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TIGSource ForumsCommunityDevLogsAtomic Society: Post-Apocalyptic Town Building Where You Set Laws & Punishments
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ScottFarRoad.
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« on: July 15, 2015, 01:36:39 PM »

Atomic Society is a post-apocalyptic town building game where you set the laws.

Atomic Society is a sandbox post-apocalyptic town building game where you must set the laws and decide how society should be run.

​Build a large settlement that can keep hundreds of survivors alive in a harsh wasteland. Expand carefully and overcome challenges from a dangerous and desolate world. Decide what laws and values your town will have. Create a society that others will admire or dread.

What kind of leader will you be?

Atomic Society is still in an early state of development, but is being worked on constantly and updated with new content. You can find more about it on our website, including how to try the pre-alpha.

Several streamers have looked at the game over the months and we've been getting positive comments despite the early state of the game.

We have been blogging about the highs and lows of making the game since the very beginning (which is what this thread is about!)

Current Features:

- Rebuild a town after a nuclear war. Set all the laws and values of the people.

- Decide between a range of ethical solutions for every issue, including hanging, prison and even encouragement.

- Be cruel or kind and make a town that reflects whatever you believe in. Choose how to handle slavery, drug use, euthanasia, murder, and other social issues.

- Protect your town from hostile outsiders... Or make a deal with them.

- Overcome problems such as plague, sanitation, healthcare and more.

- Struggle to create a settlement that can keep hundreds of people alive, fed, and safe.

- Salvage resources from ruins or convert them into new types of building.

- Control your own leader character and get involved directly.

- Explore a wide range of maps including frozen islands, haunting deserts, and peaceful forests.

- Expand from nothing to a town of hundreds, if you can...


« Last Edit: June 25, 2018, 09:24:24 AM by ScottFarRoad. » Logged

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« Reply #1 on: July 15, 2015, 01:48:16 PM »

Dev Log #1: Why The Hell We Ended Up Making an Indie Game (July 2015)

My personal journey with this game began about 10 years ago when I applied to work at Rare. They were advertising for a game designer in Edge magazine back then, so I decided to test my luck and send in some concepts. I heard nothing for 6 months so I assumed I wasn't wanted but then, out of the blue, I received a letter asking if I'd like to apply for a QA role (this was back when Rare was making their first Xbox game). So I went for an interview, got hired fortunately, and began what I thought would be the start of an insanely exciting and happy career.

And it was... For a while. As a typical game addict since the Atari 2600, I had high hopes I'd work my way up through testing and be a designer in a few years, as  was  a common route back then. Sadly, it wasn't to be quite that easy. Rare was a great place to work, educational, had great staff, but the company was going through bumpy times as it leapt into the 360 era and after a few years of working there, most of the QA department was made redundant. Me included.

So that took a rather large dump on my game designer hopes. I’d worked for my favourite company and ended up jaded and burnt out. I couldn't really face finding work elsewhere, all that overtime in QA for some other company possibly for no gain. So I bounced around from one job to next, did a degree in Creative Writing, got married, and tried to find a day job I didn't hate. The latter part didn't work out well (I mop floors for a living when not working on this game).

Luckily, last year, when I was  getting down, an old friend from Rare called me up. He suggested making a game in this new-fangled Unity thing all the cool kids were talking about. I knew it was possible to make indie games already but I needed a guide. He  happened to be friends with someone from Krillbite Studios who had told him the best way to get started. So we all agreed it was just going to be a fun little side-project and being naive we decided a multiplayer FPS would be a good idea for first-timers.

As soon as I tasted that drug of game dev, all the passion I’d had for making games in the past came back. Game dev was (and is) such a fantastic thing, and creating games  felt like I'd rediscovered what I was meant to do. I still don't know if I'm right about that, but we'll find out when this game is released!

However, our  hobby project escalated too quickly. Before we had a functional prototype we'd gone and found two other people to help us code it (including Nick, programmer on AS now). My wife, Mariana, had seen what we were doing and offered to make the 3D art for us. There were now 5+ people working on this hobby  and that’s  when the thing turned sour for me. It was turning into a second job, which was fine, but  the online FPS idea wasn't something I wanted to devote 2-3 years of my life to (I barely play that genre any more). I wanted to make  games I'd been dreaming about for years and to steer my own ship, to do it my way.

Starting Over

So I pulled out of the FPS before it could go to far, and that hobby project fizzled out unfortunately. I was more or less back to square one. But I still had my wife to do art (just as well), and Nick was  keen to code with me again, so I went off into the desert to see what sort of idea I could commit to working hard on for years, something that I felt truly passionate about. Ideally something that was feasible to make and commercial.

I had lots of ideas but I didn't just want a "cool" idea. Cool ideas are dangerous, seeming great on paper, but ultimately hollow when the novelty wears off. I had to "see" the actual gameplay behind the concept, the core actions that would keep me sitting at my PC and playing for several hours when there's about 10,000 better things to be doing. Oddly enough, the only game I could truly envision was one I'd pitched to Rare a decade ago. A post-apocalyptic city builder. Back then I'd pitched it was a Gameboy Advance title! I don't have that document any more unfortunately, just the vague memory of it, but I love the concept still.

So I spent a couple of months more or less on my own documenting everything about it, trying to nail down what could be unique and different about it, and excite me and others. I essentially designed every single aspect playing it in my head. It was a real headache compared to the FPS because a city-builder is just one massive clockwork machine. I'd keep hitting "bugs" where my design would fall apart. But I worked them out (a boring day job provides plenty of thinking time) and pitched it to Nick and Mariana. Fortunately they loved the concept (or we'd be making another game) and we more or less got to work on it that day.  

And that concludes part 1 of this saga. I'll stick up part 2 tomorrow (probably!) with how development actually got going. Thanks for reading
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« Reply #2 on: July 17, 2015, 11:58:58 AM »

Dev Log #2: 5 Months in (Nuclear) Flash

As threatened, here is part 2 of our dev log, which goes the past 5 months of development, so rather a lot is crammed into a small space. After this, and probably on a weekly basis, we'll be talking about the current stresses/problems/victories.


So, as stated in part 1, the idea of making a post-apocalyptic city building game had been agreed upon and we’d committed to the game for the foreseeable future. We had a ton of design documentation that I was pumping out, but there was a lot of foundational work to do before any of it became useful.

Near the start, this is how Atomic Society looked:  


As you can see, it's not great (look at that tree!). Unfortunately you can only get so far when you know so little. And we barely knew anything.

Mariana, our artist in the making, had to learn Blender to construct the 3D art (because it's free and good) and I had to learn Unity (because it's free and good) enough to feel comfortable around it. Nick, our programmer, had more experience but this was a case of his hobbyist knowledge being pushed in new, challenging ways. If we didn't like learning, we'd be screwed. Fortunately game development is incredibly rewarding. Every little step forward feels like a milestone as that virtual world comes to life,  more so when it's your first big, dream project.

But there was, and remains, frustrations. It's hard to find good, free info out there on the internet and we don't have any wise pros to call for help. Unity has a big community, but it doesn't always overlap with what you're doing. We had to get used to making mistakes and asking dumb questions of one another.

Nick was determined to get the foundations of the game right. He created a database to catalogue all the buildings and citizens, etc, could be collected in one place for easy editing and loading. We wanted everything to be as flexible as possible so the game could be tweaked and adjusted later on without the whole house of cards coming down.

In March Unity decided to let all free users get access to its whole suite of features without paying a penny. This was a huge boost for us. Things like image effects, LOD support, AI navigation, and performance analysing are so handy. Working on the old, free version was forcing us to make one compromise after the next.  Finally our tools weren't holding us back.

A level before Unity 5...




The same scene after an hour of playing with Unity 5. I loved trying to kill the frame-rate with those new image effects.

