exit a building but find a clear space instead.
• Corrected various typos.
Bug Fixes:
• Fixed a bug where the Town Leader could get permanently stuck underground if a building collapsed on them just as they entered it.
• Fixed a bug where the camera was still snapping to the leader when you chose to educate/torture people, even if you had disabled this option.
• Fixed a bug where custom difficulty settings did not always persist through a save and load. This fix will not apply to existing save games unfortunately, only to new custom games.
• Fixed an issue where goals could sometimes stay ticked off if you completed them and then started a new game.
• Fixed a bug with the cooldown timer for changing your belief decisions looking odd after loading a save game.
• Fixed text elements being truncated on citizen’s bios, such as long song titles.
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Thanks to everybody who took the time to tell us of bug reports or gameplay feedback during our first month on Steam. It's been really helpful.
I'm hopeful we can put out another update on this scale around Christmas time, and then early next year we will take a little longer to work on some bigger changes/features for the game such as new buildings/social choices.
Best wishes & happy playing,
Scott & The Team
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I didn't feel confortable with the game. It looked much raw and the UI was very crude and simplistic. Also, besides these considerations, it felt somewhat too much mechanic, with no "atmosferic feeling" at all. I would give it 4/10.
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I didn't feel confortable with the game. It looked much raw and the UI was very crude and simplistic. Also, besides these considerations, it felt somewhat too much mechanic, with no "atmosferic feeling" at all. I would give it 4/10.
Hi Selva
Thanks for your feedback :thumbsup
The game is in early access and a lot is to come. Maybe try it in a few months? Let me know if you have any more thoughts on the game.
Regards
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New Update 1.0.1.4 Released! (Patch Notes)
22 December - Far Road Games
It's been another month and here's another update of refinements and small improvements. There's a lot of little changes in this patch but they should add up to create a smoother and more enjoyable game.
We're continuing to work on much bigger gameplay features which are keeping us busy and will be released throughout next year. Our main focus for now is to increase the replayability and length of the core gameplay experience.
Thanks to everybody who's supported us since we launched back in mid-October. This is our first ever game, and it's a labour of love, and we're very excited to keep building on what exists now, polishing and expanding the game in 2019. Thanks to you all we're able to finish this game and make it the best post-apocalyptic simulation we can, within our means.
I'll be in touch soon with a new dev blog, outlining what's in store for 2019 and as always I'll check in on the forums regularly in case anybody has questions/feedback.
Happy Christmas everybody, and I hope new players enjoy the little Christmas discount currently on offer.
VERSION 1.0.1.4 PATCH NOTES:
Changes:
• A new 6th goal has been added to have 60% of the town convert to your belief system (this new goal will only appear in new games, it won’t appear in old save games).
• When your leader’s inventory is full, a button now appear over all storehouses in your town so you can easily click on it and send your leader back home.
• When you open the menu for any workplace the game will now highlight its workers and incoming users.
• A smoke effect has been added to scrap mounds, to help you more easily spot them when a building collapses.
• A progress bar now appears when you are torturing or educating believers so you can see how long it will take.
• A periodic reminder message now appears whenever your latrine coverage gets too low.
• A “?” icon now appears over the hidden story skeletons when you get close to one, to make them slightly easier to find.
• Various messages in the news feed have been made less spammy so it’s easier to follow what’s going on in big towns.
• The “Made in Unity” splash screen has been removed so the game starts up faster.
• Tooltips have been added to the options screen explaining what the various things do.
• The various belief systems in your town are now sorted from most amount of believers to least amount.
• Added a text alert when you enable or disable migration.
• Added a text alert when you achieve the population count.
• Moved up the “Core Issues” section of the stats up nearer the top as it is more important to see.
• The default chance of women having an abortion has been increased.
• Raiders now demand fewer supplies to make this request somewhat more tempting.
• Storehouses are now at slightly greater risk of being destroyed by raiders if left undefended (they are now more in-line with other buildings).
(https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/27205314/af61f3dece3127b637eb473fbebe4f0229f2bc95.jpg)
Bug Fixes:
• Fixed a bug where the game was sometimes incorrectly reporting how many unemployed citizens you had available, and idle citizens weren’t always getting jobs.
• Fixed a bug where the stats screen still showed you had undefended buildings even when your town was fully protected. This was caused by those buildings were being protected by a garrison (not a guard tower).
• Fixed a bug where the game speed number did not show up at the specific resolution 2560X1080
• Fixed a bug where the cooldown timer for changing your belief decisions looked broken after saving and loading.
• Fixed a bug where certain one-off text messages appeared again after loading a save game, e.g. “you executed your first citizen!”
• Fixed a bug where certain text messages inviting you to change your laws were did always appear.
• Fixed a bug with breeding rates decreased dramatically after all goals had been completed.
(https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/27205314/fd7f20853b843c85207687aa1194be25481e78d4.jpg)
I'll see you next year with plenty more to come. Happy Christmas!
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Dev Blog #33: Atomic Society in 2019
15 January - Far Road Games
(https://i.imgur.com/GWaq9a6l.jpg)
Welcome to the first dev blog of 2019, which will look at what’s in next store for Atomic Society, and how things are going on behind-the-scenes as we make the slow journey through Early Access.
What's Up Next?
Right now we are hard at work on another little content patch for the game. It's going quite well and I guess it's about 2-3 weeks away from being released.
Update 4 will bring a couple of features we didn't have time to finish before the Christmas break, including an (optional) day/night cycle feature, which makes the game world feel more alive and realistic, and the much-requested employee priority panel - so you can decide for yourself what buildings get staffed ahead of the others - and a bunch of other tweaks and bug fixes that players have told us about (thanks to all our volunteer bug reporters!) It's another small step forward for the game.
After that we plan to dig in and start making some really big changes...
(https://i.imgur.com/JZJYFHhl.jpg)
Picking Goals For 2019
One problem was working out what those big changes should be.
We're not short of ideas. We have at least 300 of them sitting in our database, waiting until we have time to work on them. And that's not including the suggestions players give us. We could just keep adding them and it would improve the game, but it wouldn't go far enough. It would pad out the game, but it wouldn't fix it. We need to go deeper...
I have spent the last 2 weeks just studying game design again. It's not a topic you can stop learning about. It's why this blog is late. I've actually had re-write this whole thing as I keep learning new things.
Sometimes my brain decides it's ready to level up and I have these learning phases. We've never made a game before, and what you're seeing or playing is the product of gut instinct. Occasionally, I have to retreat and do some homework. This usually involves taking great games and pulling them apart to see how they work, writing down what I've learnt, and then starting all over because the learning doesn't stop.
Fortunately, I think see what the problem is now and it is treatable...
It's the Economy, Stupid
I know Atomic Society isn't deep enough, and adding more stuff isn't going to fix it.
The problem lies within the 3 pillars of the game aka the gameplay loop. I've really neglected one aspect of it, which is the resource-gathering side (the others being keeping people alive, and keeping your town running efficiently). For example, we have about 10 buildings that involve keeping people alive and happy. We have... 1 resource building (scavenger's hut). Oops.
Realising things like this slaps you in the face, and you wonder how you never noticed it before, but that's what learning on the job is like. Sometimes you feel pretty dumb, but it's rewarding at the same time, gaining expertise.
So, for the time being (or until I make more discoveries) our plan is to get the next little patch I mentioned already out (hopefully this month), and then go away and make a considerably larger patch that will expand and improve the resource production/gathering branch of the game. It would also be a fine time to introduce the barter/trade system I've been thinking of.
Hopefully a patch solely devoted to the resource aspect of the game will make it a lot more fun. There's only one way to find out...
I've still got so much to learn and time is always against us. We'll do what we can to make this game a lot better by the end of 2019. It's a relief to me anybody likes what we've made so far. I just tend to see the flaws and get depressed. Onwards and upwards!
(https://i.imgur.com/XfEn7cAl.jpg)
3 months Since Launch
It's been (almost) 3 months since I pressed the big green button and found out if there's anybody in the world who wants to buy our unfinished game. It then took us another month to get paid. That was a nice day. We did well for a bunch of first-timers and for the first time, we can actually pay ourselves on a regular basis. I still don't think anybody on the team has absorbed the fact we're getting paid to make games until the money runs out. We've been doing this as a glorified hobby for so long that it won't sink in. I keep expecting to find out it's all been a practical joke.
Earning some money forced us to do some basic chores, which slowed us down a bit in December. For example, Nick desperately needed new hardware, and Nani had to handle a lot of boring paperwork that goes with running a company while not being arrested.
Still, we managed to put out a patch before Christmas, and I can't even remember what was in it now it feels so long ago https://steamcommunity.com/games/514500/announcements/detail/1716333469329964775
Then we took a break for Christmas, which was nice, because we could actually afford to survive Christmas this year. And now we're back at work again, like nothing's changed.
I don't feel a professional game developer, even though I guess I am now. I literally have my dream job, but everything is the same. I still kept my day job as a janitor because surviving off Steam sales is scary. The money train could stop at any time. We do have enough money to finish the game now though. Work-wise things are just going to be the same as they were, but with less fear and stress. I'm very grateful, it just all feels like a dream still, and ultimately the only thing that matters to me is making a game I'm proud of.
(https://i.imgur.com/KGP0ACLl.jpg)
First Steam Sale
Speaking of money, we decided to try our first Steam sale over Christmas. We weren't sure about doing it. It felt a bit soon, but we had to find out if they're as good as people say. I can confirm they are. Our sales went up a lot and I discovered a ton of people buy games on Christmas Day, which is funny because that's exactly what I do as a treat to myself. We will probably do little discounts during the big sale events from now on if people are waiting. I don't want to go and do big discounts now until the game is finished. We still have a long way to go.
Other Plans for 2019
I've already mentioned the core focus of improving the resource side of the game. There needs to be a resource production flow before you can build and expand your town.
After that it's hard to say because the game will be different in 3-4 months and I'll have to review our plans then.
Some things are guaranteed. There will always be be bug-fixes coming. We could spend months just fixing bugs.
We also definitely need to translate the game, or at least enable people to translate it for us (depending on what we can afford). We have started preparing for this at least. We have to move every single piece of text into the game online so it can be edited easily and then downloaded back into the game, which is boring work but almost done now.
My concern is that we're still in Early Access and the text in the game is changing all the time. So a translation will be out of date all the time. We'll figure something out. I'm sorry it can't be sooner but we will get there one day.
Apart from that, as I mentioned we have 300+ ideas to review. That sounds like a lot, but 90% of them are probably awful. In terms of big changes I've started thinking about a campaign mode to go along with the sandbox mode we have currently. I'd like there to be a little mini-story on each map with some moral dilemmas. That won't be for a while though, if at all.
(https://i.imgur.com/zw48Qebl.jpg)
Looking Back At Crazy 2018
Beginning a new year is also a time to look back at the last one.
First up, I just want to thank everybody who decided to buy our game. I'll probably never get to meet anybody who's actually bought our game but I don't take it for granted. Every sale is a surprise.
I have no regrets about last year, thank God. We had to get on Steam because we were going mad just thinking about it. If releasing a game is like giving birth, we'd been pregnant for over 2 years. It needed to come out.
I think we did quite well with our Steam launch considering marketing is evil voodoo. We don't have any marketing budget or knowledge, but YouTube took care of everything. There were enough big, positive YouTube videos of the game and that is, apparently, all you need.
Being on Steam has not been much fun for someone like me with really thin skin and a hobby for worrying about things that don't matter. I knew it was going to be tough. I don't really have a solution for it except ignore it all, and if you feel brave, visit the forums. Maybe that's the best outcome. Would I be happier if more people like the game? I don't think so. I'd be smugger. Make games because you love making games.
I am glad we didn't go with a publisher. Aside from the money involved, I don't think having a huge spotlight shining on an unfinished game is necessarily a good thing. We made the right choices, for us at least.
I'm okay with the time everything is taking because I know how hard it's been for the team at times. We are a bunch of oddballs and there is a reason Atomic Society is a game about persevering against the odds to create something that ends up looking like a shanty town. It will probably be a 5 year project by the time we're done (2 more than I planned) but making games is hard and running a company is quite hard too, especially when it started as a random post by me on Reddit asking if anybody knew how to code.
Conclusion
The thing I'm looking forward to now is finishing the game, which I'm hoping we can do by around this time next year, at least in terms of content. Polishing and bug-fixing will take longer no doubt. I have no plans beyond that except perhaps to apply the heaps and heaps of knowledge we've gained making this game to a new project. We'll have to see how it goes.
The nice thing is I love making games, more than ever. I love games more than ever. I always have this fear that I'll get bored of something and move on, but I never get bored of this. Even after all these years.
I'll do my best to make a new blog next month. The next update will come first.
Thanks for reading.
(https://i.imgur.com/N4Zg7l3l.jpg)
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Mini Update – New Version Progress
24 Feb - Far Road Games
Hi everyone. The next update for Atomic Society is now in the last stages of development. Apologies for lack of contact. I'd been hoping the new version could’ve been released a few weeks ago (hence holding off on making any announcements) but we hit the usual bug explosion at the end of a version. However, the fixes are going well, and as soon as we're sure we’ve caught the last few bugs, we’ll upload everything to Steam. Thanks to everybody for their patience. If we hit any more unexpected snags I’ll let you know.
Everything you see below in the patch notes below has already been finished by us, it’s a just a case of ironing out the last few bugs with it so we can safely release it. The patch notes will probably grow a little bit as well because new things are still being added.
Meanwhile, aside from this update, we've also finished a lot of the design work for future improvements to the resource/economy side of the game, and other more substantial gameplay changes, which has also taken a lot of careful planning, but is now done. We’ll start working on that as soon as this next patch is out. We're not going anywhere. :)
We'll get the new goodies to you as soon as possible.
Upcoming Patch Notes Preview:
• Flogging solution added. The final ethical solution has now been added to the game and you can choose to flog your citizens for their crimes if that sounds right to you. Flogging is a quick but violent solution that will greatly reduce the health and morale of the punished person.
(https://i.imgur.com/1yOAaXYl.jpg)
• Gateway building added. A new building has been added. The Gateway acts as an optional gathering spot for new migrants to your town, rather than them all gathering at the first storehouse you make. This will make it much easier to create multiple small towns and to spread out where people arrive.
(https://i.imgur.com/e9yn7IRl.jpg)
• Worker priority panel added. A new panel is now available at the Town Hall once you have built one. This panel shows you every building currently in your town, how many workers it has, and how many it needs. You can tick boxes beside the workplaces and any unemployed people you have will go and work in those structures first.
(https://i.imgur.com/BTpdZ7Pl.jpg)
• New (optional) day/night cycle feature added. The sun now slowly moves around the sky on each map, causing the lighting and shadows to change realistically and creating moody nights. If you don't like the lighting changing, you can pause the sun’s rotation, or even adjust it manually using a slider to get it just the way you want it. This helps the world feel more alive.
(https://i.imgur.com/7l6qbHZm.jpg)
(https://i.imgur.com/Q6UmMYAm.jpg)
(https://i.imgur.com/frdA2UFm.jpg)
Bug Fixes
- Fixed: A rare bug where the need bars of your could appear to crash to zero suddenly and people would randomly die of thirst.
- Fixed: A bug where sometimes the raiders would stop interacting with you entirely if you saved and loaded after ignoring them.
- Fixed: A potential memory leak problem that could cause the game to slow down slightly over time.
Other Changes
- New building placement guides added. You can now see the range and radius of more buildings when placing them, such as repair shacks, prisons, etc. This should help you see if your buildings are in range of repair workers...
(https://i.imgur.com/qyqnuvdl.jpg)
- The optional camera mode is now the default camera mode. The camera no longer automatically snaps to the town leader when giving orders and you can boss the leader around like an RTS unit. If you prefer the old way, you can switch to it in the options. (We have already started the work on a much bigger camera overhaul as well - coming in a future update).
- (This change will only appear in new games, not old saves) The missing side-effects for picking punishments/laws have now all been implemented. We tried to make this backwards compatible with old saves but sadly it wasn't possible technically.
- Several new help messages have been added the first time you place certain structures if they have unique gameplay features that new players need to know about.
- Enforcer/execution status text improvements
- New sound effects added in certain places.
- Various buildings have had their prices and performance somewhat adjusted. In general food and drink production has been slowed down slightly to make it harder to get a surplus.
- The raiders now come at 250 citizens (up 50).
- Migration speed has been slowed down slightly to avoid too many unemployed.
- (This change will only appear in new games, not old saves) The demands of the raiders have been reduced greatly to make building guard towers less important. It should now be possible to have a “peaceful” life surrendering to them now, if you want to give in. We felt it should be possible to complete the game being a vassal state of the raiders if you want to avoid building defences.
- Buildings now have a slightly longer durability before they need repairs. In addition to that scavenger huts no longer need repairs at all.
- (This change will only appear in new games, not old saves) The text and impact of some of the side-effects when you change your laws has been improved somewhat.
- Various small UI tweaks have been made here and there to tidy things up, new graphics, icons, etc.
- And we have now finished all the behind-the-scenes work on getting the game text files ready to translate (which was a huge task) and can move onto the next step of actually translating the words in upcoming versions. Stay tuned.
Looking forward to sharing all this with you soon. :)
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Dev Blog #34: About Recent Delays…
26 MAR - FAR ROAD GAMES
Firstly, I want to apologise for the slowness of updates.
We are quite behind schedule at the moment due to some significant health issues with one of our team (we’re 4 part-time friends in total making the game) that has essentially brought all work to a halt at the moment. We are currently sitting on a 98% complete update to the game but can’t fix the last few issues with it until our partner (who is an extremely vital part of the team) recovers and is able to pick up where they left off.
I’m really sorry for this delay. I’ve been wracking my brain trying to think of anything to do, but releasing the current new update in its present state would simply break the game for everybody.
The patch notes in last month’s update represent the work that is 98% finished and ready to go. I desperately want to get it out as soon as possible, but unfortunately we can’t do anything except wait and hope for our friend’s recovery.
We are fully committed to finishing Atomic Society, all of us. We were actually just getting to the fun part of adding new content and buildings, etc, and now this has issue has happened. Obviously it’s not great for our little business at all - which we depend on - but there’s nothing we can do and nobody’s to blame. This has come out of nowhere.
As soon as we’re able, we will put out the now almost-finished new update and then hopefully get stuck into a larger, game-changing update with numerous improvements to the economy/resource side of the game and more late-game stuff to make. These features are all designed and ready to enter production. We’ve been trying to do what we can here and there around the edges, but we’re pretty limited in what we can do.
It’s a tough situation, especially for the sick person on our team. You can imagine how they feel being the cause of this delay. Our first priority is to support them and aid their recovery, because this game wouldn’t exist without them. But we can only wait and see what happens right now. It’s not in our hands for now.
I don’t really have much more to say in this dev blog, making the shortest I’ve ever written since we started, but it’s important people know we’ve hit this health snag and hopefully things can get back to normal in a week or two and because we’ve got a lot more post-apocalyptic goodness to come!
I’ll keep everybody informed and I’m always around on our Discord server if people have questions.
Thanks for your patience and support. This isn't a "we're done" post by any measure, it's just the state of things at the moment, and the problem we're facing. We'll do the best we can.
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Version 1.0.1.5 Released!
26 Apr @ 6:45pm - Far Road Games
After a long, difficult start to the year featuring some serious illness on the team, I’m pleased to say things are back to normal again and we’ve been able to finish off the next update to the game.
Version 1.0.1.5 is now available to play. Full patch notes are below.
This version is the last of the “polish” updates, I suppose you could call it, but we have already started on much bigger changes to the game, including more brand new buildings and challenges. The next version is going to be 90% new content/things to do, which should be fun (if you like the game already). We hope you enjoy all this update has to offer though in the meantime though.