Around this time we dropped in the first of our more novel features, "avatar mode", which lets a player control a character and walk around their town. This was a big task, essentially assembling a third-person game on top of a management one, but it came together and created that buzz of seeing something that had just been in my head become a reality. And it not sucking.  

Not all features were so straightforward. We dropped the procedural map idea because it was simply going to take too long to set it up, and we wanted faster progress. It was also decided that it'd be better to have a handful of good looking, carefully arranged maps than an endless amount of mediocre ones. We also had to drop the idea for laying a coloured grid across the terrain which would show players where they could and couldn't put structures because it took up a surprisingly huge amount of memory and again, we didn't have time to solve it.

Meanwhile, I got serious about the soundtrack. Music is an essential part of any game and especially for this genre, where the player spends long periods of time just watching a virtual world. Fortunately one of my old World of Warcraft buddies happened to be a member of the Swedish rock band Angrepp and also an ambient/synth DJ in his own right. He was more than happy to create a moody, haunting soundtrack for us out of interest in the idea. It was immensely cool hearing original music created for our own project (I'll have more on the music in later blogs).

Mariana got to grips with Blender as the weeks rolled by and was soon slowly creating a 3D village of her own:


It's insane how much great, free software there is out there these days for making games. That, and the rise of Kickstarter and Greenlight truly have opened the floodgates for all wannabe game developers, for better or worse. What we're doing would be out of the question for amateurs like us a few years ago.

April Cometh

This was a highly productive month for us as we got over the initial "what the hell are we doing" phase and found a workflow involving weekly video-call progress reports and the awesome free task management site Asana. Although we were still struggling with bugs, Unity updates that broke features, and design ideas that refused to be pinned down,  we were getting closer to the moment when this would feel more like an unfinished game and less a collection of random assets.

We came up with a cool solution for doing scaffolding that rose up around the buildings automatically just using a transparent texture on some cubes. We also started work on the front-end, texture and normal mapping, and creating a build menu for putting structures down. And I got to grips with global illumination and using lighting artistically to make up for our lack of graphical sheen.  






This last screenshot shows us working on the second unique feature, which is salvaging ruins for food and supplies. Citizens will do this or the player can even do it directly as the avatar. We had to work out an entire RPG-like inventory and loot generation system for this and it took a good few weeks until it all came together.

May

This was the month we decided to make our adventures in game development more formal and created Far Road Games as a limited company. After that we all briefly felt like adults. The hardest part, naturally, was coming up with a name for the company and  game, which had just been a code name before then. I must've invented about 50 alternatives but we all liked the same ones fortunately.

In general, the team side of making a game, through all the weeks and late night after day jobs, was (and still is) working out incredibly well and so much fun. We're fortunate to live relatively close-by and meet up face-to-face occasionally to discuss big issues. We've grown comfortable around each other. It's such a relief that we all expect the same excellence from each other but also remain supportive at the same time. We're all shy weirdos, but give us a project to focus on and that doesn't matter. The buzz of taking on a challenge together professionally with people you like cannot be beaten.

Later this month, we had the big milestone of actually getting some NPCS in the game to join the deserts and tundras and ruins. Our NPCs started as just white blocks but Mariana switched her craft from making buildings to making and rigging humanoids instead. Here's the initial scary effort:  


Nick also worked out the system for giving the citizens different ages and genders. It was fantastic seeing the poor NPC suckers enter our post-nuclear world. I feel an odd attachment to them. This is God-gaming taken the next level when you're the ones actually creating characters out of nothing. And I know what terrible lives they're going to have. They'll wish they'd been born to a different game.

And that almost brings us to the present in this rocket-speed tour...

June 2015.


I'll cover what exactly has happened to the game this month in next weeks' dev log. But the main thing, and perhaps the scariest, was actually deciding to tell show the outside world our game. We didn't plan to reveal it so soon, but it's the modern indie way to show everything no matter how early it is, and to be honest, it's been fantastic just sharing what we're on even if hardly anybody knows we exist yet. It doesn't feel as isolating even though I'm still nervous about it all.

Overall, looking back from where we are now, I'm happy with how things have gone. The only disappointment is just how much time it takes to make a game of this scope and size, especially when you're unpaid, working hard in whatever free time you can make. Needless to say, the usual joke about doubling your time estimates seems to be true. I'm thrilled with our progress but also impatient to see more and more of the game come to life. We're working flat out but there's only so much we can do.

On the plus side, we have a great code foundation to the game, good tools, a decent workflow, a set of maps, a working salvage and construction system and visible, (mostly) animated citizens and a front-end. But we don't yet have any proper gameplay.

I'll see you next week when we'll go over what progress and disasters have occurred in the current month. Thanks for reading. Any questions or things you dislike and want to point out, do let me know.

- Scott
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« Reply #3 on: July 28, 2015, 07:01:52 AM »

Dev Log #3: Three Weeks, a Lot of Changes


Welcome back to the third part of our blog about making Atomic Society. This edition brings you up to date and covers what’s been going on over the past few weeks. I’ll try to be as neurotic as possible. As you will see, a lot has happened this month and this post would be far too long if I mentioned everything, so here are the big leaps forward.

Public Reception

As mentioned in the last blog, we had stepped out of the bunker at the start of July to tell people about Atomic Society. Even most of our friends and family weren't aware of the game’s existence! (I've discovered self-promotion is hard work when you see faults before praise, I find this twitter account rather cathartic). But my fears were for nothing. The initial reaction from readers of this blog and on Reddit, has been very encouraging and heart-warming. The game has been in the top 50 on IndieDB and popular on /r tycoon, and that's about as popular as we deserve considering we don't even have a trailer to show off yet.

The downside is that marketing takes a lot of time. It's fun, exciting but endless. I don't know how solo-developers manage it. I’m glad we waited 6 months to go public and didn't start too early, even though common wisdom seems to be shout from the rooftops before you've even got a screenshot. I won't pester the press until we've got some footage to show. Whether that’s wise, we'll find out.

The word people used to describe our game most frequently was “interesting”. That’s great, because I love games that make me think as well provide solid gameplay. Thanks to everybody who took time to post a little comment on Reddit, IndieDB, Twitter, or wherever you heard about this game. Such things feel like a pay cheque when you're working for free.

The Building Costs/Resources/Inventories/Storehouses


This month has largely been consumed by one of those jobs that sounds simple but took ages to do, several weeks in fact. However, Nick our hardworking coder, has at last finished everything to do with the resources system, a tasks with hundreds of sub-elements. It is now possible for us to set resource costs for buildings (which will require a lot of playtesting to balance right), for resources to be subtracted from a storehouse as workers collect them, and for workers to know what the hell do with building supplies.

The core building resources in Atomic Society are: rubble, wood, scrap metal and plastic junk. Workers will have to go off and find these resources in “resource ruins” we've dotted around the landscape, at least until they run dry. We may also put traditional tree-cutting stuff in there as well, but we’ll see how it feels. Some of our levels our set in deserts and frozen wastes, so forests don’t always make sense (and survival games have bored me to them. Thanks videogames, I am now bored of trees).


Our building cost system also now works with converting ruins (see pic above). We have a feature where you can convert certain ruins into houses or storehouses for your growing town. If you leave all the salvage in the ruin, it’s free to convert and you get a free structure. But if you take some of the salvage out, the ruin costs more and more to convert. So there’s a trade-off. This all works now, though I'd still like the ruins to physically decay as the loot is removed, but that's a cosmetic thing for later.

One of the biggest tasks has been devising and implementing an inventory system for the citizens. I often moan about other RPGs and their crappy inventories but now I've tried to make one I feel the developer's pain. This is particularly complex for us as we have a playable third-person character who can pick stuff up manually.

The way we have it now, all citizens and the playable character have a slot-based inventory that fills up as they get items, and empties when they visit a storehouse. When their pockets are full, they know to come back from salvaging to drop it off, etc. You can click on any of them to see what they're carrying and it now all works fluidly and reliably.


Performance Upgrades

This month we decided to stress-test the game, which was something we should've done a while ago! The current goal for the game is that your town’s population will level out around 500. That’s not a lot compared to other games, but our citizens will have completely unique traits, personalities, skins, looks, etc. They’re more similar to The Sims (though fully automated).

Unsurprisingly putting 500 detailed, animated people on screen made Unity blow up. However, with numerous performance tweaks, Nick was able to get it up to about 400 people on mediocre PC hardware by making some optimisations. Still got a way to go but the challenge is doable. Our goal is for a stable 30fps on an average computer and 60+ for those who can handle it.

View a gif of us testing that here

Animations


This month Mariana delved into the horrible world of making custom animations to go with some of the ready-made ones we had been using. Not surprisingly, animation turned out to be a massive can of worms. It would've been fine if everything worked, but getting Blender and Unity to be friends has been a nightmare and resulted in some very distorted models. But rage and perseverance paid off and we now have a workable system and experience of how to make custom animations and get them into the game, at least to a basic level. Mariana made a custom hammering/building animation (seen above), and we were able to improve the the avatar (your character) so he can walk or run when you press shift.

New Music

We received another new ambient electronic track from our composer, Dawid Dahl. The soundtrack for our game is loosely inspired by artists such Kammarheit, Boards of Canada, Gustaf Hildebrand and others of that ilk. The work of Fallout composer Mark Morgan has naturally also a big inspiration. In other words: dark, haunting, and beautiful. Here is a taster of one of the songs on our growing soundtrack. We're still experimenting and finding our way with the music to get the mood right, but we're in the right ball park.

New Buildings

One of the biggest headaches for me as designer was working out what structures the player would be able to make in this game. I wanted to stay away from medieval things, which I think is a bit overdone. Months ago I did a lot of research on survival scenarios and brainstormed loads of buildings. This month I've spent hours refining that list down so every building is useful, important, and balanced. The goal is that everything will have pros and cons and it will be down to intelligent play to decide what to build. Right now we have 28 building types confirmed. These will all be unlocked at the start when you play the game. Mariana has been making models for them and we'll code the functionality of them one by one.


Extra Bits

Some things you might've missed that have also happened this month:

* We now have a subreddit discussion forum where all are welcome to talk about the game.

* This rather poor quality gif of avatar mode in action.

* The fact we are hoping to find a hobbyist UK programmer with plenty of spare time to join our team, assuming if we can find one as deluded as we are.

And Finally...

A couple of people out there have asked about the release dates. Right now, we’re still working to get in all the core gameplay systems in a rudimentary form so we won't be ready to release an alpha version any time soon. Our current goal is to try and get the outstanding core features in as quickly as possible and then in September we'll put out a gameplay trailer/preview thing that at least shows the game in action with some commentary.

At some point over the winter, we may go begging on Kickstarter because we cannot make everything without any form of income, although we’ll do our best! And around that time I'd like to offer people a demo they can tinker with, but we'll see.

Anyway, thanks from the 3 of us to everybody for reading, and your interest and support. Always happy to discuss anything about the game or the way we're making it. One of the reasons I put out these dev logs is to hear what people think, especially on the topics I'm unsure about.

I'll see you next time, in about 1 or 2 weeks. :-)
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« Reply #4 on: August 05, 2015, 09:17:38 AM »

First Test Foootage

Not a proper dev log this week as the 3 of us are still knee-deep in a necessary clean-up, bug fixing, and tweaking fortnight on all the content we’ve produced over the past 6 months. This won’t lead to many exciting developments straight away, but it will, metaphorically speaking, keep the base of the tower strong as we add more and more weight to the top of it.

In the meantime, here’s the first look at some in-game footage. It’s really just a rough and ready test of the avatar mode that lets you control and do things with the leader of the town, in the manner of a third-person game. There are bugs and it’s more an experiment at putting together game footage than anything, but I hope you find it interesting.



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« Reply #5 on: August 16, 2015, 03:06:40 PM »

Had an interview about the game this weekend here, which might be of interest and discuss more about the game's on-going philosophy and what separates it from other city-sims:

http://www.gamingconviction.com/interview-far-road-games-talks-atomic-society/
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« Reply #6 on: August 22, 2015, 04:21:35 PM »

(Sorry for the huge pics!)

Dev Log 4: One Step Back, Two Steps Forward


August is turning out to be one of those months when you do a hundred tiny things, and it doesn't seem to add up to much. Only when you stand back and look at the whole picture, do you realise you've done so much work. We've got a lot to share this time.

Re-Factor 5

After the monumental progress of July, it was time to fix underlying issues with the game and to build the foundations for future development. I dread these moments. I always want to go forward. But better to fix the present than worry about the future. Nick said sooner or later we'd have to patch up the engines. The question was whether to do it now - when it’s a relatively small job - or later when it could take ages because there'd be so much more to redo. We decided to do it now.

Over the last 3 weeks Nick has essentially rebuilt the innards of the game single-handily and gave it a total tune-up so that it’s a lot more future proof (as much as anything can be in games!) I did fear at one stage he’d disappeared into the coding vortex and would

but my fears were heedless, and now we essentially have Atomic Society 2.0 under the hood.

The amount of work he did is insane and such is the life of a poor tortured programmer, it's largely invisible to those who aren't programmers. Nevermind. You’ll see the fruits of it later on as we can pump out content faster now.

Build Menu Changes

This month we experimented with a new way of doing the build menu today. Most city-building games do it in a different way, but it is the most crucial menu, where the player is constantly going. I originally came up with a streamlined pop-out system, which was fine, but Nick came up with the idea of making it tile based and I have to admit, it’s a lot better in action. Always trust a programmer to make something efficient.

[/left]

Brand New Feature: Star Ratings

We were also able to add in the first part of the star rating system. Every time you hire someone to work in a building, they will slowly gain work experience that makes them more efficient and reliable at their job. You’ll miss it when one of your top workers dies/leaves/goes nuts. At the moment they gain one star per year, in a gradual way. This month we were able to put in the first elements of this system as you can see in the pic below. You can also see a little of the citizen's biographical data there.


Animation vs Reality

We had been using a system called “root motion” on our characters, which makes the animation look  realistic. But having realistic animation with hundreds of citizens in a landscape that changes radically as you put down new buildings was causing a few bugs, to put it mildly. After days of trying to solve it and getting stressed, we simply hit the destroy button and removed root motion from the game. I was worried this would ruin the look of the game, but it’s barely noticeable even if you're staring at the citizens. We're going through all the lessons other companies who have made city-building games learnt years ago I guess.

New Map: Canyon

I did some work on a new level for the game this month. This one is set entirely in a canyon where the survivors shelter from the radioactive winds above. This level is unique in that you can't go  above the canyon and float around. You'll never know what’s around the next corner (though this top down aerial dev screenshot gives you a bit of a clue!).


New Art: Buildings

Thanks to Mariana we have created plenty of new buildings this month, almost too many for me to remember!

The screenshot below (which is taken from ground level on the aforementioned canyon map) shows about half the buildings we already have in the game. Naturally, this only shows one  copy of each building, so it's the start of a town, and that would probably be enough buildings to accommodate 50 citizens. So you'll soon have a town that stretches into the distance.


It’s not so evident in that pic, but those buildings have also had their textures upgraded. Certain indie-devs say is that you shouldn't get too bogged down in art, but those people probably don’t have the luxury of an artist. We don’t go overboard, but adding a degree of art to the game even this early on has been really beneficial in terms of getting a feel for the game and seeing where you’re supposed to be going. It inspires you. A game is about how it makes you feel, and art is a massive part of that even at this stage.

New Feature: Need Bars

At last we started work on one of the few gameplay aspects I’ve been waiting for since we started work. Semi-functional need bars!