Fingers crossed the next update will be out a lot sooner than this one took (assuming nobody on the team dies or gets sick again). I shall write a dev blog about talking about our plans for the next version in more detail, and what a crazy year it’s been so far.
Thanks for your patience and I hope you enjoy the new version!
Scott & The Team
(https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/27205314/d6eb0f7d8f4228125b9d0f0f86078f7470c6b8d6.jpg)
VERSION 1.0.1.5 PATCH NOTES (FINAL)
Note: Due to many code changes behind the scenes, this version is not compatible with existing saves. Sorry for the inconvenience.
Major New Content:
• Flogging added. The final ethical solution has now been added to the game and you can choose to flog your citizens for their crimes at the Punishment Centre. Flogging is a quick and cheap but violent solution that will greatly reduce the health and morale of the punished person.
• Gateway building added. A new building has been added. The Gateway acts as an optional gathering spot for new migrants to your town, rather than them all going to the first storehouse you make. This will make it much easier to create multiple small towns or to spread out where people arrive.
• Worker priority panel added. A new panel is now available at the Town Hall once you have built one. This panel shows you every building in your town, and how many workers it has and how many it needs. You can tick boxes beside the workplaces and any unemployed people you have will go and work in those structures first.
• New optional day/night cycle feature has been added. The sun now moves around the sky on each map causing the lighting and shadows to change and things get dark at night. The night length is a lot shorter than the day. A new button has been added to the top left information panel that lets players pause the sun’s rotation, and also lets you manually choose what time of day to play at using a slider so you can adjust the game’s appearance to your heart’s content.
Other New Content & Changes
• Building placement graphics added. You can now see the range and radius of several more buildings when placing them, such as repair shacks, prisons, artwork, etc, making it easier to arrange the town the way you want it.
• The optional camera mode is now the default camera mode. The camera no longer automatically snaps to the town leader when giving orders, making controlling the leader smoother and easier. If you prefer the old way, you can switch to it in the options.
• The missing social side-effects for picking certain punishments have now all been implemented.
• Several balance/difficulty changes. Various buildings have had their prices and performance somewhat adjusted. In general food and drink production has been slowed down greatly to make it much harder to get a surplus until the end-game. This also means you need more workers to make food, so there a far fewer unemployed people hanging around. Also migration speed has been slowed slightly so you have to be more careful about how many staff you use at each workplace.
• The raiders now come at 250 citizens (up 50).
• The 3 different demands of the raiders have been softened greatly to make building guard towers less important. In theory, it should now be possible to have a “peaceful” life surrendering to them for a while if you want to.
• All town hall stats now have a glowing border whenever a number changes, making it easier to spot what’s changing.
• Several new help messages have been added the first time you place certain structures if they have unique gameplay features.
• Citizens now choose a random bit of ground to stand in when they leave a building rather than all standing inside each other.
• Enforcer and arrested citizen’s status text has been improved showing you what they’re doing in more detail. You can now also mouse over the icon of someone after they’ve been hung and it will tell you what crime they died for as well.
• New sound effects added in certain places.
• Buildings now have a slightly longer durability before they need repairs. In addition to that scavenger huts no longer need repairs at all so you can place them wherever you want.
• The text and impact of some of the side-effects when you change your laws has been rewritten and improved somewhat.
• Various small UI tweaks have been made here and there to tidy things up. For example, star icons are now used to show stock levels at certain buildings.
• This will not appear in game, but we have now finished all the behind-the-scenes work on getting the game text files ready to translate and can move onto the next step of actually translating the words in future versions. Stay tuned.
(https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/27205314/efeaef7433543ec7fc7d4d8cd74a6b5681791ca3.jpg)
Important Bug Fixes:
(Thanks to everybody who contacted us to let us know about any bugs!)
• Fixed: A rare bug where the need bars of your town could appear to crash to zero suddenly and people would randomly die of thirst.
• Fixed: A bug where sometimes the raiders would stop interacting with you entirely if you saved and loaded after ignoring them.
• Fixed: A potential memory leak problem that could cause the game to slow down slightly over time.
• Fixed: A bug where it said “building is too far away” and stopped you building at max camera zoom.
• Fixed: A bug where engineers and citizen builders sometimes became stuck and stopped working if they exited a structure at the exact time as the leader.
• Fixed: A bug where sometimes the leader would get stuck within a building’s structure after exiting it.
• Fixed: Several issues where information on the Town Halls stats screen wasn’t accurate, or wasn’t being preserved correctly after saving and loading.
• Fixed: A bug where submitting to the raiders could reset the cooldown timer for setting laws unnecessarily.
• Fixed: A bug where sometimes the town leader would stop going back to the nearest storehouse to drop off items.
(https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/27205314/32afec7f2ec6f15992529024c9e1cc794a4f4d81.jpg)
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Dev Blog #35: New Version Progress…
18 May @ 5:24pm - Far Road Games
(https://i.imgur.com/waZ9Mhxl.jpg)
Back On Track
After a very rough start to the year, full of illness and delays, things have got a bit better lately since we released patch 1.0.1.5 last month. We still aren’t at 100% speed but we’re making slow and steady progress. A new patch is already well underway as this dev blog will show.
The crisis earlier in the year was terrible at the time. I even begun to wonder if we could finish the game. We couldn’t do anything except wait. However, in the long run, this proved to a great thing for me, personally. I finally overcame my fears of delays and the public... Because we were stuffed. Sometimes when you hit rock bottom its easier than trying to keep afloat. You realise nothing that bad actually happened. It is only a video game after all.
I’ve been able to relax and enjoy making the game without worrying about the business aspects since then. If it stresses me out, I don’t do it. A lot of our success is down to good fortune. I’m not going to risk my health and sanity over making a game (or money).
If we ever make a game afterwards, I hope I shall be a lot more chilled about it. This has meant withdrawing a bit, ignoring social media, and gaming news but peace of heart is priceless. Things work out.
I’m really happy how the team handled the delays. We’re doing this for the fun of it mostly (any minimum wage day job would pay better) and everybody stuck together and supported each other during the delays even though things looked uncertain occasionally. Some of us didn’t even know each other before starting this game (we’ve still never met the whole team in person) but there’s a team spirit and faith in the project that keeps us going. I don’t think there’s ever been a day of drama team-wise since we started.
It’s good to be making games and realising that all that nonsense people say about the business side of things really doesn’t matter, provided you’re not in it to get rich.
New Features
The next update to the game is going to bring a heap of new features. We haven’t been able to really deepen the city-building side of the game for a while but we can finally get around to it now. Here’s some of the things we are working on right now, which will be coming in the next patch.
(https://i.imgur.com/ctTlidDl.jpg)
Wind Turbine & Electricity
This is now already in the game and working (on our end). The new turbine building will be one of the most advanced things you can build. It will charge up batteries that can be used to supply power to your buildings. (The building model is still being worked on).
It’s up to you what building to give power to, one by one. Each building now has an upgrade. We’re in the process of adding in lots of them. Each upgrade costs a battery. Batteries might be hard to come by and charge (we’ll see when I balance it) so you’ll have to pick carefully. Generally the game will be a bit harder at the start until you upgrade.
Restoring power to your shanty town is a sign it is becoming more advanced, more like how life was before the war.
The upgrades for each building vary, but there are some player requested ones like bigger storehouse capacity, longer repair duration, and scavengers will get a boost that makes them less likely to die in the middle of nowhere.
Night Lighting
This is related to the wind turbine. When you upgrade a building, a light will appear on it. This lets you know it’s got power but it also makes your town look really cool when it gets dark outside (using the day/night feature from last version). By the end of the game most of your town could be lit up, showing how you’ve restored civilization.
(https://i.imgur.com/F2cZ9KUl.jpg)
Barter System
Adam has been really busy holding the fort lately through the sickness we’ve suffered and I’m really happy to say he’s added another new building this version.
You can now invite an independent trader to come and live in your town by building a certain structure. This will unlock the barter system. Essentially you trade what you have an excess of for whatever you need. No more having to destroy goods!
This is balanced at the moment so that it’s a last resort because the trader will rip you off, but if you can’t face another salvage trip, or you want medicine in a hurry, this is one way to get it.
(The UI is still a work in progress and will be prettier!)
(https://i.imgur.com/wLJn6rWl.jpg)
Camera 2.0
Nick has been busy redoing the camera system in this version. Hopefully this is the last thing we need to fix up as we’d much rather make new content, but the camera was really cranky.
He has made it practically impossible to get stuck in scenery now and has smoothed it out so it feels a lot nicer even if your PC is chugging a lot with the game.
In addition to that, we have added in some player requests like edge-scrolling and sensitivity options.
Work in Progress Buildings
The above is stuff we’ve added in the last few weeks but there’s a lot more I’d like to put in this patch content-wise. Nani has been busy making models...
(https://i.imgur.com/6zHkLArl.jpg)
This picture above shows the in-development Water Boiling Facility, Courthouse and Refrigeration Unit buildings. All 3 should hopefully be coming to the next version. I’ll explain more about their use in the next blog. Certain buildings (like the fridge) will need electricity to even work. (We’re still working on the models.)
Other Plans For This Version
Depending how things go, we also have plans to introduce a basic research system so you can unlock buildings, which will add some extra planning to the game.
We also are going to slightly complicate the resources so that more advanced buildings need more advanced materials, which requires some processing. It won’t be anything that complex but just an extra element of strategy.
It’d be nice to also add in another social issue to deal with.
I’ve heard players’ request a nice, big flat-map to play on so we might add that in as well (we actually use one for testing so could just add it!)
Release Plans
We are still recovering a bit with doctors and medical problems to deal with but my goal would be to get this version out over the summer. I really don’t have a firm plan for it yet. When it’s ready, it’ll be out and I will try to keep people informed via blogs. There’s a lot of content like this coming to the game. Nothing amazingly game-changing but just more and more to do.
The best way to reach me is on our Discord [discord.gg]server. I generally check it each day.
(https://i.imgur.com/bHEMaUkl.jpg)
Thanks To Our Players
I just want to say an extra thanks to all the players and supporters of the game who left us a nice message or a word of support during the delay. The vast majority of people on Steam are actually very cool and really get what the game is about. That aspect didn’t change when we stopped being a pre-alpha. Players do have a role to play in helping get a game out and knowing the audience was behind us certainly sped up the recovery process. Thank you from everybody on the team!
I will see you in the next blog, whenever that might be.
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New Version Update (Patch Notes Preview)
29 Jun @ 3:58pm - Far Road Games
New Version Almost Finished...
Just a little update to tell you how the next version is coming along. We’ve only got 1 feature left to finish off and some bugs to squash, so I’m pretty confident it’ll be released next month, in July.
90% of what you see in the patch notes below is finished, we’re just finishing up what's left at the moment.
One good bit of news for us is that we’ve now completely finished all the behind-the-scene coding aspects of the game - boring stuff like having to make databases, or redo cameras, and things that don’t create new fun content but are very necessary to keep everything working. This means Nick, our main coder, can focus now on adding new stuff like new buildings, features etc and not have to spend weeks finishing the framework of the game.
I’m pretty excited we’re at this point at long, long last. This is more or less like gaining a whole new programmer, so that should speed things up for us. It also means we're on the downward slope...
Meanwhile, over the last month, Adam has more or less has finished the electricity and building upgrade feature that I mentioned in the last blog. This was a huge task as now practically every building has an upgrade of some kind and there are 11 unique types of upgrade. It’ll be down to you to decide what building is most important to upgrade first. I’m still re-balancing the game so it feels more difficult until you upgrade the buildings.
We also finished the night-lighting feature, so your town comes alive after sunset if you’ve upgraded it. The lights are real-time and cast shadows so it does look quite cool (but still post-apocalyptic).
Nick has now totally finished the big camera redo completely (a task that took 2 months!). If we’d known what we were doing at the start, we would’ve made our camera this way in the first place, but making your first ever game has been nothing if not a learning experience! It doesn’t help the game has a real-time strategy game style camera and a third-person camera. Getting them both to work nicely without getting stuck in scenery on very hilly maps has taken some head-scratching, but it’s all done now. Finally.
The one feature we’re still finishing off is the new Research Centre (one of 3 new buildings coming to this update) where your citizens study pre-war objects to work out new plans. This means in the new version not every building will be open from the start. You’ll have to pick and plan what to unlock based on what you think is most important. It adds an extra layer of strategy.
I’m hoping the combination of trade, upgrade and research systems to the game will add a nice extra level of depth.
Other News
Our big focus in general now for Atomic Society is just to add a bunch of new buildings (and challenges that demand those buildings) and new moral/social issues to deal with until it feels like there’s plenty to do. That and fixing bugs and (eventually) translating the game.
We’re happy with the way the game keeps selling, given that we didn’t expect so many people to check out our first ever attempt at making a game, and we’re just continuing to make the game with the least stress possible. It helps to have fun when you’ve spent 4+ years working on a single project day after day. Team-wise, we’re doing well. We’re still having to juggle day-jobs and serious health issues (not as bad as earlier in the year), but work keeps happening. Thanks to all our players for their patience. All being well we’ve crossed the hardest part of development.
Here’s a look at what’s coming in the next version. Obviously it isn’t finished yet, but most of what you see here should be in it unless something goes badly wrong. As I say, we’re aiming for July with all this.
Atomic Society Version 1.0.1.6 Patch Notes
(Preview, Work In Progress)
New Content Coming…
• Trader Shack Building Added. You can now build a new trade building. This will invite an trader to come and setup an outpost at your town. You can then barter with this person for various goods you may want. It will be down to you to try and find the best deal.
• Wind Turbine Building Added. The wind turbine has been added. The wind turbine is expensive to make but will produce charged batteries that can be used to upgrade various buildings around your town.
• Research Centre Building Added. Several buildings in the game now need to be researched before you can build them. This requires you to build a research centre and unlock buildings via its menu. This adds an extra level of strategy in how you go about expanding your town as you need to decide what structure you most need in advance.
• Building Upgrades Feature Added. Almost every building in the game now has an upgrade panel. There are lots of different types of upgrades, so it is up to you to decide what building to upgrade and when. Each upgrade costs a charged battery, which the wind turbine can make, or you might find one by salvaging. The game has been rebalanced to make upgrading feel important. Scavengers can also be upgraded now to become more effective.
• Night-Lighting Feature Added. When you upgrade a building with electricity, it switches on a light, allowing you bit by bit to visually restore electricity to your wasteland settlement. Is a cosmetic feature that lets your town really stand out as you improve it, at night.
• Camera Completely Redone. We have completely remade the game camera from scratch in order to make it smoother and easier to control at all framerates. It should also be much harder to get it stuck in hills and mountains. In addition you can now scroll the screen by moving the mouse to the edge of the screen and camera sensitivity options have been added.
• Cloud saving support added.
Other Changes & Bug Fixes:
• The avatar now decides to drop off good based on how far away he/she is from the storehouse by walking distance, not in a straight line. Should prevent some very unusual routes!
• Citizens now fade out when they enter a building, which looks a lot better than just disappearing.
• Fixed a bug where sometimes you could not destroy the Punishment Centre manually.
• Fixed a bug where the Town Hall radius effect graphic was incorrectly appearing when you opened the Town Hall outpost.
• Condensed the storehouse menu slightly, removing some outdated resources. This may help with an issue where players at 4k+ resolutions were having trouble with it.
• Changed the forum link button so that when you report a bug it goes to the new Steam forums, not the old pre-alpha ones.
• Fixed a missing title on the video options panel.
• Fixed some spacing issues with text in a few places where things could get cut-off at certain resolutions.
• Fixed the missing tooltip and icon for garrisons in the jobs priority list if you make a ruin into a garrison.
(And more bug fixes that are too arcane to mention here!)
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New Version Almost Ready...
18 AUG @ 9:47PM - FAR ROAD GAMES
Hi. Just checking in to say that the newest big update to Atomic Society is nearly, almost ready and should be out quite soon if all goes well. The content is all done, we’re just fixing the remaining bugs as quickly as we can.
I'm hoping it'll be out in the next 7 days, but I can't promise the code will behave.
As mentioned before, big new features in this update include...
- A brand new research system adding more strategy
- Trade/barter system to boost the economy side of things
- Night lighting feature for moody nocturnal towns
- Wind turbine and building upgrades feature to let you plan what to improve.
- A completely redone/improved camera system that works a lot better
- And a ton of little tweaks and fixes to various things that I'll cover in the final patch notes.
It adds up to quite a substantial improvement to the game and I'm having fun with it again, and I've played it to the point of insanity many times.
I had been personally hoping it would be ready by now, hence I delayed writing any kind of blog. I wanted my next post to be "it's out!". But it isn't. Just when I thought we were getting there, some new bug emerges. This weekend has been a bit annoying because just when we think it's all ready to ship, a new mini-disaster shows up. Oh well.
Our current crisis is that adding a trade/barter system to the game creates a whole heap of unexpected glitches that only emerge when you play the game for a long time. They’re mostly related to the UI side of things (for example citizens taking out stuff you were trading, numbers not updating correctly, prices becoming incorrect if you swap and change the deal, etc). In theory I suppose we could release right now, but I'd rather give you an update you can play without stressing that something is going to break.
The good news is that the changes in this version really do beef up the game in my view, to the point where I’ve had to extend the in-game goals just because it just takes longer to finish building a settlement now. I think we've made the right choices...
Aside from that, while I've been waiting for bugs to be fixed, I’ve also been designing the version after this one which is really aimed at improving the resource-management side of the game. I think when that side of the game is deeper we’re really going to be onto something with AS and I'm looking forward to the rest of the year. I am proud of this game even though sometimes I want to tear my (remaining) hair out with how long things take to make. But we're doing the best we can on the budget/team-size we've got.
I just want to keep adding new content (as fast as we can) until this game is the best we can make it, no matter how long that takes. Making a good game is the best reward.
Thanks to our players who the support, telling us to relax, etc and for your feedback and suggestions. It genuinely helps!
All being well version 1.0.1.6 will be with you before August is out, and if not, I'll... I don't want to think about it. It will be out in August! :D
I'll be in touch and I'm always around on Discord (see forums for a link) if you want to pester me directly!
Best wishes,
Scott & The Team
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Version 1.0.1.6 Released!
27 Aug @ 10:53am - Far Road Games
The next big content update to Atomic Society has now been released, adding new features like a barter and trade system, research, building upgrades and a wind turbine, and a lot of fixes and general polish, including a brand new camera system.
Full details can be found below in the patch notes.
I’ll post a (much needed) dev blog soon when the dust has settled. We’re already preparing for another big update after this one.
(https://i.imgur.com/RyfdL9I.jpg)
Note: Due to the large changes in this version won't be compatible with existing save games. Players will need to make a new settlement.
Latest Features:
• Barter/Trade Feature Added. You can now build a new trade shack building to get rid of supplies you have too many of, or to find items you need without salvaging. Trade is done via a barter system so it’s down to you to work out the best price. Don't necessarily trust the trader's first offer!
• Wind Turbine Building Added. The wind turbine has been added. The wind turbine is expensive to make but will produce charged batteries that can be used to upgrade various buildings around your town.
• Research Centre Added. Several buildings in the game now need to be researched before you can construct them. This requires you to build the new Research Centre and unlock buildings via its menu. This adds an extra level of strategy as you go about expanding your town.
• Structure Upgrades Feature Added. Players can now decide to upgrade buildings with electricity to improve their functionality by spending charged batteries. There are various types of upgrade to get, and it’s up to you what buildings should be upgraded first. The game has been rebalanced to make upgrading feel important.