Which is a rather lame name for what is going to be a backbone of the game. As soon as you load your city, you'll to see something like this in the bottom left:



Those orange bars are averaged among your entire population and will tick down as people get hungry, thirsty, tired, etc. The Approval bar you can see will also tick down. It is an average of the other bars. And when that ticks down, your citizens get nasty.

If you've got a murderer in your midst, he or she is going to get bloodthirsty as confidence in your leadership expires. The punishment for playing badly is not bankruptcy (there is no money in our game) but social chaos as everybody's worst aspect comes to the fore.  

We went with a need bar system because it sets clear goals for the player. You can see immediately what you need to aim towards, no guesswork. How you actually fill those bars is a different matter, but it should point new players in the right direction. I’m hoping when I do the next blog, these bars will be properly linked to the citizens and we'll have the first taste of true gameplay.  

Design Doc Revamp:

As Nick was re-doing the code, I set about doing the same thing with the design docs. I had designed most of the game in advance but we’d now come far enough in now I didn't have to guess so much. I first set about simplifying things. I am a believer in the theory that you should take a game idea and simplify it as much as possible. Even complex ideas, such as a citizen having needs, wants, fears and desires, can all be broken down into simple steps if you try. This doesn't mean that the game becomes basic, simply that the components that make it become as streamlined and elegant as possible, making the player's choices clear and fluid.

First Video Footage:

Finally, after weeks of trying to get my slow PC to behave, I was able to record a little bit of test footage of the game. At the time of writing it’s coming up on 700 views, which I don’t think is too shabby for a game almost no one knows about! Go and take a look and let me know what you think. Naturally it just shows the game far from release, but it’s something. We’ll try to have more test footage in the near future.





A New Programmer?

The last couple of weeks have been interesting as we have had people apply to work with us (work is a liberal term as no one's being paid!). I’ve been in two minds about bringing someone else on the team. On the one hand, we’re a stable team of 3, but at the same time, it would be lovely to have faster progress and to let Nick rest a bit if he wants a day off. I think Far Road Games will always make code-heavy games, rather than art-focused ones so we need lots of programmers. We’re speaking to some people this week and we’ll see what happens.

Press Interview:

A website named Gaming Conviction somehow found out about our game and wanted to interview me about it. This was a rather surreal experience. I’ve been reading about other games for as long as I could read, and now someone wanted to chat to me about mine. I didn't have a clue what to say at first, but soon found my tongue, as you’ll see. I know it's not going to set the world on fire but it was a lot of fun.

Marketing

I can’t believe how much time marketing takes up if you’re a person who finds the act of selling  to people uncomfortable. I find it completely exhausting and I’m doing relatively little of it. I’m slowly working out a way to handle it though. The biggest lesson I’ve learnt is don't over plan, trying to guess how people will shop leads to madness, and only market in ways you enjoy. I like writing these dev blogs. If I wanted to work in sales, I'd get a different job.

Kickstarter When?

Atomic Society is going to need a Kickstarter unless we find several thousand pounds lying around in a dodgy briefcase. Right now we're surviving by the thinnest thread and it would only take one of the team’s PCs to break to stall the project. We can't exhibit the game at a show or anything because the fees are too high. The real question is when to go begging. I’m a bit scared if we don't do it soon, we'll be lost in the winter avalanche of games that come out, but we must have some solid gameplay to display. I suppose I’ll trust myself to the gameplay and hope that is enough to make people open their wallets even near Christmas.



Extra Things You Might've Missed:

* I posted a list of songs that inspired our soundtrack here. You’ll like it if you like dark, ambient, weird music:

* I started a personal blog on the process of making an indie game company. Check it out here. It currently has 2 posts on dealing with the stress of making your own business and the fact that you can design games even if you don’t know how to program.

* Mariana made a Major Lazer inspired thumbnail for our game, which is rather cool in an 80s way.

* Tweets! Lots of lovely tweets. Each of them a sheer delight for the soul. Read ‘em here.

* We had a discussion on how dark and mature a post-apocalyptic game can go over here.

So that's not a bad little update for 3 weeks I suppose? See you again next time and please do let me know how your thoughts and feedback.
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« Reply #7 on: September 19, 2015, 04:43:32 AM »

Dev Blog #5 - The Citizens Come To Life


September has been a slow and steady grind, the honeymoon period of indie-development is over, but I feel we’re adjusting to the long grind afterwards, when excitement meets self-discipline. We’ve managed to get some cool new stuff in, including 1 feature I’ve been waiting months for.

New UI

Those boring, old white UI placeholders have been updated. Mariana worked out a concept around burnt wood/paper and metal and practised her 2D craft, mostly using GIMP. We discussed whether or not to make the UI look like an actual part of the game world, making things look like clipboards, etc, but settled on a compromise between prettiness and readability. The best thing is that she now knows a lot more about the UI aspects and can do a lot more in that department when required. Here you can see the UI as it looks today. It's a lot easier on the eyes.


Citizens Live!

Nick spent his month pouring hard work into the need system, the core system that drives the city-building part of the game. Our NPCs will be complex individuals, but under every complex person are basic physical needs, and that's why you'll need to build structures. Our citizens now have 2 active, working needs at last, food and drink.

When their needs reach critical thresholds, they automatically go and find sustenance at a storehouse. It was fun (but a bit weird) seeing our AI characters move around of their free will after so long!

Making all this happen required a lot of head scratching but it was a fun task. We needed the citizens' needs to decay at differing rates, and to be boosted by different amounts depending on what they eat or drink. We also had to set trigger points for when they'd stop work and seek food, and give them the intelligence to know what was most important (e.g. don't eat if you're dying of dehydration!).

One unexpected but cool thing was seeing the villagers form a scrum and push and shove each other to get what they want. This wasn’t in the design, it’s a side-effect of the AI, but it suits the setting where people will be desperate for supplies.



As the citizens needs decline, you can now see that reflected on the information panel in the bottom left of the above screenshots (the 5 orange & white bars). That UI element now works.

It looks simple but seeing these bars trickle down at various speeds is something I’ve been waiting for ages. I knew it would be the core of the game. When you see the needs ticking down, it does convey the feeling of an anxious leader. You can sense how hard it will be to provide for them.

As they go down, the thermometer shaped icon goes down as well. That's your approval meter. It is calculated to be an average of all the needs in the town. And when that goes down your citizens will turn nasty and you'll be in danger of being ousted from power.

The fact our citizens now have appetites really drove home to me how much food, drink, etc, the player will need to produce. Even 25 people consume a huge amount of food and water every day. There is going to be a ton of balancing work ahead.

Our next goal is to put in ways for the remaining 3 needs (health, morale, and shelter) which shouldn’t be too difficult now we’ve figured out the basics. After that we can hopefully move onto the really fun stuff of giving the citizens personalities.

All Building Models Completed

This month Mariana finished all the 3D models for buildings. A lot of them need minor adjustments still but it’s great to see all 26 of them in-game. I’m happy with the style she’s invented, making them realistic but still simple enough players can see instantly what a building is from above. The really impressive thing is how few textures the buildings use. Sometimes having zero budget can inspire a lot of creativity.


Our 7 Month Deadline Expired

Back in February, we decided to give ourselves until mid-September to get the game onto Kickstarter. 7 months seemed like a lifetime then. But in reality, 7 months of hard work was nowhere near enough for a game this complex! We have completed hundreds of tasks, but the final dozen are bottomless wells. We still have the all-important behavioural traits that will make the citizens truly come alive before I’d feel comfortable seeking crowdfunding. I want people to see the mechanics at least in a basic, crude form. This was a bit disappointing, knowing we’ve got a long winter ahead, but I’m too proud of what we have done to care.

Decided To Keep the Team Small

Those who read last month’s blog may remember we were seeking a new programmer. This was a gamble for us, as we’re unpaid, and keeping that friendly, productive atmosphere going is incredibly important for us. We did interview hobbyists but no one seemed quite right so we decided to stay as a threesome for the time being. We’ll see how things pan out when we will (hopefully!) have a little bit of finance and credibility. Of course, if a UK hobbyist programmer sees this and still wants to apply, go ahead. You never know who you'll meet next!

Things You Might’ve Missed

Not much to miss this month, but if you haven’t seen it, there may be some extra screenshots of the game in the weekly “Screenshot Saturday” thread here. I try to update that every weekend.

Our music composer has been busy as well, aside from providing us with our first song with a bit of guitar in it (it reminds me of The Last of Us), he was also off DJing and being generally cool in the Netherlands this month. If you’re into hard techno, his set from that gig is worth a listen.


Conclusion:

Personally, I feel it’s been a productive month but game development is strange. Nothing happens for a week, then five things happen in an evening and my mood goes back up! We don’t have an office, so sometimes it’s hard to know what people are working on. Old indie game developer clichés about wishing we’d used a simpler game idea as our first project sometimes occur to me, but I'm terrible at coming up with little games (I'd be a terrible phone game developer). Atomic Society is the game we want to make, and it’s a project that remains fun to make, so we’ll stick with it. We’re long past the point of no return.

And that’s it, for now. Thanks to everyone for your comments and interest in the game so far, really makes it all worthwhile. See you in October when hopefully there might be a few more vital ingredients and fingers-crossed I can do another short Youtube video of me actually playing the game if we get the vital ingredients in.
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« Reply #8 on: October 26, 2015, 01:02:18 PM »

Dev Blog 6: New Gameplay Footage & Latest Progress


September and October have been incredibly busy months for us as usual, but not in the ways I expected! Here you can read about the biggest, most recent updates for the game.

New Gameplay Footage

Decided it was time to share a bit more footage, so you can see how the game is slowly evolving. This is about 8-9 weeks further on that the last video and it looks a fair bit better. I've also discovered video editing is a pain in the arse!





Female Avatar & Children

A few new characters entered our bleak and desolate game this month. First up, we implemented a female town leader option. At the start of the game you’ll be able to customise the appearance, gender and race of the town leader who you move around.

Secondly, we’ve had kids... Or rather, we put children into the game. Kids can be a mixture of orphans who managed to survive in the wasteland, or who were adopted by adult survivors. Adults will eventually reproduce and form their own families later on, of course.

It’s certainly added some extra tension to the game knowing that all the nasty elements in this game world also affect children.


New Programmer!

If you read last month’s blog, you might recall (you won't) that I’d written off the idea of finding a new programmer. It didn’t seem like we’d ever find the right kind of person. Who in their right mind would want to slog out their guts for us with no guaranteed reward?

Anyway, I decided to advertise one last time and for some reason (perhaps because the game is looking more like a game these days?), I got a lot of responses. It took me a week or so to sort through them. Turns out HR is something indie devs need to worry about and that sucks.

However, the guy went for is called Adam, and he's from the States, so it's our first long-distance team member. He might be American but he shares our sense of humour. He's everything we want on paper, and I was unable to put him off and scare him away from working with us, so he is now helping to craft the apocalypse. He’s busy guy with a kid on the way, but fitting in great so far and it’s letting us take a bit of the pressure off Nick. Simply having another talented and motivated person around is motivating. I love the buzz of teamwork.


First-Draft of All Levels Completed

One of the few technical things I can actually do as a designer (!) is creating the environments using Unity’s ageing but intuitive terrain building system. Landscape is essential for setting the mood, especially when players spend several hours in the same area. Atomic Society will launch with 9 handcrafted and varied stages, ranging from the traditional post-apocalyptic desert, up to mountain ranges (admittedly why you’d build a city on a mountain is a good question, but I'll come up with something...)

This month I managed to finish that ninth and final stage. And of course, as soon as I did, I learnt a new technique that would've made every level look 10x times better. Learning sucks. I've now understood how to naturally erode a terrain and texture huge expanses, so I’ll probably spend the next month refining and improving all the levels.
Outside Interest

For the first time, we started to receive a few emails from indie publishers, marketing, and freelancer type people. Nothing major, but it all felt rather weird to me - I’m usually the one pestering others! It felt more like we're part of a wider industry. I’m instinctively suspicious of anyone, but most of them seemed genuinely interested and it was just nice to be noticed. However, Atomic Society is far from being finished, so I haven’t gone ahead and signed up to anything yet.

Outside Interest

For the first time, we started to receive a few emails from indie publishers, marketing, and freelancer type people. Nothing major, but it all felt rather weird to me - I’m usually the one pestering others! It felt more like we're part of a wider industry. I’m instinctively suspicious of anyone, but most of them seemed genuinely interested and it was just nice to be noticed. However, Atomic Society is far from being finished, so I haven’t gone ahead and signed up to anything yet.


Building Art Improvements

Last month I recklessly said all the building models had been done. Saying anything is “done” is a mistake. This month Mariana went back to being a busy architect again. 3 new structures have been added, all belonging to the "cosmetic" category. They’re bonus structures you can use to make your town more interesting visually. They will also convey certain bonuses to any citizen standing near them (e.g. stand next to the grim reaper riding an atom bomb as pictured above, and it might sober you out of doing something you'll regret, like stabbing your neighbour).

Apart from that, she has been a second pass on the buildings to make them better looking. We learn so much making this game that it’s literally painful to see the earliest things we made in the first weeks. She also started experimenting with animations. Seeing a building move just a bit makes such a huge difference to the feel of the game. Creating a windmill was a good animation to practise on. Here you can see the wind-powered turbine in action (and if you squint, you can make out some citizens milling around in the background.)  

Bugs

As stated in earlier blogs, I used to be a tester at Rare many years ago. I know about bug-hunting and that's come in very helpful lately. As Atomic Society becomes more and more complex, more and more bugs seem to keep cropping up. Keeping on top of them lately has basically given me my old job back (minus the salary!)

Nick did a major new version this week that brought lots of improvements, and also broke a lot of things. It's just the nature of game development. Still, it has been strangely satisfying finding a bug, assigning it, getting it fixed, and seeing the little imperfections disappear one by one. It reminded me of the old days but now on a project that means a lot to me personally.


Extra Stuff!

* The UI keeps being revised and tweaked, of course. I didn’t realise how much of creating a game would revolve around UI. It’s so important and so fiddly/difficult to do, especially at any resolution ranging from 1280x720 upwards (which is surprisingly still commonly used on Steam). We’ve switched to using icons more and more. I know now why developers like icons now, they take up less space.

* The marketing grind... I’m keeping Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, etc updated, or trying to. I’m still struggling to share information (like this blog) when I'm anxious as hell, but it’s got to be done. This month we passed 300 followers on Twitter, and most of them are actually genuine people, not bots or motivational quote re-tweeters, so I guess that's something.

* Our soundtrack guy Dawid got a new piece of obscure synthesiser equipment that he’d been waiting 7 months for. He immediately made a song for us using it, and it sounds ace.

* Meanwhile, I’ve been scouring the web for public domain video footage and editing it like a total pro in Windows Movie Maker. Keeping a close eye on what you can and can't legally use is something I'm trying to watch like a hawk, it's scary.

​*My rough and ready game design blog still continues to exist. Mostly my random observations on the last thing I played. Last time I wrote a piece gushing about Metal Gear Solid V, so if you don't like that game, you now have a right to be worried about me working on this game.

So that's it for another month. Thanks for reading and please do let us know if you're interested in the game or have questions/queries about it. Otherwise, I'll see you in November.

« Last Edit: October 26, 2015, 01:13:26 PM by ScottFarRoad. » Logged

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« Reply #9 on: November 28, 2015, 02:12:31 PM »

Dev Blog 7: Racing Ahead


This month has been hectic but productive so this will be a longer than usual entry. Adam, our new programmer, continues to fit in nicely and a lot of new features have gone in with all 4 of us contributing as much as humanly possible with day jobs and families to distract us.