(https://i.imgur.com/tPMrKaQ.png)
• Night Lighting Feature Added. When you upgrade a building with electricity, it switches on a light, allowing you bit by bit to visually restore electricity to your wasteland settlement. Is a cosmetic feature that lets your town really stand out at night.
• Camera System Completely Redone. We have completely rebuilt the game’s camera, making it smoother and easier to control. We have fixed all bugs relating to the camera getting stuck in scenery and it now automatically adjusts if something obscures your view. A range of camera sensitivity options have been added and you can now scroll the camera by moving the mouse to the edge of the screen.
• Cloud Saving Feature Added. The game now uses Steam’s built-in cloud saving feature so your towns will travel with you
Bug Fixes/Gameplay Tweaks:
• The population goal has now been increased to 400 due to the extra content expanding the game.
• Fixed a bug where sometimes you could not destroy the Punishment Centre manually.
• Fixed some framerate issues on the title screen and when saving that might speed up save times for some people.
• Fixed an issue where if you changed your scavenger loot focus while the leader was inside looking for something, they could get stuck.
• Fixed a bug where the Town Hall radius effect graphic was incorrectly appearing when you opened the Town Hall outpost.
• Condensed the storehouse menu slightly, removing some outdated resources. This may help with an issue where players at 4k+ resolutions were having trouble with it.
• Changed the forum link button so that when you report a bug it goes to the new Steam forums, not the old pre-alpha ones.
• Fixed a missing title on the video options panel.
• Fixed some spacing issues with text in a few places where things could get cut-off at certain resolutions.
• Fixed the missing tooltip and icon for garrisons in the jobs priority list if you make a ruin into a garrison.
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Dev Blog #35: New Content Progress
Mon, 28 October 2019
(https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/27205314/acdf3c2b80dda085e729dde4b5a5e00a46a13217.jpg)
Here’s a look at what we’ve been working on for the next big update. Apologies it’s been a little quiet around here since we released the last patch. We’ve just been quietly working away on the new version and not paying much attention to the outside world or social media, but everything is going pretty well (if slowly) on the team.
I’m always around on our Discord server if you want to ask me something about the game or development, or you can email us if you have any problems/questions.
New Buildings In the Works
At the moment we're working on more new buildings to add to your towns. Nani (artist) has made models for the new Courthouse and Canteen structures while Adam (coder) makes them work. The new Courthouse structure will let you deal with the negative side-effects of setting laws (like innocent people being educated) and the Canteen is a building that can improve the quality of the food and drink your settlement produces. It needs supplies of lumber to keep the stoves burning. The Canteen and Courthouse have been on the to-do list of potential buildings to add for years, so I’m glad to finally see them in the game.
We’re also working on a building to upgrade your morale structures. It was a little challenging trying to think of a single building that can upgrade a theatre, a tavern and a chapel, but in the end we've gone for a Brewhouse type building where homemade “wine” can be made and then delivered to these structures so they work more effectively (I’ll word the text so you can imagine it’s non-alcoholic if your town's religion doesn’t allow booze!)
I don’t think any of these buildings are particularly drop-dead exciting, but they do add a bit of extra depth and some end-game structures to think about. The goal is for everything to have a way to be upgraded.
(https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/27205314/c0c3a25ef442bb5352366de55f49acdd7f351231.jpg)
New Social Issues
We're overdue to add some new social issues so we intend to add at least a couple more to the next update. Social issues are probably the most fun thing to design for me. It’s more interesting working out how a citizen should morally behave than how a well makes water, for example. We have 3 new social issues in the works at the moment: prostitution, capitalism and patriotism. I won’t go into too much depth about how these actually affect your town yet (as the coding hasn’t started), but citizens will eventually be engaging in those 3 activities and you can encourage or discourage them in the usual manner.
Achievements
Steam achievements should be coming to the next update too. None of us have ever made a game before, so we had to do some homework on how these work first, but we've got them up and running now. It turns out to be pretty simple, when you know what you’re doing, it’s just a bit tedious inserting all the triggers for them. We have a long list of achievement ideas going right back to the start of the project. I hope we can at least get 5-10 in the next update. I’m not a big fan of achievements myself, but I think they’re good at helping players learn the features of the game, and encouraging them to play in a certain way.
Pathfinding/Navigation Improvements
We’re presently upgrading the intelligence of our citizens (yet again) so they stop taking bizarre routes. This seems to be a never-ending job in a game like this. It came up again when Nick (main coder) started trying to fix a single pathfinding bug and then discovered the cause of that bug would be having an effect on the whole game, so he’s now spending weeks redoing the navigation stuff. There’s always things to redo if you scratch the surface of this game. I dislike redoing stuff of course, but this should fix many quirks with citizens taking weird paths, so it’s got to be done, even though it will delay the version. Basically, until now, our landscapes have been automatically “scanned” for the AI, which defines which bits of the map are walkable and which aren’t. Unfortunately this automatic scanning led to less than perfect results, and was making citizens think they couldn’t go a certain way. To solve this, Nick now has to manually “paint” all the walkable areas onto all 9 maps, which is dull work, but it will ensure accurate data for the AI. I once again understand now why so many city-builder games use flat maps now…
(https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/27205314/dc9881ce68f05ac80482190a5ee23f248b3a0cb7.jpg)
Other Things We're Working On...
All of the stuff I've mentioned is keeping us pretty busy with the game at the moment (along with some extra bug fixes or bits of polish that are too dull to go into here), but there’s still more we'd like to add if we have time.
I'm probably being optimistic, but I hope this next update will more or less round-off the Early Access version of the game in terms of content, and then everything after that can just be polish and refinement. Who knows if it will work out that way, but that’s the plan. We have to think quite far ahead on this game as things take ages to make. This update alone might take us until Christmas to finish if I'm being realistic.
In order to make the game feel “content complete” I’d like to come up with some kind of ending to the story element of the game (the tale of you leaving a bunker to recreate society), even though the game is endless. I have some ideas about you building a radio tower to contact the bunker and tell them your mission is complete when you’ve finished the goals, but it doesn’t seem to be exciting so far. We’ll see.
A lot of people will probably be pleased to hear we are also (at long last) investigating adding paths to the game, e.g. seeing trails form where citizens walk most frequently that gives them some kind of speed boost. A few indie games have used this system lately and given how awkward and uneven our landscapes are, it’s the only way we can add paths to the game. We’re just playing around with it for now, looking for something that works and looks good.
Lastly, Nani is adding some more decorative buildings to the game (ornamental stuff) so if you have any ideas for an ornamental/decorative building you think would be fun to put around your town, let me know!
(https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/27205314/a37775c23e7f413c05d5c5ea55607a7e359f5a63.png)
Behind the Scenes Views
I always like to include a bit in these dev blogs about the process of actually making a game, as this is our first ever game and we're making it up as we go along. It’s interesting to document that process (for some). These are just my personal views and don't necessarily reflect anybody else on the team.
It’s now been 1 year since we launched on Early Access, and we’re still here, still (slowly) making updates and things haven’t really changed a great deal in that time, although I’ve changed a bit as a person. I care a lot less about being a success, and “making it” and what we sell, and things like that.
Launching on Early Access last year was just so stressful for me that it probably broke something in me, and I think that’s good. I now feel too old (or frail) for that level of hype and intensity. Nowadays I’d rather just look after my mental well-being, even if means potentially losing popularity and money.
I’ve pretty much given up on things like the Steam forums, comments, and Twitter, etc. I just can’t face them anymore though I wish I could. I don’t know what the review rating is for our game. I don’t even check our sales (though others on the team do, so I can’t ignore it totally). I’m trying to live more in the present moment and see if you can live life just taking it one step at a time, avoiding stress. So far, it seems you can.
Sales seem to tick on by no matter what I do, or don't do. They were getting pretty low (as I was informed), but now they’re back up since the last update. I’m still working as a part-time janitor though. On bad days I’ve thought of chucking that job in, but I know the money from Steam will stop one day, so I keep it. It helps that we’ve all been broke for years, so any kind of extra income feels generous. But I would just like to let people know that ignoring the outside world while making an indie game is doable in my experience. For people who hate marketing, as long as your game is interesting enough to attract YouTubers occasionally, you’ll probably be okay, even if you live under a rock by choice. I just generally don’t think the internet is a very healthy place for humans to interact and though we have some really lovely fans of this game, and people who make great suggestions, I struggle to interact with them online.
Because I live under a rock with pretty much everything, it was a total surprise to me when someone told me a big developer (the people who make Tropico games I think) went and released an Early Access post-apocalyptic city-builder that probably overshadows ours in many ways. If I had heard this a year ago, I probably would’ve fainted with anxiety, but nowadays I really don’t mind, which is much nicer. I went through all this stress when Frostpunk was announced so I’m over it now. Our sales didn’t change when Frostpunk came out, and they’ve gone up slightly when this new game came out (possibly unrelated). They are what they are.
I can’t really speak for how the rest of our tiny team is feeling, as I’d just imprint my feelings onto them, but if I had to guess I’d perhaps say people feel like they're at the end of a marathon. We've all been making this game for about 4.5 years now now, and though it’s been a real blessing, fun and profitable, I think we’re ready to wrap this baby up and apply what we've learnt to something even better. But there’s definitely a lot more to add to Atomic Society we can move on with a clean conscience, so we keep working and will do so until we've made the best game we know how to/can afford to.
Ideally, by summer 2020, I’d like to be working on something new (while maintaining support for AS) but that’s just a possibility. If I want to live in the present moment, I can’t think that far ahead. We'll see how things pan out.
Thanks for reading and I'll keep you informed when this big new update is closer to completion.
(https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/27205314/4c138777b1d5b7c784d204fcb66c639ffc20d654.jpg)
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Version 0.1.7.0 – Courthouses, Prostitutes, Patriots, Cooking & More
Tue, 24 December 2019
That's not the title of my autobiography, but another update for Atomic Society, featuring some new social issues, some new buildings, and a lot of polish and fixes. Thanks for your patience with us as we continue to take this game to the finish line. We hope you enjoy the latest features.
More improvements are already in the works…
Version 0.1.7.0 Patch Notes
Note: Due to some big changes to the game’s code, this update will not be compatible with existing save games. You’ll need to start a new settlement once the update has been downloaded.
New Content
• New Social Issue added - Prostitution: Citizens may now act as prostitutes and take time off work to service clients at the nearest tavern (if available). This provides a shelter bonus to the client and prostitute, but decreases work productivity and it isn’t always safe being a prostitute in the post-apocalyptic world…
• New Social Issue added – Patriotism: Certain citizens now feel very patriotic about your fledgling new town and want others to feel as they do. They will periodically attempt to “convert” others so that they feel patriotic too. If successful, their target will join the town’s belief system and gain some morale. If not, the target will be offended and leave town. You can decide how to handle the patriots,
• New building added - Courthouse. You can now improve the justice system of your town by researching and building a Courthouse. The new Courthouse is used to prevent negative side-effects such as innocent people being executed, etc. You’ll need 3 of them if you want to block everything.
• New building added - Canteen. Citizens can now cook their food and boil their water at the new Canteen structure. Once researched, the Canteen acts as a communal kitchen for the town. It must be built within walking distance of a storehouse. This building will improve the food/drink so it provides more sustenance. But this building does need a regular supply of wood to keep the stoves burning so you’ll have to handle that.
• 2 new decorative buildings added. You can now add even more post-apocalyptic style to your shanty town with the new “gazebo” decorative building and the stylish new “tyre tree”. It almost feels like paradise…
• New pathfinding (navigation) system added: Last but not least among the major changes (and one of the reasons why this update has taken so long), is the new pathfinding system we have added to the game, replacing an older/buggier one. This new system should cut out a lot of quirks/bugs and make people choose more sensible routes in general.
(https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/27205314/6b4deec7de445d4f988d90fa3d3c92d4e54ee8c9.jpg)
(https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/27205314/abe901735e185377ea3f4d3ead5c3b3907ef1df0.jpg)
Other Changes:
• The game now gives you a reminder to save every year. This message can be disabled in the interface options.
• Builders now have a max range radius and won’t construct anything that is too far away from their workplace. This will help players who like to build several small settlements, as before builders would frequently die trying to walk long distances to construct something on the other side of the map.
• Made the camera automatically zoom out for convenience when you switch into Overview Mode.
• Character appearance and naming options now persist between games/quitting to desktop.
• Made it so defence/guard tower coverage always shows when placing any kind of building, so you know where to put things. You can disable this in the interface options if you don’t like it.
• Added some story text and artwork when you first build the Trade Shack, giving some extra details on the trader and where he comes from.
• Added sound effects when you agree to research something or make a deal with the raiders.
• Improved salvaging UI slightly so it’s clearer when scavenger focus is enabled that the search is still working.
• Various buildings have had their upgrade (electricity) costs adjusted.
(https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/27205314/e81c5dd59283f322bd73078356ed49c518a19314.jpg)
Important Bug Fixes:
• Fixed: A bug where sometimes the game refused to load a save game (duplicate name issue).
• Fixed: Issues with the research centre being unusable if it collapsed.
• Fixed: A bug that let the town leader gain infinite bag space if you saved and loaded at a specific point.
• Fixed: A bug that let the leader run through rivers and lakes.
• Fixed: Some inaccurate news feed messages regarding the Town Hall and Tavern.
• Fixed: The culture critic effect was affecting all needs, not just morale, making people receive less from boosting.
• Fixed: A bug where buildings/citizens appeared highlighted when they weren’t selected.
Happy Christmas!
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Dev Blog #36: Development Progress
Sat, 21 March 2020
(https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/27205314/fd7f20853b843c85207687aa1194be25481e78d4.jpg)
It’s been a little while since I checked in, but progress is going nicely on the next update. Here’s some of the things we’ve been working on lately…
Paths
The next version of Atomic Society will feature paths at long last!
We’re using an auto-pathing system that organically creates trails where the citizens walk most frequently, similar to other games. We're just ironing out the last technical tricks to it at the moment.
One challenge has been making it play nicely with the scenery, which changes as you place buildings and likes to mess up the paths, but we're figuring it out bit by bit. The screenshot below is just a work in a progress shot (textures will change), but it definitely makes the settlements feel more like actual lived-in places.
There will be a small speed bonus for citizens using a path, and trails will fade away if citizens stop using them.
(https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/27205314/6daf0e93b495a7362e71fbf867cf615456153f4c.jpg)
Leader Family System
The other big new feature we've been working on over the past couple of weeks is the Leader's House, a new building that will be awarded to player's after a certain period of time, if their town lasts that long.
The Leader's House, aside from giving you a "trophy" building, also allows you to raise a family and pick 1-3 spouses (depending on your preference). Same-sex spouses will be allowed if you've legalised homosexuality.
This is mostly just for fun, but it also adds a goal to the game, and creates fun stories as you see your spouse and/or children getting up to all kinds of bad behaviour around town, and meeting with cruel fates. We may expand its functions later.
You can obviously procreate and raise a brood of kids, and you can choose whether or not your spouse(s) should work. You can even choose to make your family immune to prosecution, but this will make it harder to convert citizens as they'll see you as being hypocritical.
This features is almost finished now, and we're just at the final testing phase.
The UI elements you can see in the picture below are still placeholder elements at the moment.
(https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/27205314/0ae08ff7bc38f80c96f3a49433a9a77bf91e4379.png)
Other Upcoming Changes
Apart from these two big features (which have taken up most of our time so far) we're also continuing to monitor the bug situation, so thanks to anybody who's contacted me with a bug report lately. We investigate all the serious ones, if we can reproduce at our end.
We're also continuing to make little tweaks to the UI and other parts of the game, as needed.
There could be another morale-related building in the works as well, but we'll see how time goes as we want to get this update out as soon as possible.
All being well, and that's a big "if" these days, I'm hoping the next version should be ready by early May.
Slow But Steady
It should be no surprise to anybody who's been following our game that the big updates can take us a quite a while to produce, which I'm really sorry about, but it's just the pace we can work at while juggling full-time jobs and various health issues that never seem to go away. Thanks to everybody who has patiently supported us so far and left feedback.
Ideally, I would like to get the game out of Early Access this year and move onto the polish phase of the project as we'll need to find new work soon. Unfortunately the coronavirus is already having its effect, which I didn't expect to be writing a few weeks ago. One team member has already lost their day job due and another is now having to care for an elderly relative, but everybody remains focused on getting this next update out and smoothing off the rough edges to the game. We're not going anywhere until we've done all we can.
I'll be back in the coming weeks (if the world still exists) to post the full patch notes for this version and let you know how the release is going.
Thanks for reading and supporting our little indie game.
(https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/27205314/dad3e54f83ded9382f6d992ccf1eb1137348d57f.png)
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Dev Blog #37: Difficulties Explained
Sat, 30 May 2020
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Hi everyone. I know the new version isn't ready yet but I thought I'd post a new update to keep everyone informed on what's happening. Hopefully the version won't be delayed much longer!
Warning: This is going to be a long one...
Update on the Delay
Firstly, I'm sorry the new update still isn't ready. I had high hopes it would've been finished weeks ago and this delay is really frustrating. Nobody wants to see progress on the game more than the people making it, especially when the company is bleeding cash. This is not a conscious choice to sabotage our own success by working slowly.
Instead, the delay is the usual nasty problem of us trying to add something cool to the game that players wanted, and which seemed pretty straightforward to code - a naturally forming path system under the feet of your citizens - only to find out it's a complete horror show to implement as we reached the halfway stage.
But by that point, we'd spent so much work (and money) on the feature we didn't want to give up. We knew there would be a way to finish it, if only we kept banging away at the problem. And suddenly 6 months went by. Days can be a blur when you spend them staring at a computer screen.
The reason this feature has been such a pain to add is because it connects to the AI navigation system, which is probably the most complex aspect of the game, and has given us numerous headaches in the past. Until this version we told our citizens to pick off-road routes, and they did so by calculating a line across the terrain and adapting on the fly as necessary. Now we want them to (sometimes) ignore that system and pick paths that another citizen formed, a path that possibly didn't exist 5 minutes ago. But not always. Sometimes following a long path doesn't make sense when you could just cut across a field, so we needed to add in decision making factors and give each route a "cost" which the citizen weighs up.
And such tricky navigation issues come after all the graphical issues we've already (mostly) solved. For example, paths that form themselves underfoot also need to automatically form good looking intersections that still look good as more and more paths connect to them. And they need to look good on flat and mountainous terrain, and in snow, forest or desert biomes. Oh, and sometimes the player will want to slap down a huge building right in the middle of that complicated intersection just as 10 citizens were approaching it with urgent deliveries while being chased by enforcers. And all this has to work flawlessly.
It hasn't been easy, and solving all these problems is the job of just one man, our main coder Nick, a guy making his first ever game (like the rest of us) and who’s working alone at home with no one to support or advise him on the technical issues. Don't get me wrong, I think Nick is a genius-level coder, and building something like AS as your first game is amazing. I can give him literally any feature request and provided he has enough time, he will somehow work out how to do it and make it run efficiently no matter how complex it is. And he does all this on pity pay (my term), and with serious health issues that are no joke. He never complains or loses his temper with us (perhaps he does with Unity) and accepts tasks from a first-time game designer who can't even work a calculator, let alone understand programming.
Which is why this version - which I personally expected to be out in April - still isn’t ready. Knowing our difficulties doesn’t change reality and give our players new content, but I hope it shows you the state we’re in.
To be frank, I wish I hadn’t put this feature in the game and I'm still unsure if we should keep working on it. I don't think it's worth the damage it’s done to our finances (or review score) over the past 6 months. The trickle of money we earn from AS is more important than ever due to day job losses from the coronavirus pandemic, but that precious money is currently flowing into a feature that is purely cosmetic and adds probably less than 30 minutes to an average play time (the extra time coming from people gawping at the path system and wanting to expand their town further). My mysterious calculator says we'd have to sell about 3000 copies to break even on this feature. And we sold 200 copies last month. Hmm… I think I'm learning something important about videogame production.
We're in a problem of our own making. This is not me begging for sympathy or complaining to you, our wonderful players. This is me publicly sharing my own idiocy and learning painful lessons as a developer.
Which I guess is what a dev blog is for!
Blame the Banished Guy!
All this hassle and delay with the path system has forced me to look at the deeper problems in our company, problems that have blighted our team since day 1.
What is our biggest problem as a team?
We’re slow.
Why are we slow?
I (jokingly) blame the guy who made Banished.
5 and a half years ago, back when we were starry eyed noobies who wanted to try and make our first ever game, we decided to make a 3D city builder (as opposed to a 16-bit style 2D game like most sane startups). If one person made Banished, we wondered, how hard could it be for 3 beginners to make a similar game? But I didn’t realise at the time that the guy who made Banished had 10 years industry experience. Nor did I think twice about designing a game even more technically ambitious than Banished. In Banished you could only look down, you could only build in a flat forest, and you could only build in a grid system. Wouldn't it be cool if we did away with all those technical limitations on our first ever game?! I'm sure first-time coder Nick can make all that while simultaneously pumping out new buildings and gameplay features to keep the fans happy.
Well, here we are. 5 and a half years later. Still wrestling and suffering from the implications of these early naive decisions.
If we hadn't recruited a second part-time coder (Adam) by simply begging on Reddit, all our working hours would be consumed with fighting the technical foundations of Atomic Society. That’s not how you make an Early Access smash hit. But like all the stickiest problems, we were just good enough to scrape through the hard work rather than hitting a brick wall. If we'd hit a brick wall it might have actually forced us face harsh truths. Instead, we discovered if we banged our heads against any problem long enough it went away, at least for a while.
But I don’t recommend headbutting as a long-term career.
On top of struggling with over-ambition, one of the worst parts was not even knowing the path we'd chosen was supposed to be hard. We work in relative isolation. I personally don’t have any other developers to talk with. Working in a vacuum can all too easily lead to blaming your co-workers, or blaming yourself, when in fact nobody's to blame. It's just that you're in an extremely difficult situation.
Which is why I was deeply relieved when I recently stumbled across a dev blog written by the man who actually made Banished…
Perhaps you wondered why there hasn’t been a Banished 2. At least one of the reasons is he's having the exact same struggles we are. He's trying to make a game that is a lot more like Atomic Society on a technical level. Large portions of his dev blog could’ve been written word for word by me.
This man made Banished. He is certainly not behind schedule because he lacks talent or experience. But no matter who you are, certain game features are painfully time consuming and difficult to implement. And unfortunately, we decided to make our first game with a bunch of these features.
To any aspiring indie dev reading this, beware! Here be monsters. Especially the most vicious monster of 3D pathfinding. AI pathfinding is literally a full time job on bigger teams. Stick to games where the AI is on a Super Mario level of complexity. We spent much of the last version redoing our pathfinding system to eliminate bugs and now we're spending even more time trying to integrate a new feature into the pathfinding system.
And it's bleeding us dry.
Brick Wall Time At Last?
The real reason our team is slow is not just because we tried to expand on Banished. We also add features that have no financial benefit, and we proudly stick with them even if they prove to be incredibly difficult to do. I’m astounded by my own naivety.
Right up to the present version we assigned tasks by me asking Nick or Adam "is this feature doable", which basically means "can it be done in 3 months"? If the answer was yes, we just went for it. I never stopped to think of the value of said feature.
Let's assume you're in the privileged position of being able to pay your development staff (British) minimum wage. 3 people working full-time for 3 months on a single feature means that little feature will cost nearly £14,000 in wages, and that's assuming it doesn't run late. 14k decisions should not be taken lightly, it's the price of a small car. But we'd been working for free for so long before coming to Steam that we'd developed bad habits, like implementing whatever felt good at the time. And if a thing took ages to make, we had nothing to lose but time and sanity. That kind of attitude doesn't lead to a sustainable salary.
These recurring mistakes placed us in a vicious circle. We’re running out of money fighting problems we shouldn’t be fighting in the first place, and because we’re distracted and exhausted from fighting such problems, we lose momentum on updates and serious bugs slip into the game, which leads to bad reviews, more delays and lower sales.
I like to be as open as possible on these blogs because most people presumably aren’t hate-reading them, and maybe they'll help someone out, so I don't mind saying that in 6 months our little company will be flat broke, broke to the point of literally going (back) to the welfare office. In January we had 12 months runway (Silicon Valley speech for “time to poverty”) and we blew half of that on this path system. I know we’re talented enough to eventually make it through anything - even going bust - but there has to be more to life than survival.
I think I made a whole game about that...
What To Do?
In summary, we're insanely ambitious (emphasis on the "insane") when we should be ultra cautious because we're poor beginners. Technically simple games sell just fine. We choose tasks with little consideration of their financial implications and whether they will meaningfully increase player engagement (and therefore sales). And we're stuck making a game that requires 6 months of work to implement cosmetic features. These sound like obvious mistakes, and they are, but until now we were in a survival mentality of "just get it done".
At least now I know why Atomic Society has been such a slog. The next question is what to do about it...
The simplest but scariest solution is to totally scrap the dreaded path system that’s taken 6 months, fix the worst bugs in the game, and let Atomic Society be what it is: a small but at least stable and cheap curiosity on the Steam store. Most of our bad reviews are about bugs rather than content, which is understandable. We'd fix them and move onto a (much, much simpler) new project with all our hard earned knowledge before poverty really kicks in around Christmas and perhaps live to fight another day. This is probably the smart choice.
But can I really ask Nick to scrap all his work from the past half year, just chalk it up to a learning experience, and give up on a feature that is probably 90% complete? If I wait a week or two it might all come together…
And more importantly, am I willing to walk away from my beloved Atomic Society?
I recently went through our task list, getting rid of ideas that would never get done (employing a little of that cost analysis stuff) and just erasing plain bad ideas that were invented 4 years ago. After this long clean up, I was still left with 219 features that could make great additions to the game. Ideas ranged from mundane stuff like achievements and foreign language translations to schools and a full on end-game story, involving you taking on the raiders once and for all and being reunited with the people from the bunker. If we put these ideas into the game, we’d have a game to be proud of, right? We'd be an Early Access critical "success".
Maybe. If we’re willing to work for free for another 5 years, and sadly the world has already moved on from this game.
Despite romantic notions of the plucky entrepreneur, nobody really works for free - unless they’re immune from basic survival needs. Somebody has to pay the bills and put food on the table. If it isn’t you, it’s your wife or family or loan shark, etc. We self-funded Atomic Society before Early Access through day jobs, primarily through our artist's (Nani) day job. Her salary allowed the rest of us to focus more on AS. She was the agriculture to our early civilisation. But her day job doesn’t exist anymore thanks to coronavirus.
This all feels like I'm considering a breakup... with a videogame. Atomic Society and our team had a whirlwind romance, we could be so good together, but it's been almost 6 years, and every day feels like a battle. Maybe we could make it work, but maybe the smartest thing is to leave while we're still friends.
I don’t know what the answer is yet. We’ll have to talk as a team, but I think we're getting close to some big, life-changing decisions.
Anyway, that's why the version is running late! :)
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Anything Else To Talk About?
The last six months have not just involved 4 people stressing over a path system and deep introspection into one's own business limitations. A few other things are happening...
The Save Bug
Thanks to our players reporting it, we are definitely aware there’s a bug in the game that can sometimes cause saving to freeze at about 50% which is something we want to fix urgently. This is the worst kind of bug but annoyingly it isn’t a bug we’ve been able to reproduce at our end. We’re trying to catch it, but if anybody suffers from this bug, it would be lovely if you could quit the game when it happens and email us a output_log file.
Here’s how to find the file after you've quit the game:
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We will fix this bug and your file could make all the difference.
New Building: Terraforming Station
While Nick has been busy with the path system (understatement alert), Adam has been busy beefing up the patch notes with some new content. We’ve started on a terraforming/mining/digger station (haven’t nailed down the final name).
I’ve heard that players would like more control over the layout of the landscapes and this building will let you do just that. After building it, you can mark out areas for workers to flatten and they’ll go over and crush the landscape, kind of like when you place a building. This should help players expand their town, especially on the more mountainous maps. But naturally, I’m a little concerned about the bugs this might create, as anything that changes the landscape can affect the AI and the dreaded pathfinding won't like that... But we’ll see. Hopefully this isn’t a task hiding a handful of complications. We're trying it out anyway and it's coming together.
Here's Nani's work in progress model for it:
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Trees Now Have A Function!
When we released Atomic Society, I was weirdly adamant I didn’t want the game to involve cutting down trees. It sounds foolish, but I was so burnt out on crafting/Minecraft games at the time I just didn’t want to make a game where you start by hacking down trees. I even went so far as to research why cutting down trees might be a bad idea after a nuclear war (they’d be radiation sponges from the toxic rain). This wasn’t just my anti-lumberjack prejudice, there were a few technical issues, like balancing the maps that don’t have many trees, and persuading the pathfinding to cope with disappearing trees (hi pathfinding). Altogether it just didn’t seem worth the effort. But I’ve always wanted to do something about this criticism. Therefore the upcoming version will at least let you gain something from trees.
The Scavenger Hut now has a radius circle around it (work in progress visually), and the more trees in that radius when you build it, the more bonus lumber you’ll gain on a periodic basis. This increases the strategy in building as you may want to expand towards natural resources and rely less on salvaging. We’ll balance the game so this doesn’t make it too easy, but it's ready to ship.
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New Music!
The next version comes with a new track from our composer Dawid Dahl. It’s a special guitar track that will play when you finish all the goals, including the new goal to raise a family/heir.
Working with Dawid on the soundtrack was one of the best creative moments of the whole development process for me, hearing his demo tracks for a game I was designing felt magical. Whatever happens with AS, I'm really happy with our soundtrack.
And there’ll be a bit more of it in the next version.
Personal: Do I Like Games Again?
To get into the weeds again, around November last year I lost the desire to play games entirely. It wasn’t depression, I’d guess it was burnout from viewing games through a professional lens for too long. I’m someone who wants to make games passionately and scrutinises the slightest detail of almost every game ever made – which is not really how you fall in love with games. It can actually turn you against them. I felt “done” with games.
This isn’t the first time I’ve felt such a loss. It happens every so often, but this was the longest time such apathy had stuck around while I was making AS. I got slack at making dev blogs, and lost some of my fire as the unofficial director of our little team, which was contagious on the others, or so my ego likes to think. It also caused inevitable “is this game dead?” forum posts.
Sometimes I think games are kind of pointless, and making them is folly. In a sense I’m right. Games don’t matter. The coronavirus outbreak didn’t change my mind about that when 700+ people were dying every day in my country. I felt trapped. I wanted a career where I don’t have to worry about reviews, missed deadlines, and being paid.
And then as summer bloomed, all my gaming passion came back. For the first time in 6 months, I genuinely wanted to play games again. The burning passion for games that’s been with me since childhood resurfaced. It’s weird, like a tap that can shut off and on. If I had to guess, I’d say I’d matured a bit and started to see games as my best shot at a career no matter what I thought about them - which led to me figuring out the problems with our slow development. Games are not just artistic expression, they're a livelihood.
I’m almost 38, but I’m a part-time janitor. If I want a career, it’s probably make a (popular) game or scrub floors. Scrubbing floors is actually pretty chill, but I like to think I have some talent for designing games too. I don't think it's just coincidence at least 3 big studios took a shot at making a post apocalyptic city builder after us (Frostpunk, Endzone, Surviving the Aftermath), and some even marketed themselves on the law changing aspect. Or maybe it is a coincidence. Either way, I now really want a second swing of the bat and to employ my newfound design knowledge and understanding of game development. I feel ambitious again. We've learnt too much to give up. AS was just the apprenticeship.
And ultimately playing a good game is just so much fun…
Where Next?
I've obviously gone on for way too long. This is probably the longest blog I’ve ever written.
To wrap it up, we will come together and decide whether to keep struggling with the path system or just push out what we've got, like the family system and other things above. Or perhaps the path system will suddenly come together at the last minute. Either way, I will try to keep people updated more frequently on how things are going and what the future of the game is.
I hope somebody benefited from reading my avalanche of words, and that honesty about the project counts for something. Thanks for reading and I hope you're enjoying the apocalypse!
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Update 8 on the beta branch / full patch notes
Thu, 18 June 2020
A big new update is now available to try
Update 8 for Atomic Society is now available to try on the beta branch, featuring the new family system!
The family system unlocks at year 3. Citizens will award you the new post apocalyptic mansion structure to dominate the skyline of your settlement. Once constructed, it lets you tackle the new challenge of finding a life partner (or three) and raising an heir as your town expands.
Survival and setting laws suddenly seem more impactful when they can have serious consequences for your loved ones. Spouses and kids can and will commit the same social issues as anybody else, which also creates some very darkly amusing stories of life in a post apocalyptic town (don't exile your wife).
Apart from a new building and goal, and changes to scavenging that improve map differences, this version also comes with many bug fixes for all the serious issues players have told us about. Thanks to everyone who took the time to let us know about a bug, we couldn’t have found them all on our own.
To access the beta branch and the new update, here's all you need to do.
1. Right click Atomic Society in your steam library and select properties.
2. Select the betas tab and from the drop down menu select "beta - Public beta branch".
3. You do not need to enter a code for this public beta. Just close the window and in your library Atomic Society will automatically update to the beta version.
4. You can now play the Atomic Society Beta (or switch back to the main version anytime)!
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Please do let us know if you discover anything serious or have feedback. We're running a beta to be safe and we may be able to tweak it in the coming week. We've tried to catch everything but being just 3 people it's hard to say for certain. We'll update the main branch of the game as soon as everything looks solid.
(And it sure does feel good to have an update out again…)
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Update 8 - Family - Patch Notes (Beta)
All the features are now available on the beta branch.
New Content and Improvements:
• New Feature – Leader’s Mansion & Family After your town has survived 3 years, your people will award you the Leader’s Mansion structure. Building this impressive new structure lets you tackle a new goal – to have a life partner and pass on your unique genetic code to an heir. After choosing who to be with, you can see your spouse (you have up to 3 if that suits you) getting up to mischief in town as you play, and worry about whether or not your children will survive (or be murderers – family members can commit the same traits as ordinary citizens). You can choose to make your family immune from arrest, or let them be locked up like regular criminals but this makes people harder to convert. Laws you set will impact who you can be with in the first place.
• The Scavenger’s Hut now passively harvests lumber from any nearby trees at a slow rate. This change makes the placement of the Scavenger’s Hut a lot more strategic. You must now consider how close it is to ruins while trying to get the most from any nearby trees. This change also means forest maps play differently to desert and snow maps.
• In response to player feedback, the bonus Raider Story Event can now be enabled or disabled whenever you start a new game for those who just want to build in peace (though you still need guard towers to make people feel safe). However, because the Raiders are now optional, their impact has been scaled up (it varies by difficulty) making the Story Event a lot more damaging if you do switch it on. We have also changed the wording around the Raiders to make it clear they're simply a text-based story event.
• The Town Leader will now automatically keep salvaging after finding a bag upgrade, until that new bag is full.
• A new guitar-based song (“Safe”) has been added to the soundtrack. This song will play after all the in-game goals have been completed.
• The Canteen building is now upgradeable with electricity, allowing more people to visit it simultaneously.
• Added a new “ultra” graphical preset that has increased shadow distance and resolution. You can switch to it in video options.
• Several new sound effects added for various actions.
• Countless UI tweaks implemented. To list a few: buildings with an radius effect (AoE) now display icons on the ground to help players understand what the effect does. The Town Hall stats screen has been made a lot more readable. The Courthouse and Trader UI has been improved. A quick way to access the menu button has been added to the top left. Extra shortcut buttons have been added to the main panel. Almost every menu has had a little touch-up.
• Several new alert messages added. These will explain what certain features do, or alert you to problems in the town that players were previously overlooking.
• Several text improvements and adjustments. For example, the opening story now implies the (super-speedy) Town Leader may not necessarily be an ordinary human being but created to rebuild society for the humans - which is interesting when it comes to raising an heir. New game tips have also been added to cover new features and hazards players often fall into. The tutorial has been streamlined and refined. Building descriptions have been made clearer, etc.
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Bug Fixes:
This version comes with many important bug fixes…
• Fixed: A bug that could cause saving to freeze permanently on certain maps with certain ruins. Thanks to our players for finding this and sending us the vital game info to solve it! We are monitoring this one on the beta branch to make sure it's fixed for everyone, but hopefully we've found the cause.
• Fixed: A bug that let the player try and save while saving, or delete a save while saving thus causing the save process to break.
• Fixed: A bug where guard tower workers would stop collecting weapons if one of them lost their job while coming back with weapons.
• Fixed: A bug that meant upgraded guard towers were not protecting structures in the extra radius.
• Fixed: A bug that could sometimes cause your Town Leader or engineers to teleport across the map if you were following them with the camera as a building was converted.
• Fixed: The Research Center can no longer be destroyed by raiders or collapse due to lack of repairs in order to prevent a rare and unrepeatable bug where researching could get stuck (you can still manually blow it up).
• Fixed: A very rare memory leak that could cause the game to crash when loading a saved game under specific circumstances.
• Fixed: A bug that was letting citizen builders leave work whenever they wanted, thus making them frustratingly ineffective even if they were even slightly unhappy.
• Fixed: A bug that could sometimes cause the repair building icon to get stuck on the screen if the building collapsed.
• Fixed: Fixed a bug that caused several sound effects to be unaffected by the volume slider.
• Fixed: A bug where Enforcers could get confused if Raiders changed a law while they were working on it. Also improved the Enforcer code in general to make them more reliable.
• Fixed: A bug that caused the food and drink statistics on the Town Hall stats menu to be linked, showing identical numbers. They now show accurate numbers.
• Fixed: A bug where the leader could get stuck behind the fence after helping to build the Research Center and only moved out by using mouse clicks.
• Fixed: We’ve reduced the size of the output_log file the game creates while you’re playing to save on hard drive space (and make it easier to email to us if needed).
• Fixed: A cosmetic bug where construction areas were rotated at a different angle to the way the player had put the building down.
• Fixed: A few alert messages were spamming the player too frequently (like a Courthouse Lacks Workers, etc). These will appear less often.
Balance Changes:
Here are the latest balance changes in response to player feedback…
• The beginning of the game has been re-balanced to make the initial citizens survive longer, letting new players get their bearings before people drop dead. This change does not affect hard mode.
• The canteen has been made a little less thirsty for lumber to encourage players to use it.
• Guard towers now only need 2 workers so players have more staff to spare.
• Wind turbines have been re-balanced so that you can only build 1 per 100 citizens, to avoid people exploiting them batteries for trade.
• The Luxury Tower now takes longer to research, meaning the other houses are suddenly more useful.
• Citizens are twice as likely to belong to your belief system passively (without needing conversion) so you can spend less time torturing or educating in the Info Station. This should result seeing more convictions in the early game.
• Tundra is now shrouded in fog of a nuclear winter, making it harder to scavenge as you can’t see as far ahead.
• As mentioned, if this story event is enabled, the “Raiders have arrived” alert now appears when you hit 200 citizens, not 250. Their chances to kill, destroy, or damage buildings have been slightly increased. The Raiders can still be completely neutralised by upgraded guard towers.
Quick Update On Development
Anybody who read the last recent dev blog will know we've had a real battle on our hands with this version and went down some development dead-ends that really slowed us down.