November has been the first month we've been able to sit down and play the basic city-building aspects of the game without missing features, which gave me one of those “we might actually pull this off” kind of feelings.

New Feature: Wandering Tribe

We’ve almost finished implementing the first aspects of the game now. At the start, you’ll be dumped, with a group of survivors, into an unknown part of the map. You must choose one of the ruins to make your first Storehouse out of, and that will become your city centre. You lead your people across the wasteland, before they all die. It's cool watching them trail behind you until you’ve found a place to build.

We’ve also given them a little more life, so they don’t just stand around like zombies when unemployed.


Needs & Negative Effects

We finished implementing the 5 core needs every citizen has: Food, Drink, Health, Shelter and Morale. This alone has been a HUGE task and great progress for us.

The needs are now all fully functional and citizens refill them by visiting the right structures, so that almost constitutes gameplay! Along the way we had to solve some unexpected problems, like what happens when all your medical staff get sick and can’t work? Sooner or later everybody would fall ill. Found a solution in the end though.

The Health need became more advanced too. Citizens now have a chance to become unwell or injured. It makes the game less manic and more realistic.

Lastly, citizen’s now catch, for various reasons, negative effects, like “unemployed” or “homeless” to make their lives even more fun. These debuffs have penalties to make building new structures seem more vital.

New Feature: Citizen Variety

This month we were also able to finish off a cool feature that makes the citizens and survivors who come to your town a lot more varied. They now all have multiple skin colours, hairstyles, body shapes, age ranges and of course, gender. It should be pretty rare to find two citizens who look exactly identical.


The Idiot's Guide to Running an Indie Games Studio

One annoying tasks about making games is that it isn't all about making games. This month I decided to do some homework, dipping into the scary world of business studies tomes, and marketing guides for dummies. I’m not sure any of it has sunk in yet, but you’ll know if I learnt anything in about a year if we’re all sleeping under a bridge after the game's launch. Of course, I want Atomic Society to succeed somewhat, and for Far Road Games to prosper at least modestly over the coming years, but I feel the business/marketing side of this operation is always going to be out of my comfort zone. We'll see.

New Feature: Engineers

Another new feature added this month is the Engineers. Engineers are basically super-citizens. They’re good at everything, but they’re incredibly rare. At the start of the game, they’re the only people who can construct anything. As a player you’ll want to employ them in the right places, and hope nothing/no one kills them. The story of Atomic Society is that you were kicked out of a government outpost that survived the war, because you disagreed with the way it was being led. Now you’re off to make your own new society. You brought a handful of fellow Engineers with you.


Finding a Solid Design for the Buildings

Working on the needs forced me to re-evaluate what buildings we had in the game. I didn’t want it to be a case of just build X, Y, Z then repeat. So we’re using paper, scissor, stone style balancing. There are 3 buildings that can provide water, 3 for food, etc. Each of them has a plus and a downside, and you won't be able to afford to build them all immediately.

We turned this new balancing method into a set of programming scripts that can work on almost every basic building. This month alone at least 9 or 10 new buildings have become functional in-game due to this refinement.

As a designer, I've also discovered that every game needs a little randomness to be addictive, and it's down to the player to decide if they want to gamble for added reward or play it safe. Randomness is a powerful tool in the designer's handbook.

Likewise, I have started to appreciate the importance of honing a core "gameplay loop". This was a term I wasn't particularly worried about, but now I appreciate it as a way of honing the design to perfection. Everything feeds into everything else in a game design. Everything in Atomic Society is now about keeping up your Approval. You build new structures to keep it up, but that attracts new survivors, who come with new demands (and social issues), that drive down approval. Every time your city will get more and more wild and big. Everything has come together now and the game feels a lot neater in my head.

New Art Pass for Buildings and Environments

This month I finished the second pass on all the environments, armed with the knowledge learnt last month. They still need a third and fourth pass no doubt, but we’re down to the polishing stages. All 9 levels now look presentable and interesting to explore at least.


Other New Stuff This Month

Queuing. Yes, the simple art of queueing becomes a big deal when you’ve got twenty dumb citizens all trying to access the same building at the same time! Perhaps it’s because we’re 50% British, but we spent a good while making sure that each building knows who came first, who to let in, and how to serve them. And we maintained a nice shoving/pushing animation to make it look cool.
The UI has been tweaked and shaped up in several places. We now have nice bookmark style tabs on things and presenting information more clearly.
Conclusion & Hopes for December

Next month I hope we’ll start to see the first evidence of Atomic Society's truly unique aspect, its society and law-making aspects. We're getting so close at last! Everything else has been building up to that (no pun intended). The city-building aspects are vital, and fun thanks to their post-apocalyptic twist, but I can't wait to see our citizens truly come to life in all kinds of dark, exciting ways.

Feels like we’re really getting close to having this basic alpha version in our hands. Here’s hoping we can maintain progress over Christmas...

​See you in about a month.
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« Reply #10 on: January 12, 2016, 01:35:17 PM »

Atomic Society Dev Blog #8: Making of a Murderer


City-Building… Built?

Just before Christmas the team managed to tie up the outstanding elements of the city-building side of the game and get it playable. There are still some buildings that don’t do anything, but the core is in there now. Citizens are now able to intelligently boost all 5 of their needs, and we have 15 fully operational buildings, each with different roles. I love seeing crowds of citizens living independent lives and doing their own thing.

Mostly importantly, the game didn’t break. It wasn’t missing any functionality, citizens didn’t wander off and get stuck. For the first time we didn’t just test the game, we could play it.

It’s been a big gamble working solid on something for 10 months before you can even see try it out, but that’s the nature of building such a complex simulation.

And for the first time I actually got to watch someone else play Atomic Society, and they seemed to be drawn into the experience despite missing stuff and glitches. After almost 30 years of playing other people’s games, seeing someone else play yours is a good feeling.

Making of a Murderer

We have at long, long, (long) last started coding the coolest feature – our law and behaviour system. We have now started making the NPCs in our game seem more alive and human basically. The first element we’re adding is murder, because out all the issue, it’s most straightforward. There isn’t a lot of subtlety to shanking a guy.

The process we’re working makes a murderer pick a victim at random when he or she is triggered, lead them away from the crowd, and bump the person off. (We'll make motivations more complex later).

It isn’t guaranteed to work out though for the murderer, and can lead to the attacker and/or victim being injured instead. Also if a passer-by wanders over during the attack they might go and get the authorities or they might be too afraid to do so. Obviously if a guard wanders over, they will attempt to stop the crime and arrest the suspect.  

Stabbing folks is just one of many behavioural aspects we have in store. Once that’s up and running, and is cool to witness, we’ll move onto the political side – which is letting players decide how to deal with the murderer.

When that’s done, we can start working on prostitution, as that’s also pretty straightforward. We could’ve started it with that first. But then I’d have to call this dev blog making of a prostitute.


Kickstarter Preparations Semi-Begin

Progress towards completing the prototype phase of the game feels like it's going so well it’s now getting scarily close to the time when I can start planning our Kickstarter, which may or may not be in February. I’m going to need all that time I can get to put together a compelling campaign. I’ve started writing the draft page for the game and putting together some ideas for the trailer. It’s stressing me out.
 
Obviously we need the behaviour system to be up and running first so folks can see that in action. I want people to see we’ve got something playable. Worst comes to the worst, we wait until March.

We’ve carefully budgeted the cash we need to safeguard the development of the game, but who knows if we’ll entice enough people to lay down their hard-earned earnings. Will the world respond to the game, or will we be a passing blip and then forgotten? I can spend the next several weeks panicking about that.