This version was supposed to have a "star" feature of a visible path system but we just couldn't iron out the technical hassles. When I last wrote we were at a crossroads about what to do. In the end, even though it was 80% complete, we made the painful choice to scrap 6 months of hard and costly work in order to get this update finished and save the company.
This update is not quite as full as I'd like therefore, but at least we're back on track, and Update 8 does noticeably improve the game.
We've done some serious analysis of where we've been going wrong on a production and design level this month, with thanks to some wonderful advice from a more experienced indie dev. The passion and excitement is back as never before. We're going to go for broke addressing the remaining player complaints and requests in a practical and timely manner from now on as we head the Early Access finishing line.
We're here to shape the game with our players and no review or forum post will be left unattended. Last week I studied and catalogued every single review (including all the bad ones, needed a beer after that!) and all recent forum posts to find out what essential areas we still need to look at. We're now designing practical solutions that can fit into the game and are doable, given we're a first time, no budget part-time team. I'll have a lot more to say about this new focus (and our restored love of making this game) in the next dev blog, including a totally refreshed Early Access roadmap to show people how we intend to finish this game… and maybe save our sanity and company in the process.
Thanks to everyone who tries the beta and for all the supportive players who have helped us keep going. Making games is never easy but it didn't need to be as hard as we were making it. Hope you enjoy the new update. You won't have to wait as long for the next one.
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Keep In Touch
Any questions, ideas, suggestions please make a post on the forum. I'll read all comments down below of course. Alternatively you can contact me below. Always happy to chat with players who are interested in the game, though bear in mind I have a day job, but I'll get back to you.
Good luck raising a family in the apocalypse!
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Update 8 Now Out On Main Branch
Wed, 24 June 2020
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Following a successful week on the beta branch, Update 8 is now available on the main branch for all players to enjoy. As mentioned, this update bring the new Leader’s family system, for you to take on the challenge of having a spouse and heir, many vital bug fixes, and a lot of smaller improvements.
Patch notes are repeated below. Thanks to everybody who took the time to try the game during the beta.
We’re hopeful we’ve caught all the serious bugs, but we’ll continue to monitor bug reports and forum feedback of course.
New Development Roadmap
Our old feature roadmap was a bit out of date and I’ve now updated it to show what our core focus is for finishing Atomic Society:
You can read it here, on the discussion forum https://steamcommunity.com/app/514500/discussions/0/2572067496656687982/
Comments, ideas and suggestions are welcome as always. We’re really trying to shape the core of Atomic Society around what players do and don’t enjoy (as best we can with our tiny team and day jobs) so the more we get the better! Thanks for helping to make the game better.
Coming Next
Work has already started on Update 9 with new little improvements already being added. The main goal of this update is polish and stability before we carry on adding major new content to make sure everything is working as intended. The good news is this means it shouldn’t take so long to get out (by our standards) as there isn’t any scary epic new feature for us to tear our (remaining) hair out over!
I promise to keep in touch with dev blogs even if the blog is just me basically saying “everything is on fire” as one thing I learnt from my last blog is that players just want to know what’s going on, even if things aren’t going well, that's part of the Early Access journey. However we've really changed a lot about how we work this summer, so I'm hoping we can get better updates out faster. That's the plan.
Update 8 - Family - Patch Notes (Final)
New Content and Improvements:
• New Feature – Leader’s Mansion & Family After your town has survived 3 years, your people will award you the Leader’s Mansion structure. Building this impressive new structure lets you tackle a new goal – to have a life partner and pass on your unique genetic code to an heir. After choosing who to be with, you can see your spouse (you have up to 3 if that suits you) getting up to mischief in town as you play, and worry about whether or not your children will survive (or be murderers – family members can commit the same traits as ordinary citizens). You can choose to make your family immune from arrest, or let them be locked up like regular criminals but this makes people harder to convert. Laws you set will impact who you can be with in the first place.
• The Scavenger’s Hut now passively harvests lumber from any nearby trees at a slow rate. This change makes the placement of the Scavenger’s Hut a lot more strategic. You must now consider how close it is to ruins while trying to get the most from any nearby trees. This change also means forest maps play differently to desert and snow maps.
• In response to player feedback, the bonus Raider Story Event can now be enabled or disabled whenever you start a new game for those who just want to build in peace (though you still need guard towers to make people feel safe). However, because the Raiders are now optional, their impact has been scaled up (it varies by difficulty) making the Story Event a lot more damaging if you do switch it on. We have also changed the wording around the Raiders to make it clear they're simply a text-based story event.
• The Town Leader will now automatically keep salvaging after finding a bag upgrade, until that new bag is full.
• A new guitar-based song (“Safe”) has been added to the soundtrack. This song will play after all the in-game goals have been completed.
• The Canteen building is now upgradeable with electricity, allowing more people to visit it simultaneously.
• Added a new “ultra” graphical preset that has increased shadow distance and resolution. You can switch to it in video options.
• Several new sound effects added for various actions.
• Countless UI tweaks implemented. To list a few: buildings with an radius effect (AoE) now display icons on the ground to help players understand what the effect does. The Town Hall stats screen has been made a lot more readable. The Courthouse and Trader UI has been improved. A quick way to access the menu button has been added to the top left. Extra shortcut buttons have been added to the main panel. Almost every menu has had a little touch-up.
• Several new alert messages added. These will explain what certain features do, or alert you to problems in the town that players were previously overlooking.
• Several text improvements and adjustments. For example, the opening story now implies the (super-speedy) Town Leader may not necessarily be an ordinary human being but created to rebuild society for the humans - which is interesting when it comes to raising an heir. New game tips have also been added to cover new features and hazards players often fall into. The tutorial has been streamlined and refined. Building descriptions have been made clearer, etc.
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Bug Fixes:
This version comes with many important bug fixes…
• Fixed: A bug that could cause saving to freeze permanently on certain maps with certain ruins. Thanks to our players for finding this and sending us the vital game info to solve it! We are monitoring this one on the beta branch to make sure it's fixed for everyone, but hopefully we've found the cause.
• Fixed: A bug that let the player try and save while saving, or delete a save while saving thus causing the save process to break.
• Fixed: A bug where guard tower workers would stop collecting weapons if one of them lost their job while coming back with weapons.
• Fixed: A bug that meant upgraded guard towers were not protecting structures in the extra radius.
• Fixed: A bug that could sometimes cause your Town Leader or engineers to teleport across the map if you were following them with the camera as a building was converted.
• Fixed: The Research Center can no longer be destroyed by raiders or collapse due to lack of repairs in order to prevent a rare and unrepeatable bug where researching could get stuck (you can still manually blow it up).
• Fixed: A very rare memory leak that could cause the game to crash when loading a saved game under specific circumstances.
• Fixed: A bug that was letting citizen builders leave work whenever they wanted, thus making them frustratingly ineffective even if they were even slightly unhappy.
• Fixed: A bug that could sometimes cause the repair building icon to get stuck on the screen if the building collapsed.
• Fixed: Fixed a bug that caused several sound effects to be unaffected by the volume slider.
• Fixed: A bug where Enforcers could get confused if Raiders changed a law while they were working on it. Also improved the Enforcer code in general to make them more reliable.
• Fixed: A bug that caused the food and drink statistics on the Town Hall stats menu to be linked, showing identical numbers. They now show accurate numbers.
• Fixed: A bug where the leader could get stuck behind the fence after helping to build the Research Center and only moved out by using mouse clicks.
• Fixed: We’ve reduced the size of the output_log file the game creates while you’re playing to save on hard drive space (and make it easier to email to us if needed).
• Fixed: A cosmetic bug where construction areas were rotated at a different angle to the way the player had put the building down.
• Fixed: A few alert messages were spamming the player too frequently (like a Courthouse Lacks Workers, etc). These will appear less often.
Balance Changes:
Here are the latest balance changes in response to player feedback…
• The beginning of the game has been re-balanced to make the initial citizens survive longer, letting new players get their bearings before people drop dead. This change does not affect hard mode.
• The canteen has been made a little less thirsty for lumber to encourage players to use it.
• Guard towers now only need 2 workers so players have more staff to spare.
• Wind turbines have been re-balanced so that you can only build 1 per 100 citizens, to avoid people exploiting them batteries for trade.
• The Luxury Tower now takes longer to research, meaning the other houses are suddenly more useful.
• Citizens are twice as likely to belong to your belief system passively (without needing conversion) so you can spend less time torturing or educating in the Info Station. This should result seeing more convictions in the early game.
• Tundra is now shrouded in fog of a nuclear winter, making it harder to scavenge as you can’t see as far ahead.
• As mentioned, if this story event is enabled, the “Raiders have arrived” alert now appears when you hit 200 citizens, not 250.
Their chances to kill, destroy, or damage buildings have been slightly increased. The Raiders can still be completely neutralised by upgraded guard towers.
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Dev Blog #38: A New Hope
Tue, 21 July 2020
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What a roller coaster of emotion it's been since my last dev blog.
At the very end of May I outlined all the difficulties we were having with Atomic Society. Should we put aside almost six months of work on the path/road system? The feature was way over-schedule but was close to being done.
Well, things have changed a lot since then. This dev blog will cover everything.
Honesty Works
Firstly, some might think that my last dev blog, a 3000 word diary saying "we’re really struggling" wouldn't go down well on Steam, but it did. A lot of people read the whole thing. Lesson learnt: Bad news is better than no news! Early Access players don't seem to mind if you're having development problems as long as you explain them honestly. And these dev blogs are more important than I realized. Thanks to everyone for the support.
Holding Out For A Hero
But writing didn't fix my problems. I was still in the same situation, still stuck with an almost finished feature that was causing us to be massively behind schedule, and uncertain if it would make a difference even if we could finish it in time.
Then the man behind successful indie game Judgment: Apocalypse Survival read my blog and contacted me out of the blue. As I mentioned, one problem I had was not knowing any other indie developers. We make Atomic Society from home in our spare-time, and live in a small town. Everything we did making Atomic Society felt like one long guessing game. Fortunately Tomer Barkan (the maker of Judgment) said I could ask him anything. And I certainly did!
In fact, I sent him 5 years worth of pent-up queries and questions about making indie games. If something was worrying me, I turned it into a question. To my surprise, he replied with detailed answers almost immediately. It was the best business chat I've ever had. Here was a person who’s been down the road we’re walking on, and made a success of it. He knows how to run a good business - and that's required to make good games. Everything he was saying was causing light-bulbs to go off in my brain.
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The Main Lesson
The number 1 thing I learnt from him was to stop guessing what features to add to the game and start focusing on our Steam review score. Use that as the guide rather than just guessing what to add. Listen to what players are unhappy about and start fixing their complaints before you get around addressing their requests. I hadn’t really understood this distinction before.
In fact, I was completely ignoring bad reviews. "If they don't like it, the game's not for them" I used to think. But bad reviews drag down the game’s overall review score on Steam. This drastically decreases sales, especially if the game goes below 70%. And the lower it goes, the lower team morale goes, for all our hard work adding content seemed to be having a negative impact (because we weren't addressing specific complaints). It was incredibly confusing and disheartening.
But the information I needed to fix that was right there all along. All I had to do was read it!
Deep Breath
So after my chat, I decided to read every single bad review and every single refund reason for the game in a single night. I hadn’t done that for a very long time, and never with the right attitude.
Reading 100+ complaints about something you’ve made isn't pleasurable but this time I could handle it. I didn’t feel so sensitive because I viewed the bad reviews more like a "how-to" manual on what to tackle next. I summarised all the complaints and ordered them by frequency so I could see what the biggest issues were. A plan of action unfolded. I didn't need to guess anymore. People were being very specific about what they disliked!
Naturally, certain complaints will always be beyond our meagre resources to fix. We’re a no-budget tiny team making our first game, and some early mistakes can’t be undone. However many of the issues appeared to be relatively easy things to resolve (or at least mitigate). For example, recent bad reviews tended to focus on two things: slow updates (because we were stressing out over the path system) and certain bugs... Nobody was leaving us a bad review because we didn't have paths.
This led to an obvious conclusion: why don't we put the path system to one side and put out an update that happens to contain bug fixes - thereby curing our two biggest types of complaint in one go?
It kind of sounds so simple in hindsight. And it is. But I needed experience to make it sink in.
Turn The Ship Around!
Refocusing our little part-time team to be all about the review-score involved shaking-up the way we’d planned versions since the start. It also meant recommitting to Atomic Society and reigniting our hope for the game and our struggling income. It also meant handing over ownership of the game in a sense to the players/reviewers - and accepting the customer is king from now on (even if we can’t always help them), like any other service job. My role as designer would evolve from “ideas man” to a guy who comes up with creative and practical solutions to player feedback. It's fine to be the "inspired artist" before you go public, but afterwards you have to adapt to what people want.
On top of these changes, getting an update out ASAP obviously meant shelving the 80+% complete path system which coder Nick had been slaving over for 6 months and which looked really cool. But as Tomer pointed out, spending a lot of work time/money on stuff that just "looks cool" isn't going to help the bottom line. He told me that when a feature is slipping behind schedule ask "is it going to pay off?”
The path system had long passed that point. As I've said before, if you're lucky enough to pay someone the basic minimum wage in England, 6 months indie game development (full time) will cost about £8000 for one person - and that's just to break even. We get about £6-7 net income per copy of Atomic Society after deductions so you can guess this path system was going to have to sell a lot of copies to pay-off. But the only people who wanted it were people who already owned the game.
It’s not that we don’t want to make the game better for fans of the game of course. We’ve spent the last 18 months improving the game for them. But fixing stuff people strongly dislike - and therefore the review score - might help us achieve a degree of financial stability and then we can help everybody. It has to be our goal.
I had to tell our coder Nick that the path system was doomed even though he’d spent so much hard work on it. I wasn’t sure how he’d react. But Nick is a pro. Unsurprisingly he'd rather spend his time trying to save the company than bashing his head on a low-priority feature. We finally said farewell to the path system and spent the first half of June in a frenzy of bug-fixing, based on what people were complaining about in reviews, hoping it would all pay-off...
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Undercooked
Will the path system ever return? Right now, I don't know. It touches upon another piece of advice Tomer gave me, that no feature is better than a half-baked feature. In fact, sometimes it's best to actually remove stuff from a game to keep players happy.
I was a bit shocked by this as I was under the impression that any content you can get into the game is better than nothing at all. Who wants fewer things to do in their game? But I was wrong. “Half-baked” features please no one. To use an analogy, I'd rather have no chicken than an undercooked one.
As exhibit A for this, I present the raiders we put into Atomic Society. We added raiders way back in our pre-alpha days because a lot of our early players requested them. But combining a fully-fledged combat system with a complex town building game was beyond our budget and skills. So our version of raiders became a text-based story event, which was better than nothing, I thought.
But when I looked at my collated list of bad reviews last month it turned out raiders were a top 3 complaint! A sizeable portion of all our bad reviews were about a gameplay feature that was bug-free and working. We were being hammered for having content.
The reason? It was half-baked. Certain players saw our post-apocalyptic game had raiders and formed expectations about them we couldn’t do justice to (though I wish we could on a future game). To them our product was supposed to do X and didn't, so they left us a bad review.
So for the June update I put my trust in the advice and “demoted” our raiders. I couldn’t bring myself to rip them out of the game entirely, but the story event became a bonus difficulty mode which we only recommend people try on their second play-through. And it’s clearly labelled it’s just a story event (no combat). 5 months of arguably wasted work was put behind a toggle that took about 2 days to code/test.
Did It All Work?
So after an exhausting shift in attitude and goals, and putting together a version in 3 weeks (without the path system), we managed to get an update out in time for the Steam summer sale - our first major update this year. I can’t tell you how good it felt to be releasing content again.
And after releasing it, we went on a modest discount for the summer sale. This was a lower discount than we had offered before (just 15% off) for Tomer rightly pointed out, sales attract crowds and you better have a product that can keep them happy when they arrive or the review score will suffer.
And so far, at time of writing, it seems to be working.
At the start of the sale we had our biggest day for almost a year, even beating the bigger Christmas discount. We actually broke-even as a company for the first time in a scarily long time throughout the sale. And fortunately, the extra attention didn't hurt the review score. In fact, it went up and it’s never gone up since launch. As I write, 86% of our recent reviews are all positive, which is I think is a new record. And our overall review score (which matters most) climbed and is now hovering on 69% positive - just 1% below the 70% threshold where things kick up a notch apparently. All because we resolved a few common complaints.
I’m not saying we’ve turned everything around. We’re still losing money finishing Atomic Society now the sale is over, but the wolves have been chased a little further away from the door, and if we get to 70% positive reviews we might even stay afloat. Most importantly it gives us hope. After 18 months of seeing absolutely zero reward from our efforts (in fact our hard work caused more complaints), we’re at last seeing tangible proof we can make a difference. I know Atomic Society isn’t the best game in the world, but if at least 7 out of 10 people have a good time with it, I can't be too disappointed with my first ever attempt at game-making.
And all the changes to our way of working and business strategy caused another bonus...
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New Update Almost Ready!
Right now we’re mere weeks away from releasing another sizeable update to the game. The last one took 6 months. This one has taken 4 weeks so far. Time estimating tasks in advance, having daily progress check-ins, and focusing on things we can do easily to fix complaints has really helped. It might be the fastest we’ve ever made an update of this size.
There’s no huge gameplay changes in the next update naturally, but I know people would rather have all the improvements we’ve got. The update will contain fixes for various bugs and glitches that we’ve been putting off for ages (because I didn’t think they mattered) and a lot of balance tweaks players have been requesting. .. Or rather complaining about!
I’m hopeful it will be out this month. The one thing holding us back right now is…
The Dreaded Save Bug
We're going to wait slightly longer to release the new update just to see if we can fix a very rare save bug that is plaguing us. The bug causes the progress bar gets stuck when you make a save and it doesn't work. We’ve done various things to try and fix it but we can’t reproduce it no matter how long we play the game.
Only 1 person has mentioned this bug to us since the last update, so it seems to be extremely rare, but if anybody gets this bug please, please stop what you're doing in the game and read this forum thread. It will only take 2 minutes and you can send us vital information to help us fix this. Unless a player gets this bug and sends us the info I'm not sure how we'll fix this problem, but we're doing everything we can to track it down in the meantime.
If we can’t fix it in the next 2-3 weeks, we’ll release the next update anyway, but I think we can afford to spend a little longer hunting it down. After all, if we release a new patch in less than 6 weeks my brain might explode with the novelty of it all!
Hard Work Not Over Yet
Not all our complaints and problems can be solved easily.
The biggest complaint of all is that the game is too short, or rather, it doesn’t keep people's attention for long enough. We do get nice reviews from people who somehow managed to play the game for 100+ hours but most people average out at about 5-10 hours which is fine for some games, but people want a lot of content from a town building game.
But doubling the amount of content is not an easy thing to do.
I think part of my problem is the original design. My personal favourite builders and management games are all "level" based, like Tropico or Pharaoh or anything by Bullfrog. You make multiple cities/things on each level and then do it again through the campaign. But I don't think a campaign mode would work in Atomic Society because our game isn’t about reaching the "high scores" of money and resources. This is something I should've thought about at the start, but too late now.
I have one idea about how to solve this, which is essentially ramping up the speed migrants arrive as your town expands - so your town will always be under pressure and you’ll have to make an enormous town to keep everybody happy, maybe even cover the whole map. This combined with self-sustaining resources (mining) might help, but I don't know.
If you have any ideas for changes that would A) Tempt you to replay the game multiple times or B) Keeping building your first town for another 5-10 hours, let me know! Seeing things from a player's point of view is always useful.
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Did You Know Reviews Are Important?!
I couldn't finish a blog like this without begging for reviews at some point! As someone whose game is currently just 0.6% below the threshold on Steam where it will be considered a "mostly positive" game, I just have to ask kindly if any owners of game would leave a sentence or two (or an essay) on our review page.
Just find Atomic Society in your Steam library or go to our store page. You should see the option to leave a review there if you own it and you're logged in. Thanks to anybody who does this. And reviews are probably the best way to support any other little indie devs you know.
Another Month Rolls By
Somehow this blog turned out to be even longer than the one where I told you of all our troubles. The words just come out. I hope people who enjoy our game development adventure (currently 5 years long and counting) enjoyed this latest episode. We'll get there in the end.
Next month we should hopefully have released the next update, and we'll see if we can hit that 70% review threshold... And if it makes the difference we need to survive. The roller coaster ain’t over yet.
Thanks for reading!
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Update 9 on the beta branch / full patch notes
Thu, 13 August 2020
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A new polish and bug-fixing update has just been released on the beta branch for players to try.
This goal for this version was to tackle as many little complaints players had by going through bad reviews and forum threads, etc. We drew up a big list and went through as many as we possibly could. I'm kind of surprised how straightforward it's been. Making this game isn't usually this focused and efficient... (something must be about go wrong)!
We’ve sorted some issues that had been hanging around for ages. My hope is this puts the game in a nicely semi-polished state for anybody checking it out on Early Access.
This is more an update for brand new players than older ones, but we've got things in store for long-term supporters too...
(Scroll down for full patch notes)
To access the beta branch and the new update, here's all you need to do:
1. Right click Atomic Society in your steam library and select properties.
2. Select the betas tab and from the drop down menu select "beta - Public beta branch".
3. You do not need to enter a code for this public beta. Just close the window and in your library Atomic Society will automatically update to the beta version (if it doesn't restart Steam).
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This version IS save compatible. You won't lose anything hopefully. :)
You can now play the Atomic Society Beta (or switch back to the main version anytime). You'll know you're on the new update if the version says 0.1.9.0 on the title screen.
Do let us know on the forum, or in comments, or anywhere if you find any issues with the beta (that's why we're running it).
The Next Big Challenge...
Anybody who read the last dev blog will know what a whirlwind this summer has been. For months of stress, indecision and drudgery on a feature that was going nowhere, to a complete 180 and new focus as a first-time team trying to work out how the heck to make a game that pays the bills with tips from more experienced developers. Making your first ever game (with a day job to get by) is nothing if not educational.
Shortly after writing that blog, thanks to players supporting indie teams, we were able to boost our review score just enough to get it over the dreaded "mostly positive" 70% line where we now dangle with a sigh of relief. It's been amazing and it helped us finanically, just as we hoped it would. We're still technically spending more than we're earning making this game, but the little sales boost has bought us enough time to go for broke and tackle the last remaining (fixable) complaint about Atomic Society...
Making the game longer.
It seems players generally like the game, they just wish there was a bit more of it. We know about all about this one but have so far focused on just getting the core of the game to be fun enough. Now we'll do what we can to expand the length.
The downside is this won't be a bunch of quick fixes like this patch was.
I’ll write more about the inevitable highs and low and problems of doing that over the coming months (nothing is ever simple when it comes to making games). It’s going to take a lot of work to add new things, especially working around day jobs, etc. But if it goes well, I think/hope/pray it might be enough to make Atomic Society ready for it's 1.0 Early Access version. But I think we'll be working right up to Christmas. But if it goes well, it should be worth the wait.
Thanks to everybody who's been a part of our muddling journey! I'll let you know how well or badly it's going in future dev blogs...
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Update 9 Patch Notes
Note: This version is compatible with existing save games. You shouldn't lose anything by downloading it.
Bug Fixes
We have tried to clean up as many bugs as possible in this version. Thanks to everybody who told us about a bug. There's no way we would've found all these on our own...
• Fixed: The Trader taking but not giving goods if your storehouse was full.
• Fixed: The murders in the last 30 days statistic becoming inaccurate after a while.
• Fixed: A bug where the UI option to salvage scrap mounds would not appear if you destroyed multiple buildings.
• Fixed: A rare bug where the UI could break after starting a custom game with a unique number of adults.
• Fixed: Inconsistent speeds when builders/engineers were helping the Town Leader construct something. Sometimes it would be too fast, sometimes too slow.
• Fixed: Disabled the ability to save and load when Raiders were making a demand, which allowed players to bypass the Raiders entirely!
• Fixed: A bug where the Raiders would forget to come at all if you saved and loaded at a certain point.
• Fixed: A bug where the timer on the belief menu appeared glitched after the time was up.
• Fixed: The belief menu now updates without you having to close and re-open the menu.
• Fixed: If you walked out during sex with your spouse the sex somehow carried on.
• Fixed: Map descriptive texts being cut off at certain resolutions.
• Fixed: The menus locking the player out if the annual save game reminder popped up at the same time as the Raider story text.
• Fixed: The Town shortcut menu buttons for things like Town Hall stats opened the wrong menu on the first ever time they were clicked.
• Fixed: It is now possible to use capitals in the middle of names when creating a character.
• Fixed: Made small/narrow ruins easier to click on.
• Fixed: A bug where the icons for people who want to be your life partner would switch themselves on after sentencing laws.
• Fixed: The keyboard shortcut to zoom the camera in and out now works in Town Leader mode as well.
• Fixed: Made the keyboard shortcut (F11 by default) to hide the UI able to be re-bound to a different key.
• Fixed: Various rare code errors that could cause slowdown in larger towns.
• Fixed: Corpses can no longer despawn if you’re looking their menus so you have time to read them.
• Fixed: A bug where the population number on the Town Hall stats screen could be slightly inaccurate as it wasn’t counting people who left after a patriot scared them away.
• Fixed: Incorrect tooltips when people were being hung. The reason someone is executed should appear accurately now in all cases.
• Fixed: New migrants now have to get a lot closer to your Gateways in order to become citizens.
• Fixed: Corrected the bios on child citizens who were born after the nuclear war. For example, the entry on how they survived the bombs didn’t make sense.
Gameplay Changes:
• The building costs for all structures have been altered. Rather than most buildings using equal amounts of all 3 building supplies, now a building that is mostly wood will need more wood, one that is metal costs more metal and so on.
• Holding down shift (button can be rebound) now speeds up the camera, letting you fly across the map quickly if you want to.
• The speed of saving has been noticeably improved once again.
• Both mouse buttons can now be rebound in the controls section.
• The tenement, wind turbine and guard tower models have had some extra cosmetic love applied.
• The message that appears when you beat the game has been improved visually with new handmade artwork.
• All citizens now have a button on their menu letting you track them with the camera if you want to watch them going about their business.
• All citizens now have a button on their menu letting you open their workplace menu without needing to find it yourself.
• The screen shake that occurs when your bags are full (to alert you) can now be switched off in the gameplay options.
• All progress bars now show what percentage they’re on if you mouse over them.
• The main 5 need bars now flash if they get seriously low.
• You can see how many days until your child is born by mousing over the conceive button.
• It now shows you what your spouse/kids are up to if you mouse over the icons over their heads.
• New sound effects added for various actions (like entering your town name at the start, your child being born, etc).
• Citizen corpses will not despawn now if you’re reading their menus at the time.
• A repeating warning message has been added which tells you if your food and drink supplies are running out.
• A repeating warning message has been added if plague levels are rising noticeably.
Balance Changes:
• Decreased the rate prisoners starve to death by 50%.
• Survivors now went to the toilet before joining you at the start of a new game, and should be less likely to drop dead from poor sanitation before you’ve got your town up and running. This only applies to the easiest and middle difficulty settings.
• The Engineers you start a new game with have been toughened up and should survive longer now, letting you get more use out of them.
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Hopefully all that gives everybody a more enjoyable experience with Atomic Society.
Thanks to anybody who tests the beta and generally for being the most supportive bunch of players a no-budget indie team could hope for!
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Update 9 now out fully on the main branch
Mon, 24 August 2020
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Update 9 is now available on the main branch for all players to check out, featuring many small fixes and tweaks and general polish in order to keep the game as stable as possible before we carry on adding new content.
We didn't receive any serious bug reports from players during the beta week (thanks to everybody who tried it out) so hopefully everything is running smoothly! But if you find anything, do let us know in the forum and we'll investigate.
Coming Next
Thanks to our dramatic summer (see previous dev blogs) we now have a little more financial breathing space and focus (and common sense!) to try and get this game to a place where we can be as proud of it as possible before we go broke. We're going to do all we can to give players what they generally want from Atomic Society, as best we can working day-jobs and with our tiny budget.
We're now at the early planning stages for Update 10, which is going to be a big one, and will be our attempt to solve the last player complaint with the game, that it runs out of steam a bit (no pun intended), by adding more depth and more unique gameplay events and objectives. There will be new buildings coming and we're going to try and add some form of "campaign" in order to make replaying the game feel more compelling and rewarding. If all goes well, this might get us to "1.0" status, but we'll see. I'll have a lot more to say about this in the next dev blog. Hopefully we've learnt a few things about game development and won't get stuck in development hell as we did last winter, but as I always say, we'll get there in the end.
Thanks to everybody for trying out the update and supplying feedback. We really appreciate it.
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Update 9 Patch Notes (Final)
Note: This version is compatible with existing save games. You shouldn't lose anything by downloading it.
Bug Fixes
We have tried to clean up as many bugs as possible in this version. Thanks to everybody who told us about a bug. There's no way we would've found all these on our own...
• Fixed: The Trader taking but not giving goods if your storehouse was full.
• Fixed: The murders in the last 30 days statistic becoming inaccurate after a while.
• Fixed: A bug where the UI option to salvage scrap mounds would not appear if you destroyed multiple buildings.
• Fixed: A rare bug where the UI could break after starting a custom game with a unique number of adults.
• Fixed: Inconsistent speeds when builders/engineers were helping the Town Leader construct something. Sometimes it would be too fast, sometimes too slow.
• Fixed: Disabled the ability to save and load when Raiders were making a demand, which allowed players to bypass the Raiders entirely!
• Fixed: A bug where the Raiders would forget to come at all if you saved and loaded at a certain point.
• Fixed: A bug where the timer on the belief menu appeared glitched after the time was up.
• Fixed: The belief menu now updates without you having to close and re-open the menu.
• Fixed: If you walked out during sex with your spouse the sex somehow carried on.
• Fixed: Map descriptive texts being cut off at certain resolutions.
• Fixed: The menus locking the player out if the annual save game reminder popped up at the same time as the Raider story text.
• Fixed: The Town shortcut menu buttons for things like Town Hall stats opened the wrong menu on the first ever time they were clicked.
• Fixed: It is now possible to use capitals in the middle of names when creating a character.
• Fixed: Made small/narrow ruins easier to click on.
• Fixed: A bug where the icons for people who want to be your life partner would switch themselves on after sentencing laws.
• Fixed: The keyboard shortcut to zoom the camera in and out now works in Town Leader mode as well.
• Fixed: Made the keyboard shortcut (F11 by default) to hide the UI able to be re-bound to a different key.
• Fixed: Various rare code errors that could cause slowdown in larger towns.
• Fixed: Corpses can no longer despawn if you’re looking their menus so you have time to read them.
• Fixed: A bug where the population number on the Town Hall stats screen could be slightly inaccurate as it wasn’t counting people who left after a patriot scared them away.
• Fixed: Incorrect tooltips when people were being hung. The reason someone is executed should appear accurately now in all cases.
• Fixed: New migrants now have to get a lot closer to your Gateways in order to become citizens.
• Fixed: Corrected the bios on child citizens who were born after the nuclear war. For example, the entry on how they survived the bombs didn’t make sense.
Gameplay Changes:
• The building costs for all structures have been altered. Rather than most buildings using equal amounts of all 3 building supplies, now a building that is mostly wood will need more wood, one that is metal costs more metal and so on.
• Holding down shift (button can be rebound) now speeds up the camera, letting you fly across the map quickly if you want to.
• The speed of saving has been noticeably improved once again.
• Both mouse buttons can now be rebound in the controls section.
• The tenement, wind turbine and guard tower models have had some extra cosmetic love applied.
• The message that appears when you beat the game has been improved visually with new handmade artwork.
• All citizens now have a button on their menu letting you track them with the camera if you want to watch them going about their business.
• All citizens now have a button on their menu letting you open their workplace menu without needing to find it yourself.
• The screen shake that occurs when your bags are full (to alert you) can now be switched off in the gameplay options.
• All progress bars now show what percentage they’re on if you mouse over them.
• The main 5 need bars now flash if they get seriously low.
• You can see how many days until your child is born by mousing over the conceive button.
• It now shows you what your spouse/kids are up to if you mouse over the icons over their heads.
• New sound effects added for various actions (like entering your town name at the start, your child being born, etc).
• Citizen corpses will not despawn now if you’re reading their menus at the time.
• A repeating warning message has been added which tells you if your food and drink supplies are running out.
• A repeating warning message has been added if plague levels are rising noticeably.
Balance Changes:
• Decreased the rate prisoners starve to death by 50%.
• Survivors now went to the toilet before joining you at the start of a new game, and should be less likely to drop dead from poor sanitation before you’ve got your town up and running. This only applies to the easiest and middle difficulty settings.
• The Engineers you start a new game with have been toughened up and should survive longer now, letting you get more use out of them.
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Dev Blog #39: The End Is In Sight
Wed, 7 October 2020
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After a frantic summer trying to resurrect our little game dev business following a difficult start to the year, things quietened down while we focused on making one of the biggest updates so far.
If all goes well, this next update could bring us to the end of our Early Access journey, if we manage to get it all done in a single update (if not, we'll break into two parts).
Things are going reasonably well so far, given that it's been little more than 6 weeks since our last update. We haven't hit any big problems yet, as we did with the dreaded path system, and the business and teamwork tweaks we made (focusing on complaints, giving each other daily progress updates, etc) made working part-time from home around day jobs more productive, which is just as well, as lockdowns mean we can't get together as a team any more even to say hello.
The core focus of the upcoming version will be addressing the last major complaint some people still have: that Atomic Society is too short and could use more depth. If our new ideas pan out, the upcoming changes should add a lot more value and interest, at least for those already enjoying the game.
Here's what we've been working on so far (note: screenshots are from a work in progress dev version, so excuse any weirdness)…
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New Goals System
In the top right of the above pic you should see the new goals tracker. For the next update, we've redone and expanded the goals aspect completely, making it more addictive and interesting. Goals are now pinned to the screen (you can minimise them) and divided up into stages or tiers. Each time you complete a stage you get a large wave of migrants to deal with.
Each goal stage is different and bigger than the last, and some stages have unique goals. We've also added in some new goals to spice things up a bit. This should also make the game easier to learn.
On top of that, we've also added new "extended goals" for hardcore players and those who really want to make a big settlement. You can activate these when you beat a map, and the reward will probably be an achievement (as we don't want to force players to go for them). At the moment an extended goal involves going for 800 citizens, double the current amount, among several other tasks.
New Town Reputation System
In the bottom left of the above pic, you may also notice a new vertical progress bar (ignore how it looks, we're trying out different styles).
One of the problems I've been trying to solve is the old survival game problem of the game getting easier rather than harder as you craft stuff and get stronger.
To help with this in Atomic Society we've added a new reputation feature. From now on, as your population grows, your town becomes more attractive, and migrants will start coming faster (there's levels of intensity) rather than migration being random, as it is now. On top of that, the higher your rep gets, migrants will become weaker as they've travelled from further away to find your sanctuary.
When we've balanced it properly, this new feature should help maintain some of that addictive pressure from the start when it feels like you're being overwhelmed with mouths to feed and corpses to clean up. It's going to be tricky to balance it correctly though, as overcoming that survival challenge and building a strong town is part of the fun, but we'll try to find a decent middle-way.
This feature should also help with those lulls when you're just waiting for people to show up. Now you're always working towards something, the next reputation "ding".
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Mining and Ore Processing Buildings
In the picture above you can see two brand new buildings that we're working on right now for the next update. Given in mind people will try to make larger settlements, thanks to the new features I just mentioned, we're also going to let advanced towns become completely self-sufficient. In the next update you may eventually be able to get to the point that you no longer need to salvage at all, but you'll have to plan your town around resource areas instead, if you want to go down that route.
The new mine and refinery structures both need to be researched. When you try to build the mine, certain areas of each map will be highlighted, showing where you can get ore from, and you can order the mine to focus on stone or metal. The refinery obviously converts it into useable building materials. This should make those pesky mountains a lot more useful and add more strategy to how you expand your town.
Translation Progress
After putting it off for so long, as the text in our game kept changing so much, we've finally started getting quotes to translate the game into other languages. And it isn't going to be cheap. Each translation is essentially a month's entire income from Steam (for us), but apparently it pays off as it opens the game up to a new audience. I suppose we could get volunteer players to translate it, but this is apparently slightly risky, as a weak translation can lead to bad reviews, and it's also something we'd need to manage and monitor on top of everything else.
We haven't ordered a translation yet (as we'd just have to redo it after this version) but we're probably going to test the waters with a popular language first of all, to see if it pays off.
More Features Coming
What you see above is just the things we've started on this month so far. The biggest feature for the next update isn't quite ready to talked about it yet as it's still early days. But I will do so in future blogs.
My hope is that, despite 2020 trying to destroy society, we can get the update out by December. Hopefully it won't be like last year we were working until 11pm on Christmas Eve to get a version out. That sucked. Ideally it will be sooner than Xmas, but if anything goes wrong I'll let people know.
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Business/Personal Stuff
I know a few people just read these blogs to hear about the ups and downs of trying to make your first ever game with zero experience, so the rest of this blog will focus on that...
Fortunately, I don't have new disasters to share. As mentioned, we spent the summer trying to make amends for six months of work on a feature nobody actually wanted, and were close to being flat broke after several months of losing far more than we earned. But after getting some great advice, I started focusing on what players didn't like about the game (as such people hurt the review score, and thus our bottom line) rather than just focusing on fan requests (although of course if somebody requests a great idea, it won't be ignored) and my own personal vision for the game.
The response from existing players to us being open and honest about our development woes was incredible. If you look at the review graph on the store page, you might see a large big spike straight after the previous blog. I'm amazed and deeply grateful to anybody who left a quick review. And the encouragement came just in time. Steam reviews are percentage based, so obviously the lower you go, the harder it is to climb back up. If we hadn't changed course to deal with what the dreaded "red thumbs" were saying, we may have never climbed back out of the mixed zone.
We had a nervous month checking the store page as the trend of reviews changed from negative to positive. For one ludicrous week our review score literally hovered on 69.9% until somebody pushed us over the edge. That was a good day. And to my surprise, it kept on going and levelled out at about 71% where it's now holding, which I think is fair, though I'm not exactly objective.
We'd hoped getting above 70% would automatically increase sales for the game (after all, not many people will take a risk on a "mixed" rated Early Access game) but unfortunately getting above 70% hasn't really made a huge difference to our sales. We've started gaining wishlists again instead of losing them, but I think people may just waiting for us to leave Early Access, considering we're almost there. It may also be that we've taken too long making the game (by picking such a big game as our first project, unavoidable health issues and day jobs). When we first went public with Atomic Society, rival games like Frostpunk, and Endzone and Surviving the Aftermath didn't exist. Now they've come along and eaten our lunch to a degree, though I personally prefer Atomic Society... but I'm not exactly objective.
But it isn't doom and gloom. Following my business "mentor" Tomer Barkan's (of Judgment: Apocalypse Survival fame) advice, I took the risk of running a sale on the game after getting the review score up. This was a gamble. Sales attract people who aren't especially interested in the game, and such people tend to leave bad reviews if they're unimpressed. It could have undone all our hard work getting the score back up and I didn't think we could recover it twice.
Extend Play!