Character & Difficulty Selection Screen

Back in the game world, Atomic Society now starts with a character selection screen. It looks a little crude at the moment but at least it works. As mentioned before, your town leader is a third-person controllable NPC who can be used to do optional tasks such as salvaging and repairs. We wanted to add in some light RPG elements so you feel as if you’re living in the town you create as well as getting to explore it on foot.

At the moment you can choose your gender, clothes, name and age. We’ve also added in placeholders for the difficulty setting and tutorial options, though obviously we can’t balance difficulty or design the tutorial until the game is finished.

The game will probably have 3 core difficulty settings, and a custom one, where you can adjust individual aspects to make it as cheaty or impossible as you prefer. Making this menu was Adam’s (our freelancer programmer) 2nd or 3rd big task on the game and he has now been truly indoctrinated into Far Road Games because he now also hates UI tasks.


Industry/Trade Buildings

One common criticism I hear of certain other indie city-building games is that they don’t have enough depth. Players quickly work out what buildings to place and in what order and then it’s just a case of going through the motions.

Although I don’t want Atomic Society to get bogged down in micro-managing and accountancy, I have lately been designing second and third tier buildings, things players will require resource-chains to build. For example, you’ll be able to build a kitchen to upgrade the food you scavenge for or grow. But if you take that food to the kitchen, it will take time to cook and serve, and your starving citizens will get impatient. So there’s always be an element of tactics.

We’re not going to put in these buildings just yet, (though Mariana has made the models) as they’re way off yet, but at least we have a system in mind. It’s quite nice that the design docs no longer get drastic updates any more. Development is switching from inventing to refining already. Mariana especially appreciates this as she doesn’t have to remake every 5th building because I changed my mind.

Defence/Fortifications

A while back on our discussion forum we debated whether or not to include invasions and raiders, etc. This is a game about building and ethics after all, not warfare. In the end, I feel like it will be out of our league to do combat justice. We’re going to focus on the violence among your own population instead. That should be dramatic enough.

But I did want to make a token effort towards some kind of fortifications, simply because it’s fun to build them. So you will be able to put walls around your city, and guard towers to defend it. We haven’t decided why yet, but it will probably help your people feel more secure and happy.

Perhaps after launch, if the game does well, we can revisit this system and make defence and invasions more of a thing. I have some ideas in that direction but I doubt it will be in at launch.


Spawning/Start of Game

We have implemented a random aspect to the start of each game and spawning. Now when you play a new game, you get dropped into a random location on the map, and it’s up to you to lead your initial survivors to where you think is best. This will keep the game fresher as people replay it and it looks cool leading a tribe of survivors.

On top of that, we have now programmed in spawning at last. New migrants are attracted to your town as you improve the living conditions for everyone there, on a proportional basis. Finally, you can see your town grow and grow. And currently you see the frame-rate die when it gets to about 100 citizens (a job for later).

I realise now there are so many underappreciated little things that go into making a game. For example, we’ve made it so that a citizen will not spawn a new migrant if the camera is looking in the direction of the spawn point. I love little touches like that.

Saving & Loading

This isn’t exciting for you but it has been a huge challenge for us. We really needed to implement some kind of saving now. Atomic Society is so big and imagine the difficulty in trying to repeat a bug that requires you to spend 4 hours making an city before you can repeat it.

Unity is backwards when it comes to saving and loading. It doesn’t have any ready-made solutions. So lead programmer Nick had to do a ton of homework (on top of all his other jobs) to work how we can save the positions, conditions, and status of hundreds and hundreds of NPCs in a game where even the landscape itself changes as you play. It’s… Getting there.

Fast Forward

Another topic of debate for the team has been whether or not to let the player speed up time. I originally did not want to make a game where this was necessary. It feels a bit lame to me that people need to fast-forward through content in this genre. However, I can’t escape the fact the city-building genre is lot about building and waiting. So it is now possible, like Sim City, etc, to speed up time. This has saved so much time in testing if nothing else. Perhaps when the game is out, I will be able to work more on the avatar system, and expand that, so that players can always have something fun to do with their playable character while waiting for things.


New Mail List

A few folks have asked me if we have a mailing list, so they can get news delivered to them. Now you can thanks to the miracle of me bothering to create such a thing. If you visit our website www.farroadgames.com you should see a simple sign-up form on the front page. This would be the first dev blog sent out that way but nobody has signed up for it yet.

Other Notes

* Scandinavian god of music Dawid continues to produce great tunes for us from his temple of ice. We’ve recently had another moody guitar-influenced piece. We almost have a complete soundtrack’s worth already. Then it will be a case of tweaking/thinning out the best tracks. We might actually have to pay the guy something at this rate.

* Adam continues to make us not regret hiring him. Even though he has been slightly distracted from work at the moment due to the birth of his first child. Managing to do game development with a full-time job and having to cope with your firstborn child is one hell of a challenge.

* The tedious but important business side of setting up an indie studio continues. We’re currently in the paperwork nightmare of creating a business bank account that one day might even hold money.

* Like many people, I made a “games of 2015” article on my blog. You can read it here. I promise if you disagree with all my choices then you will only slightly dislike Atomic Society.

Next Time... On Atomic Society

If we do actually get the game ready for Kickstarter, next month or so is going to be insane. I don’t know if I’ll have time for a dev blog. Making the video trailer alone will time consuming, and that’s just one aspect of trying to tell a jaded world that another indie might be worth paying attention to.

Expect to see the game pop on the dreaded Steam Greenlight at some point. Meanwhile the rest of the team will be working overtime to squeeze in all the features we need for that video, and hoping the game doesn’t blow up.

​I’ll be in touch on Reddit and Twitter, etc and trying to solicit dollars. Thanks for reading.
« Last Edit: January 12, 2016, 01:42:58 PM by ScottFarRoad. » Logged

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« Reply #11 on: February 26, 2016, 02:23:32 PM »


At long last Atomic Society has made its way to Kickstarter. Our little apocalypse has begun! :-)

For those who don't know, Atomic Society is a post-apocalyptic city building game where you get to set all the laws and morals of a wasteland settlement. The people have different traits and personalities that constantly modify how you play, and give a great deal of replayability. You can rule as a tyrant or a hero, it's up to you, but the people will misbehave in different ways no matter what.

Atomic Society on Kickstarter Link

And here's the first Kickstarter trailer that gives you an overview.

If you can back us at any level that would be awesome. No worries if not. We are also on Steam Greenlight over here and a vote there is free:

Link to Steam Greenlight page for Atomic Society

We're probably going to have a few more videos and updates to come over the next weeks. Thanks everybody for supporting the game so far. :-)

Scott

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« Reply #12 on: March 04, 2016, 07:17:43 AM »

Dev Blog #9: Law and Order


What a crazy month (and a bit). Because of Kickstarter madness, this is going to be a 2-part Dev Blog.

Part 1 will cover new stuff that went into the game over in the last 30 days. Part 2, in the coming week or so, will cover our battle on Kickstarter.

So, without further ado, let’s start talking about new content. I'll start by listing the most interesting stuff and then do a an extra "stuff added to the game" at the bottom.

And because this is a Kickstarter special, I should just stress all these changes were done by an unpaid team (with day jobs) in about 5 weeks... And we'd really like to work even harder than this... And we're not sure if we'll be able to... So please visit our Kickstarter page buy your copy in advance (/begging over.) 
And if you're a Kickstarter backer reading this, why not go to the front page of this website and sign up for our monthly newsletter? You can always print them out and use them as fuel for the nuclear winter! 

And if by the time you read this our Kickstarter is over, then why not give us a free vote on Steam Greenlight and help us get on Steam for later down the line?

And if by the time you read this, we've already been Greenlit and backed on Kickstarter... Then we love you.



Moral Choice Interface

This month Nick started work on the UI for the Moral Choice System. This had to be in the game, in some form, before Kickstarter. Atomic Society is all about picking laws and handling the consequences (or failing miserably to!) 