Fortunately the latest sale worked. It gave us just enough cash to press on without having to think about spending more time to staying alive rather than finishing a game that is draining the bank account.
The picture below is Atomic Society's sales graph from the past 12 months. That mountain on the right is the aforementioned one week sale at a 20% discount (the other smaller bumps are the Steam summer and winter sales from the past year). In fact, we haven't seen anything like this since around May 2019 (the first ever sale).
As you can see, daily sales remain quite low (5 copies a day is roughly normal at the moment). Therefore I don't check sales that regularly, so you can imagine my coffee being spat out when I saw this sale spike. The sale marks the first time we've broken even financially for over a year.
In this regard, focusing on complaints really worked out. And thankfully, the game's review score held above 70%. It took a little battering, but didn't decline.
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But everything's relative. That spike equates to about 8 weeks of funds. I think that's all we need for now to finish the new update and get the game out of Early Access, but beyond that, I don't know. We've been tottering on the edge of being broke for so long. There have been several moments where I've wondered if I should take more hours at my day job, or apply for development job elsewhere, assuming anybody would hire me (and I'd be willing to move). But I try not to think about it. Staring into the unknown is a good way to spoil the present day and tarnish past successes.
It's quite possible that with the right mindset, we could continue to turn things around and become one of the rare indie dev successes out there...
But There's a Catch
Having Tomer as my business mentor (he isn't really a mentor, just a nice guy) made a huge difference to our survival. The changes we made by becoming complaint-focused fixed the review score and gave us a great sale. It was fun if manic seeing what we were doing wrong, and implementing practical business changes. But it was also like getting a new job I hadn't applied for.
It seems that to survive as an indie dev, while keeping a team of 3 employed (plus contractors), you 100% have to be passionate about business and marketing or know someone who is. In fact, "business dev" might need to be your first passion, with game development in second place. And though I can muster the energy to act like like Mr. Business on occasion, I'm not that guy by nature and this summer has been gruelling. In fact, I joined a group of professional game developers over the summer, and to be quite frank, I feel stressed just looking at their conversations. I don't want to live my life around wishlist conversion numbers, percentages, Valve's latest blog, etc. I don't want to be controlled by numbers like that. If you're into business and marketing, it probably doesn't feel bad, but I listen to people like the Clark Tank and I just think "I'm middle-aged, I'm going to be dead in about four decades at best, I want to follow what I love". And marketing just ain't it.
On top of that, now we've fixed many of the biggest complaints, a new complaint is emerging that wasn't there before: "This game isn't unique enough". It seems if you focus on complaints, which makes sense, you will inevitably start making something generic because complaints usually compare you to something else that person likes more. However, on the other hand, if you follow your passion and personal vision (at least if you're me), you get bad reviews and go broke.
I'm now wondering if you can actually make "art" (e.g. something you feel passionate about) for anonymous people on the internet rather than following your own heart. You can definitely make "products", but if making products or answering complaints is your thing, there are lots of better paid day jobs out there for such a role. I could spend the next 2 years adding in everything players want, but in the end, I'd just have to ask myself "why did you actually want to make this game in the first place?"
This probably sounds like I'm ranting or depressed. I haven't figured it all out myself, and write largely to figure out what's in my head. I do like solving problems/complaints and I'm enormously grateful to have made it this far, to have created a game that's far more ambitious and successful than I expected. I do still love our game. You don't spend 5.5 years making something if you don't love it. But what do I want to do for a living? And what am I willing to pay to be that person? I think for me, personally - and I certainly don't speak for the whole team - I'd rather be broke than make "products", but I still have my health, which not everybody does.
Whatever I personally think, we will absolutely finish Atomic Society as best we can, focusing on what negative feedback is loosely indicating, and hopefully make a game we can be proud to send out of Early Access. And then perhaps, next year at some point, we can start on a second game of some of the knowledge we've gained. But what should Game 2 be? A game for the public... or a game for me?
Thanks to everybody for reading my muddled thoughts! Apologies if they don't make much sense. Let me know your thoughts on the new content and anything else. I will check comments and I'll be in touch to let you know how this version is progressing between now and Christmas. You can always reach me on the forums in the meantime.
Big thanks again to anybody who left us a positive review and helped keep the lights on so far and for those who somehow make it to the bottom of these blogs. Making your first ever game continues to be a learning experience...
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Dev Blog 40: Biggest Update Yet Progress
Thu, 26 November 2020
Here's a little update on how we're doing with Update 10, which is probably the most content we've added to the game in one go.
As I revealed in the last blog, this next update already includes 1) new mining and ore processing structures, 2) a brand new reputation system for migration that keeps the challenge going and lets you make bigger towns (see the new bar on the needs menu, in the pic below), 3) a completely new goals system - including some new goals - 4) and numerous tweaks and fixes.
But over the past month, we've been working predominately on the version's biggest feature…
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Gameplay Modifiers
In update 10, each time you beat a map by completing all the goals you'll unlock several new gameplay changing modifiers that can add replay value and extra challenge on future play-throughs, a bit like a mini campaign.
We’ve made 18 mods in all, some which add new challenges and goals, and others which are basically "cheats" for those who just want to make a big town. It's up to you what to enable or disable.
Here’s the full list (90% of these are finished):
Challenge Mods:
• Bad Behaviour: Citizens are far more likely to commit social issues, making your town more chaotic.
• Bartertown: A new goal to trade a set number of resources in each stage before you can proceed.
• Storehouse Rats: Food and drink resources will begin to decay if you have too many in stock, making stockpiling tricky.
• Wanderer: Begin without any engineers or citizens, making the start somewhat harder.
• Slow Learner: Doubles the amount of time it takes to research new buildings, forcing you to plan ahead even further.
• Radiation Sickness: Radiation as an effect that can periodically cull a random percentage of your town, forcing you to adapt to an unexpected loss of people. This one is for expert players only.
• Tyrant: A new goal to set at least half your laws to flogging or execution.
• Progressive: Same as above, but you must encourage at least half the laws.
• Plague Outbreaks: Enable this and occasionally everybody in your entire town will catch the plague at once.
• Multiple Towns: A big new goal that requires you to build at least 3 small town outposts rather than just having one big town and manage them all together.
• Misery: Increases the rate which morale drains, making this need far more threatening than before (and people now also leave town when their morale runs out, rather than dying!)
• Cowboy Builders: Construction times will take much, much longer meaning you have to plan ahead again.
Positive Modifiers:
• Resource Packages: Periodically spawn a bundle of essential resources in the storehouse.
• Bounty: Food and drink production buildings produce twice as much with this turned on.
• Reinforcements: Periodically spawn a group of citizens instantly, rather than waiting.
• Full Refunds: This will instantly give you back the resources you consumed making a new building. It should make perfecting your layout easier.
• Assassin: An ability that lets you kill any citizen you want on demand. This is actually a debug tool we have but we thought we might as well chuck it in as using it feels rather sinister...
• Double Loot: Ruins have twice as many items in them.
(The UI below is still being developed - we've got a lot of icons to draw!)
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When you unlocked all of these (perhaps you'll get 3-4 per map), you can turn on all 18 at once if you feel like it, it’s up to you. Hopefully unlocking and trying them out will significantly increase the length of the game, combined with all the other features I’ve already mentioned, and achievements and medals for completing maps (which we're still working on)... As I've said, there's a lot coming in the next update.
Release Date Estimate
Sadly I don’t think we’re going to hit our Christmas deadline having to work around day-jobs as we do, and with some nasty things that have happened to me personally this year (2020 has been tragic in some ways). But on the whole things are going well. In fact I think we’ve made more content faster than ever before, which is just as well because there’s so much to test and balance with these new features. I don’t want to cut corners and introduce new bugs that could hurt our review score by charging for a Christmas release date, especially as we're tottering on 70%, just 1% above the dread “mixed” zone.
We also need a really big version to mark our 1.0 release. If we don't, nobody will notice when we leave Early Access, which certainly won't help sales. So hold in there, fans of the game, but our survival as a company depends on getting it right. Hopefully it will be out quite early in 2021, with a beta version to try even sooner.
Behind The Scenes Stuff
There hasn't been too much behind the scenes drama since I last wrote a blog, at least game-related drama. Just when I think we’re going to run out of money for good, we get a good sales week and can limp on a little further. Just when I think I can't take another bad review, a good one or email comes in and cheers us up again.
Right now, as we're getting to the end, I think the 4 of us are focused on getting to the finishing line like exhausted marathon runners. It’s been almost 6 years of work to get to version 1.0, and though we want to make the best game we can, we're also keen to be done. December 2014 (when we first came up with the idea of making a post-apocalyptic city builder) was a loooong time ago…
It’s strange knowing there's nothing else I need to design after this. I've been constantly planning one version after the next for so long, always trying to keep two steps ahead of the coders (and players), and now that part of my job is almost over. I can’t quite believe it. Our part-time American contractor, Adam, is finishing up his last few small tasks at the moment and then he’ll be moving on. He joined us in 2016, thinking this game would be a year or two of his life, but has stuck with us ever since even though it certainly hasn't been a money-maker. Adam has such an easy going, positive attitude, we're all going to miss him, and finding out what British slang words he doesn't understand.
Approaching the end has pretty much made my dilemma over how to make a game in Early Access redundant. Readers of these blogs will know I was wondering whether to stick to one’s personal vision - and therefore lose money and get insulted in reviews - or adopt an admittedly very sensible business strategy and focus on complaints and basically making the game players request, even if - in my view - that leads to a generic game, and even if I don’t have the personality or interest in being a business guy.
Those problems don’t matter now. The game is almost finished. It is what it is. We did our best.
I think on the whole things may have been better if we didn't need to use Early Access. I’m not sure making something you care about in front of an anonymous audience is necessarily the best approach, or games revolving around “updates” and being a "service" to keep players hooked leads to interesting experiences. I'm an old-school gamer and liked it when single-player games were content to just give you a few nights entertainment and be done. I hope that’s what Atomic Society does for the price of a cheap take-out (or even less if you get it on sale). I liked the days when we got 3 Grand Theft Auto games (for example) in one console generation instead of… none, as it was in the last, because they kept updating the same game infinitely.
I do think our game is “better” because we listened to players, but I think at the end of the day, you can only really make something for yourself, even if that makes you unpopular.
What happens after this update? I’m not sure. This year has been pretty good at teaching me not to plan ahead. I have ideas for other games naturally, but I’ve been reluctant to commit. I'm not the same person I was 12 months ago, so deciding what to make in advance is foolish. One idea has risen to the top however, but it will be a long time before anything is playable. The only criteria I have is "would I buy and play this game?". 6 years of experience making AS is going to come in very handy.
I know some people in the comments seem reluctant to make games after reading my depressing blogs, but I think the answer is to keep the hobby attitude. Pretend that money and success don’t matter and won't come, and just make the game you enjoy making.
As soon as I personally think about making games as a business that’s when all the fun gets replaced by stress. But that’s just me. You can only do what you can do.
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Until Next Time...
I'd currently say update 10 is about 80% done (excluding translations). I’ll let you know as soon as the beta is ready to try out.
Thank you to everybody who's been a part of our Early Access journey. The fans of the game have made it all worthwhile.
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Dev Blog #41: Nearly Done With Early Access
Thu, 11 February 2021
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Here’s how the final version of Atomic Society is coming along before we leave Early Access.
Christmas came and went with a few (more) personal tragedies which slowed us down unfortunately. It's been a rough winter, and being such a small team if one person can’t work, we have to limp on without them. But we're back together now, and started the New Year determined to get this project over the finishing line.
Rather than breaking up the next version, we’ve decided to squeeze everything into one update before we leave Early Access!
Next Version Is Everything
The next big update is the last, but we’ll keep supporting the game afterwards with translations (when we can afford them), and by fixing bugs. However, content-wise, I think we’re done after 2 and a half years on Steam and 6 years of part-time development in total.
Looking at how the game is ending up, I think we (like most devs) have been able to do about 70% of what we actually envisioned years ago. But sometimes you just need to say goodbye to a project and move on, and our time is nearly here.
I’d always wondered when Atomic Society would be “done”, as this was our first ever attempt at making a game, and nobody on the team had any past experience to rely on. It turns out we’re done when we can’t go on any more, physically, mentally, financially or creatively. It's the old saying that "at work is art is never finished, only abandoned."
But I’m still extremely proud of what we’ve achieved, or will be when I have time to reflect. Despite having no money and no clue, we actually made a pretty complex game that thousands of people have enjoyed, and that’s not a bad achievement.
Next Version Content
Here’s a look at the patch notes for the next update so you can see what we’ve squeezed into it.
• Unlockable Gameplay Modifiers. Now when you beat the goals on a map (which have also been improved) you will gradually unlock 18 gameplay changing modifiers. Some are beneficial, letting you cheat at the game, and others bring brand new challenges for replays, like radiation, trading a number of resources, or setting a number of laws in a specific way. The most complicated mod involves you building multiple town outposts on the same map and juggling 4 mini-towns instead of one central town.
(https://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/27205314/cceecfccebb1a1f1059a2d358f08284d38600e43.jpg)
• New Improved Goals System. We’ve completely remade the goals, and they now appear on the screen like a list of objectives. They will now guide you through 4 stages or chapters of the game, so you always have an target to reach for. We’ve also mixed up the goals and added in brand new ones to keep things fresh.
• Extended Goals. After beating the normal goals mentioned above, committed players can now try extended bonus goals that require you to make a gigantic settlement that is completely perfect. These “master” goals effectively double the size of the average town and should give you something to focus on if you just want to playing with your city. There is also a little cosmetic reward if you manage to complete the extended goals on a map.
• 95 New Achievements Added. We’ve finally added achievements and we might have gone overboard! 95 achievements are now up for grabs in the coming version. Many are aimed at new players, to help them learn the basics, but others create new challenges. If you like achievements, this should add hours of content.
(https://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/27205314/205d85a03dc0e3c07a41d99d1aa28045c58f4fea.jpg)
• New Miner’s Shack & Refinery Building. As mentioned in a previous dev blog, the next version comes with two new buildings that must be researched. These two structures allow towns to become self-sufficient when possible. The Miner’s Shack can only be placed in difficult, hard to reach areas of the map – which may be a challenge – but it can produce an unlimited amount of unrefined stone or metal if you keep it supplied with workers. These 2 new resources can be converted at the refinery, meaning that you don’t need to go salvaging at all (if you can get enough wood from elsewhere). Hopefully this adds a sense of progress to the game, that you’re moving away from being a mere scavenging society.
(https://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/27205314/8f3c2474b8649ba2e4dc388b10b4e7677fc2515b.jpg)
• Reputation Feature. In order to keep the pressure on as your town becomes self-sufficient, it now has a reputation meter. This increases – or decreases - with population. The higher it gets (through 8 levels) the more migrants will find you desirable, though you can still keep them out with guard towers. This does make the game more difficult, but at the same time it makes it easier to form a big town and we’ve even had to increase the population goal to cope with this.
• Map Completion Stars. To go with achievements, every map now has a set of medals showing if you’ve completed it and on what difficulty. This adds a sense of completion and lasting progress to the game.
• New Improved Tutorial. We’re currently working on improving the tutorial to make it easier and more fun to learn how to play.
There are several other smaller changes coming too, like a new upgrade for the leader’s house, several bug fixes, and changes to how morale works, but I’ll stick them in the final patch notes.
We hope this, on top of every else added over the last 2 years, creates enough content for a satisfying game.
Right now I’m swamped trying to test all this at the moment (testing 95 achievements and 18 game-changing mods is a lot of work), but we’re getting there, one day at a time.
(https://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/27205314/9298aa3e57da323a887cd4bb0df1348880dde775.jpg)
The Breaking of the Fellowship
Now things are winding down, we finally said farewell (sort of) to our 2nd part-time programmer Adam, who I think joined us back in October 2015 believing he was signing up for a year or two of casual work. But making a game took twice as long as expected (6 years instead of 3) so he ended up settling in for the long haul. He didn’t have kids when he joined us, now he has two. As I've said, it took us bunch of noobies a while to work out how to make a game.
At the start of the project I didn’t think we’d need 2 programmers, but we soon learned we did. We need 1 person to make the behind the scenes stuff (main coder Nick in our case), and 1 person to code the little gameplay stuff that players actually notice.
I therefore naively posted an ad on Reddit in October 2015 asking if anybody wanted to work with a bunch of nobodies and Adam signed up. I don't think he'd ever used Unity before, but he was a quick learner and afterwards he became our go-to “little task” guy.
It’s weird spending 5+ years working with someone and you haven’t ever seen them beyond a photo or a voice on Discord. I want to thank him in person, but unless I’m willing to fly to America that isn’t happening. Anyway, thank you Adam! We couldn’t have got this far without you.
Looking to the Future
I finally have a new idea for a game, though I’m surprised I want to make another game after this. To be honest, I’ve been playing fewer and fewer games lately, as I just don’t have time for big 50+ hour experiences while making a game, and so many modern games are (in my view) worse versions of games that came out 20+ years ago.
Aside from that, being a self-employed game dev isn’t easy. This hobby definitely has perks (you’re earning a bit of money from making games!) but it can still wear you down. You come home from a day job which pays the bills, then spend evenings doing a lot of tedious tasks in a game engine that loves to crash (we haven't updated Unity since 2017 as it would break everything). You also have to work with others and explain complex things awkwardly over long-distance. And you’re perpetually on the verge of going broke and making bad design/business decisions because there isn’t a right or wrong path (except perhaps in hindsight). Meanwhile deadlines slide as things inevitably become too complex or too buggy.
I must admit, there have been plenty of times when I’ve wanted to give up over the last 6 years. I usually want to bail when the next update is half-broken, or I’m sick of playing AS, or all my “great” ideas turn out to be less than amazing. At times like those I was sure there had to be a better hobby/side income out there than making games, especially when it feels like a thousand new games come out every day. Who wants another game?
But now we’re at the end of Atomic Society, the game-making excitement is flowing back and 1 new game idea out of the 100s I've had simply will not go away, no matter how much I've discovered about the pains of making software. I think the appeal is the potential of applying 6 years of hard-earned lessons and believing that next time we'll really hit it out of the park.
Making Atomic Society has been a lot like a bad relationship. We went into it blindly with a lot of hope and naivety, but without realising how hard it would be or all the implications. It was really guessing what to do most of the time and the fact the game has turned out to be slightly decent is astounding.
Wisdom is the main thing we’ve gained from the project. I'm looking forward to cashing it in on a new project later this year.
A Look Into the Past…
Coming to the end of the project is also the right time for reflection and one of the biggest battles I’ve had making this game is with my own personality, as these dev blogs prove. I often sound like I’m on the edge of a nervous breakdown when I read them back.
I just don’t feel at all suited to running an indie studio and I don’t think I’m even a born game designer. But here I am, weirdly making a game and co-running a “studio” (if you can call a corner of my lounge a studio).
I love creating things, but I rarely release them. For example, I’ve written big novels that nobody has ever read. I just put them in the drawer. I like the process, not the selling. I like making games but whenever I try to be a business guy, I get so stressed it’s literally bad for my health. I either feel super-excited or extremely anxious and that’s a dangerous combination. It can (and has) led to self-medicating just to calm down.
I’ve personally enjoyed the last 3-4 months because most people out there seem to have forgotten we exist. The forum is quiet. Reviews trickle in but they’re mostly positive. This lets me just focus on my game without the stress. I feel free again as I haven’t since the early days of the game.
I’m saying this to myself because with the end of Early Access coming, I’m growing tense about the amount of "extroverted" stuff I should be doing. I was so emotionally burnt out by our Early Access launch that I still get a queasy, sick feeling when I think back to those days.
I guess I’m trying to accept that I just need to stay within my emotional limits, to stay in the calm zone even if that means switching off or losing out. If I was more outgoing and practical, we’d probably be richer, but I’m an introvert, working with 2 other introverts, and we’ve still managed to make a game that took the financial strain out of life for a year or two. Hopefully we can get by in the future.
Can you run a lasting business as an introvert? Probably not. But you can make a game without becoming stressed or addicted, at least that's the plan.
(https://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/27205314/c7d583149fc23d9e58fd1854085385298af9a229.jpg)
Next Update Guesstimate!
I’ve never been remotely accurate about a release date projection since I started writing these blogs years ago so it would be pointless to do so now! However, my least favourite rule to take your estimate and double it is true, and my personal estimate is 6 weeks to release… Which means 12 weeks.
Which would mean first week of May. That sounds stupidly far away so I hope it’s a lot sooner than that. We cannot keep the lights on that long. But somehow we'll manage. We’ve never given up as people know by now, despite how bumpy the road can get.
I will be in touch when we’re ready to flip that "leave Early Access” switch and I’ll keep checking the forums, emails, etc when possible (even as an introvert).
Thanks for reading this far. Can't wait to share this final version with you!
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Atomic Society - Leaves Early Access Today!
Mon, 9 August 2021
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Dev Blog #42 – The Last Dev Blog
It’s finished! At long last, Atomic Society is ready to leave Early Access.
It's been one long and difficult journey making our first ever game, around day jobs. The key ingredient was perseverance.
I'm almost reluctant to release the game. It's been such a core part of my life since late 2014, I can't really remember my pre-game dev life.
But it can't stay in Early Access forever. Time to let it go.
Thanks to everyone who's been a part of our long and arduous game dev journey - and greetings to any new players who've been waiting for this moment!
I hope you enjoy creating your own post-apocalyptic civilisation and deciding its laws, if your town survives...
(Patch notes for this final version can be found here in my last blog https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/514500/view/3041598834073860041 , including the fixes and tweaks we made during the recent beta).
The Beginner's Guide to Making a Video Game!
I can't believe we've come to this point.
In a sense, Atomic Society has been decades in the making. About 20 years ago, as a teenager, I pitched it to a British game developer, thinking that they would take ideas from a random person off the street. They didn’t of course, but they did give me a job as a tester instead.
However, 3 years as a tester was enough to convince me I didn't want to work in the AAA games industry, so I moved on with my life, and Atomic Society stayed as a daydream.
Then in 2014, a friend told me about this "free" game engine named Unity. I gave it a go and realised even an idiot like me could cobble something together that looked vaguely like a video game at home. This was only a year after Valve had introduced the Early Access system. Greenlight was still a thing back then. The indie game market was opening up and I wanted to ride the hype-train.
Naturally, I had no idea how to code, so I naïvely went onto Reddit and asked does anybody want to make a game. The internet is full of horror stories about amateur game dev teams falling apart. Obviously we haven't, and the one thing that worked was just picking the person I liked the most (Nick), someone I could gel with. Without friendship and ease of communication, we would've never made it. Anything else can be learnt.
The next hurdle was finding a 3D artist who would also work for free. Fortunately my wife saw what Nick and I were doing and thought it looked interesting. So she went and learnt Blender (a free modelling program) and taught herself 3D art, just like that. That was lucky.
Afterwards I contacted an old guildmate from World of Warcraft who made music in his spare time and asked if he’d help us with the soundtrack, if I promised to pay him back later. Thankfully he said yes.
It seemed we had all you needed to make a game: A designer/producer type person, a coder, a music guy, and an artist. And lots of spare time. What could go wrong?
We foolishly pencilled in just 3 years dev time and set to work.
We didn't realise it was going to take twice as long...
The Journey Begins
Gradually we all adjusted to the new way of life: work by day, game dev by night.
Things were fun and exciting at first but after about 8 months the sheer scope of the idea started to kick in. It became apparent we were never going to finish a game like Atomic Society if we didn't find a second coder. So it was back to Reddit again.
Fortunately I struck gold again and found a guy named Adam – who lived across the Atlantic – to join our unpaid ship of fools. He'd never made a game before either, but he had the right personality, and that's what counts.
Now we were getting somewhere: Nick could focus on systems while Adam made the gameplay features.
Then after a mere 14 months of learning the ropes, we had something that vaguely resembled a video game, at least if you didn't look too closely, or expect to enjoy it.
We took this scrappy prototype to Kickstarter with an extremely optimistic £70k fundraising goal and presented the game to the world for the first time.
And that's when realised we weren't going to be one of those amazing indie success stories you see in those documentaries. Our Kickstarter flopped and only earned about £3k.
The reception on Steam was much better admittedly, and we cruised through Greenlight, but it was a worrying sign.
Wiser devs have told me since that we should've given up at that point and chosen a different idea. Perhaps they were right, but I was in love with
this idea, and we couldn't chuck away 14 months work.
So we decided to keep going and released what we had to little fanfare on our website.
We sold about 20 copies a month.
But that was great! At least to people who'd never sold something they'd made by hand before.
However, there was no turning back after that. We would never abandon a game after people had spent money on it. We had an audience to serve, albeit a tiny but loyal one.
Atomic Society had be finished, no matter what. We believed in it that much.
Reality Bites
Having release on our website, little did I know it was going take a whole extra 2.5 years of work before the game was ready for its Early Access debut!
Why has it taken so long?
Partly because of real-life troubles. Work, family and health get in the way.
But the biggest time-sink was the mistakes that come with making your first ever game. For example, I slowly realised that Atomic Society was actually two game ideas in one - a society-building one and a town-builder one. It was extremely difficult to do both ideas justice and took an immense amount of work.
I was also bewitched by player feedback. Obviously you want to keep the audience satisfied, but I didn't realise doing nothing can be better than not living up to expectations. For example, we had many requests to add in combat and raiders (which would make the game a town, society and combat game in one!). Naturally we couldn't do 3 games in one, so we did a story thing with the raiders. That still took months and naturally wasn't what combat-hungry players liked, so in the end all this work became an optional bonus feature. There's been so many detours like that.
Coding problems added up too. Implementing a saving and loading system 18 months after starting the project (rather than at the start) took ages. And so many systems have had to be rebuilt from scratch as well because we just didn't know where we were going at the time. We've also had nightmares with 3D pathfinding, especially as we're stuck using a lot of third-party tools. AI navigation is one of the trickiest things in game development and over a year of Nick's life has been devoted to this one aspect of the game.
Then there've been things that turned out to be far harder than expected, like last year when we had to scrap a 90% complete feature after 6 months because the last 10% was too much. That was a real low-point. A lot of time and money has gone down the drain.
All these delays are expensive, emotionally and financially. Making indie games from home is cheap but still has costs. PC hardware blows up, you need a website, company email address, and online repository to upload content changes. We also have to pay for a business bank account and accountant. And most importantly we had to stay friendly with each other, no matter what mistakes were made.
Throughout these early years, the main thing that kept us going was the hope that the game might be a success on Steam, even though its Kickstarter had flopped. But it was a tense guessing game. We had no idea if the work would ever find an audience.
Our hopes increased though when a famous YouTuber made a video about the pre-alpha version (without us even asking him to). Overnight that quadrupled our sales. It also boosted our wishlist numbers into viable territory. Perhaps this crazy idea was going to be mildly successful after all?
A few publishers must've thought so, as following that video suddenly we were contacted by various companies who wanted to help us out. We had a small taste of popularity.
However, for better or worse, we turned them all down because we wanted to work at our own pace, and publishers don't work for free either.
After about 4 years of work by this point, we were too attached. We still wanted to do things our way. That has good points - it's the independent spirit - but it also has downsides...
(https://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/27205314/3b85762875aaba0f2f8a4e43da4e28b18fbc519d.jpg)
Finishing the Fight
I still haven't recovered from our Early Access release in October 2018. I didn't know how shy and reclusive I can be until I had to do marketing!
However through gritted teeth I did what publicity I could, and after nearly 4 years of work we were ready - or fed up enough - to put the game on Steam and see what happened. It was time to face the wider public.
I can't say I enjoyed the launch. It was terrifying and exhausting and I was pretty much a wreck from nerves and working overtime by the time we hit the release button.
Thankfully our prayers were answered. The game sold. The stars aligned. People showed up! All that dreaming and hoping finally paid off.
We sold more on the first day than our entire 2.5 years of being a pre-alpha. Nobody on the team could believe it. It was incredibly exciting and rewarding, but then it started to sink in that the journey was far from over. We hadn't finished. This was just a new beginning. And not everybody was happy with the first ever Steam version of our game.
There was an insane amount of player feedback and a real pressure to come up with the goods in a timely manner.
And I soon realised I didn't have the answer to a very important question: when is this game actually "finished"?
How can you finish a race if there isn't a finishing line?
It turned out the finishing line can't be whenever you put in every idea you or a player has, because that day never comes. Ideas are endless. And as we didn't have a publisher, and were self-funding, we could've technically continued until death.
Early Access proved to be the hardest part of the journey. Months rolled by as we kept trying to create the magical version that would make the game seem
finished
. It never came. In fact the finishing line seemed further away.
After a year on Early Access, sales and hype dried up. Our review score started to wobble as people became impatient. Team morale started to fade because 5+ years is a long time to stay energised and invested in anything, and what we did add in Early Access didn't seem to make a huge difference.
I was starting to despair, and to be honest, if I hadn't written about all last year in a blog, and if another experienced game developer (Tomer Barkin from Suncrash Studio) hadn't read it by chance and told me what to do, we might've never finished the game.
Thankfully Tomer gave me some hard-earned lessons pointed me in the right direction again.
I didn't realise that when you release on Steam, even in Early Access, the creative phase is essentially over. No more daydreaming. Now the developer's job is now just to fix complaints bit by bit, until one by one, until the players are satisfied with what you've offered them. When you launch to a big audience, the game belongs to them.
So we abandoned our never-ending idea list (mostly) and turned instead to what players were telling us instead. The Early Access audience was going to be our guide to finishing the game. Not every idea a random player had, but what they didn't like.
And that is how we've spent the last, and final year of game development: fixing what players didn't like.
Suddenly we were making progress again because we had a direction, and our review score started climbing.
But it's been the most gruelling 12 months. Partly because 2020 was brutal for many reasons. Partly because giving up your own vision is difficult. And mostly because we were exhausted!
However we didn't give up even as another Christmas rolled by, and through sheer bloody perseverance we managed to solve the big remaining problems, and double the game's length in the process.
It worked. Everything I've heard from people about the latest version is really positive.
Could it be that after 6.5 years in total, Atomic Society is finally ready? It better be!
(https://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/27205314/a65de56b87e57e3fed927b47d1527c4d50060fd1.jpg)
Stuff I Wish I'd Known...
Before I wrap this up, I asked our little team for their top 2-3 tips now we've come to the finishing line:
My Tips (Designer/Producer):
• Games essentially involve doing the same thing over and over again, that whole “30 seconds of fun” thing might be cutting it a bit short. I’d say it’s 60 seconds of fun, but that’s all a game is. A game is doing something fun over and over again. I didn’t realise this at the start. I had really big picture ideas when I should've been focused on the moment-to-moment fun.
• As mentioned before, find the one thing your game is about and focus on that. Don't make 3 games in one. At least if you want to finish it in a decade!
• This rule has never been proved wrong – everything takes twice as long as you think it will. So if you think your game will take 3 years to make. It will take 6. If you think a feature will take a month, it will take 2.
Mariana’s Tips (Artist)
• Animations aren't worth the effort - unless you find yourself loving the process, buy them off the asset store, or avoid them.
• Perfection is the enemy of progress - get it done, get all your tasks done, THEN worry about making stuff look greater. You won't have time (and you're not getting paid!) to spend a week on a single model, use your time wisely. Atomic Society has over 100 (?) 3d models alone, plus UI, artwork, etc.
• Choose what you want to be responsible for - if you're in charge of art, fight to get your point across to the designer/programmers. If you're not in charge of e.g. design, let the designer have the last word.
Nick’s Tips (Lead Coder)
• The importance of company and communication. Even if your co-workers won't have a clue what you're talking about it's still required to vent. To externalise the frustration of that bug that just will not squish, the feature taking taking longer than it should.
• Don't adopt new technologies. Use long well trusted documented APIs. There is always a time cost vs performance/convenience gain.
• The importance of being idle. I've never wanted to work on something so much in my life and I did this to the point of physical and mental exhaustion. Burn out. I remember the 28 hour shift that did it.
Adam’s Tips (Assistant Coder)
• Find yourself a good team. I CANNOT emphasize this enough. I probably started a dozen and a half different game ideas, tried learning probably 8-10 different engines. only to drop them after a few weeks. There's no better motivator than working with others and holding each other accountable, getting excited about new features, and sharing in the progress you've made. Game dev requires so many different skills, its hard to be proficient enough at all of them that you can work through the frustrations alone. I tried learning blender, I'm a terrible artist and couldn't figure it out. I bought a game design book, which I did find fascinating, but ideas are only ideas unless you have the skills or team to bring that idea to life. Find what you enjoy most (art, design, programming, etc) and work to improve your skills in that area. Burn out is real, especially if you are working a full time job and doing game development on the side. Make sure you give your brain time to shut off every so often, sometimes that’s when the best ideas come about or when you figure out how to solve that impossible bug.
(https://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/27205314/41a6e2e217aa00b8dfbd257f80ec7e3a8ca9ccbe.jpg)
Now What?
That's a good question! God, I wish I knew.
As I say, it still hasn't sunk in that this is the end. It's over.
I wanted to do so much more marketing for this release but right now, I've spent all I've got. Hopefully you could help us spread the word, or leave a little review so we get noticed.
I'm in a daze right now. For over 6 years Atomic Society has been a persistent background thought in my brain. I need to rest and clear my thoughts.
I was probably ready to be done over a year ago, and my teammates have carried me over this final finishing line. I couldn't have got this far without them.
Before I see what lies ahead, I have to regain my energy and love of games again. Making Atomic Society turned my favourite hobby into a job. I haven't played a new game purely for fun for years and I need to get that passion back.
Then we'll see where life takes us... It's a new life chapter ahead, that's for sure.
Of course we're still going to monitor and track Atomic Society in case anybody finds a bug in the meantime. And we still need to investigate translations too. I haven't forgotten about them!
But today I just want to appreciate crossing the finishing line and turning a dream into a reality.
And to appreciate the fans, teammates and supporters who helped us turn a crazy idea into a game tens of thousands of people have enjoyed.
Sometimes crazy dreams do come true.
(https://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/27205314/f4fc125d7d0fabc5347171d25475b5f52924634c.png)
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Version 1.0 Leaving Early Access
Mon, 9 August 2021
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• Gameplay Modifiers
• 85 Achievements Added
• New Building - Miner’s Shack
• New Building – Refinery
• New Reputation System
• Brand New In-Game Goals System
• Extended Goals
• Map Completion Progress
• The Leader’s Mansion can now be upgraded with electricity, letting your spouse(s) and children survive for longer
• Citizens no longer die when their morale is zero. They now pack up and leave town instead
• A new type of ruin (a burnt church) has been added on certain maps
• The “raiders are considering an attack” warning messages can now be disabled in the options
• Added a new message when a child becomes an adult worker
• Citizens now age up physically as they should, changing from children to elderly models
• Various menu/UI tweaks
• Various balance tweaks
• The AI navigation system has been upgraded, removing various oddities and bugs like citizens walking around the map
• Frame-rates have been improved greatly
• Fixed: A rare bug that could cause saving to freeze
• Fixed: Prison and Punishment Center was draining nearby morale far too quickly
• Fixed: A bug where the pause button didn’t behave correctly after pressing Escape to open and close the menu
• Fixed: The “would you like to save” message getting stuck on the screen if you were building at the time it popped up
• Fixed: Certain the hidden skeletons having incorrect text
• Fixed: A rare pathfinding issue that could cause citizens to stop moving for a while
• Fixed: A typo with the extended goals. The text now correctly shows 60% for the needs goal
• Fixed: Stats screen was not adding citizens who had come to the town because you encouraged a certain law
• Fixed: Certain status effects on citizens were not lasting as long as they should
• Fixed: An issue with the news feed where it played the "migrants with encouraged issues" more than it should if you encouraged multiple issues
• Tweaked: Certain social issues are now make less impact on the birth rate. This will however increase the odds of people having abortions (more pregnant people = higher possible abortion rate)
• Tweaked: The camera can be zoomed out further on the Summit map
• Tweaked: Reduced the chance for migrants with encouraged issues to occur, as it was happening a lot at maximum migration speed
• Tweaked: Increased the chance people will give birth in big, established towns
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Farewell to Atomic Society
Wed, 21 February 2024
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Atomic Society will be removed from sale at the end of this week.
It's been a long, wild ride but the time has come to shut down our little studio and move on to new pastures. Don't worry, everybody who owns the game will still be able to play it. It will remain in your Steam library forever. However, the game barely sells anything these days, and there are still several costs involved in running a business (accountants, etc) so we have to start winding things up, starting by removing the game from sale.
I guess it's an appropriate time to say goodbuye. 2024 marks 10 years since a friend and I (with the optimism of complete beginners) asked “why don't we make a game for fun?”
2014 was a boom period for wannabe developers with crazy dreams. Steam Greenlight (remember that?) had been running for 2 years, the indie market was opening up, and Unity had made it possible for beginners to test their luck, for better or worse. Our idea of a post-apocalyptic town building game was a brand new concept back then. When we revealed it in 2016 (via Kickstarter), no one had heard of Frostpunk, Endzone, or Surviving the Aftermath. That Kickstarter still failed, but luckily a random YouTuber made a video of our fledgling pre-alpha and suddenly thousands of players fell in love with the game's potential and were clamoring to play AS. After yet another 2 years of grueling work, we released the first ever Steam version in Early Access (one of the most stressful things I've ever done!) and it sold quite well, considering we were making things up as we went. For a year or two afterwards we even earned basic salaries from this passion project - not much but we did get the privilege of doing something we loved.
However, it was really hard living up to everybody's expectations. A fully 3D town building/social sim game was a huge
concept for a tiny group of hobbyists working around their day jobs! We could just about handle it, but we were slow, and the games industry moves fast. Richer competitors came along. Also, after 7 years of work on top of regular jobs, “burnout” was becoming a thing too. But we pressed on for 3 years in Early Access, getting the game to the best state, and finally let it go for good back in 2021 (during a real life post-apocalyptic event of Covid).
Unfortunately a game only really gets one big launch, and Early Access had been it for us, so that final release didn't do much, but at least finished and I was done
. I couldn't even look at Steam without having a weird panic attack after we released. Making and marketing a game had worn me down (several real life disasters didn't help either). You need a lot of business stamina to stick it out in indie dev, and a peaceful real life. After we launched, our American coder friend had to get a real job, our artist had to give up dev to look after their elderly parent, and main coder Nick started a new family. It was okay though as we had nothing more to add to the game, but life had called us all in new directions.
I'm still extremely proud that we managed to create a pretty big 3D game out of a dream, that we stuck with it even when the problems seemed insurmountable, and that Atomic Society is still something different and quirky in an industry that likes to play it safe. For someone's first ever shot at game dev, it's not bad!
Thanks to everyone who bought and enjoyed the game and supported tiny, no-budget indie devs like us. I hope you all enjoyed being crazy post apocalyptic dictators, setting wild laws that might not show up in other games, and that these old blogs have been inspirational for anyone who wants to make their own gaming dream. If you believe in your game, you've got to make it!
However, now it's time for us to head out into the post-apocalyptic “wasteland” and see what other adventures are out there.
Best wishes from the Far Road Games team:
Scott, Nick, Mariana and Adam