The concept of this UI was based on cards, not that we had time to go to town on prettiness. I imagined the "cards of fate" being presented to the player, big decisions that would influence 100s of lives. It was also a huge challenge to try and write compelling and even-handed text for a range of views. As designer, I never seem able to fit into the right or left wing camp, and love encountering different points of view, so this was a fun challenge at least.

The choices you see above were intial ideas on what you might do with murderers but since the Kickstarter started I've developed the system a lot and we've now got a much better formula on how to do moral choices, which I'm going to talk about in a special one-off dev blog soon.

Right now, Nick made it so you build a Town Hall (where your leader lives) and then you can access the law interface. This shows all the issues that are currently active in the game. And you just click on one to deal with it.


Elderly Citizens & Art Improvements

Mariana created the models for the last members to join our apocalyptic society, elderly citizens: male and female. It's hard to say how many citizens will live into old age in Atomic Society, but surely some will. The citizens will eventually age on their 59th birthday currently and gain grey hair as well. I suppose if there was radiation sickness they wouldn't have any hair at all. Not wanting to deal with radiation as a designer is one of the reasons the game is set decades after a nuclear war, when Chernobyl style, radiation should  have receded (any science expert who thinks I'm wrong on that, please comment and educate me!).

I also adjusted the textures somewhat, getting rid of some of the insane levels of bump-mapping we had and made things that should shine, shine. You could see on the skin of the citizen above, for example, how it has a more natural sheen.

Firing Workers & UI Improvements

Adam has been working away on the UI as is rapidly becoming our UI expert (a title he will hate). He has implemented the ability to fire workers, which will be essential for players as it's not always good or wise to have the max number of employees in a workplace (if it's unpopular). We might add a debuff that makes fired citizens grumpy or something later if you sack them.

He has also been greatly expanding the amount of information you get on a workplace's menu. You can now see what specific workers are up to at any time, how quickly the building is producing something, and how much of the building's internal storage is taken up. Information is power in a city-builder after all.

Long-time followers of the ugliness of our UI may also notice that the buttons look a look chunkier and inviting to press. Mariana is a fun of Blizzard-style UIs and I love a chunky UI too, so our buttons look better now.


Post-Apocalyptic Delivery Service

Winner of "didn't think that'd be so hard" task this month has been delivery. Adam started implementing the ability for citizens to visibly deliver goods. Until now, goods just teleported from workplace to storehouse.

Now they visibly get delivered by people who have inventories.

It sounds obvious to deliver a box from one building to another, but what if a citizen is delivering a good with a full inventory but she wants to pick up a bottle of water at the same time because she's thirsty? What does a scavenger on the far side of the map do when the storehouse fills up? You can imagine the challenge of having 100s of robots/NPCs carrying goods around and having their own individual needs at the same. Needless to say, it led to deliveries going missing.

Atomic Society, is - I believe - one of the few city building games where workers deliver their own goods. There are no labourers or specialised delivery people. I find games where you have to rely on a third-party to deliver goods rather tedious and occasionally unrealistic.

So NPCs now deliver, NPCs now know how to queue properly, NPCs know what to do when they have an urgent needs a job to do, and basically the complex simulation of production and delivery now works.

This makes playing the game a lot more bearable!

Death & Ways of Dying

Believe it or not - no citizen in Atomic Society had ever died - until this month. Even the murderers we implemented last month merely tried to assassinate immortal targets. This month Nick added ragdoll deaths for murder victims. I was so happy about that because I love unscripted anything in games, and the fact all deaths in our game will now be physics-based and unique will lead to much amusement. You’ll never see 2 dead bodies in the same position. ​

Such a pity this wasn’t ready in time for Kickstarter but Mariana also created a cool prison-style shanking animation for the murderers and perfected a new system for creating animations that means we can churn them much more often in future. Right now we're focused on just making the citizen do the thing he needs to do, then we can add in an animation for it.


First Attempt at Balance

Have you ever tried to balance an unfinished game? Probably, if you've ever played a multiplayer game. It's a nightmare. But I had to try so I could just play the game. Under the surface Atomic Society is a game of numbers. How hungry someone gets, how often a murderer kills someone, how much water a water well makes, how long a citizen sleeps... All these things are working and I wanted to try and find a comfortable range for them all. That's a lot of numbers to hold in your head. To do this Nick created a calculator tool (which might be familiar to anybody who has used a DPS meter in an MMO) and I can now edit all these settings and immediate feedback. It’s  helping a lot and should make fine-tuning the difficulty in future much easier.

Remaining "Patch Notes":

* New music track by Dawid Dahl, inspired by the mountain setting (this might be my favourite song yet). If you want to see the kind of hardware he makes our music on, check this out.

* Many minor art improvements. Mariana has created brand new 2D icons for the build menu and citizen debuffs. She has also updated the character models. For example, male survivors now have broader shoulders and the tavern now has its own distillery. Metal now glints in the sunshine.

* We came up with an initial blueprint for the moral issues that will be in the game. Many months of study into the issues of society went into this, but we now have our chart of things to add.

* We now use a far better system for Screen Space Ambient Occlusion, which to non-graphics nerds, means you get detailed shadows on  things like faces and individual elements such as walls, etc.

* We were lucky enough to catch the almighty A* Navigation (as used in Prison Architect) on the Unity Store at a steep sale. The benefits of this will be massive, faster fps on lower-end systems, and citizens not wandering off into the desert because they feel like it (until we add that as a perk.)

* 50+ bug fixes. 


Coming Up in March:

These are some of the tasks lined up for us over the next month or two.

We have new outcomes. It should finally be possible to be execute those pesky murderers.

Coding is the sound of the police? We’ll be working on the law enforcement system.

We can start work on the decal system – citizens will start forming paths in the dust at last. This also lets us add in blood under corpses and add dirt to buildings over time.

New walking animation – much less floaty.

What the hell happens if our Kickstarter fails me? Don't ask me, I'm still in denial.
 
Final Thanks to Our Growing Community:

We are still a small family of people who know about Atomic Society, and Kickstarter hasn't yet changed that (despite 3700+ voting that they'd buy our game on Steam). Game development is a tricky and lonely road sometimes, and to everybody who has supported us in any way, be it just reading this far, thank you for being half the reason we carry on (the other half being the game itself!)

I'll see you for part 2 - The Kickstarter Wars. Smiley
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« Reply #13 on: July 19, 2016, 03:06:41 PM »

It's been a few months since I posted here (due to my forgetfulness), but you can read previous entries of my dev blog series here if you're curious about how it all came to this.

Here is July's entry!

July 18th, 2016: Biggest Hurdle Yet

Welcome!

June and July saw us get stuck in the humid, stinking summer bog named “saving and loading”.

​This was a task that we originally estimated would take 3-4 weeks to complete. We chuckled at the thought of it taking that long. After all, we'd being preparing for it since last Christmas...

Nobody’s laughing now.

At time of writing, we’re on about week 6 of getting saving and loading ready for our players. And we haven’t even started to test it in final build conditions!

Sadly, this makes for the longest gap between versions we’ve had since our pre-alpha launch back in April. The added pressure of being behind schedule when you’ve got sales to earn and players to keep happy is, well, pretty darn stressful.
 
But that’s not to say that it’s been unproductive month in total. Despite our lead programmer consumed with the huge task of saving and loading, a lot of good stuff has been poured into the game.



The Saving Situation
 
Sometimes I wish we could hire more people to make things go faster (assuming more people would actually help with that). This month we chatted (again) about recruiting a 2nd full-time programmer to help, but we just can’t afford it yet when our own potential livelihoods are on the line. It's a constant temptation though, especially when you see promising people on Reddit offering their services.
 
We became so overdue with our deadline this month that even I started learning how to code! Sometimes I get an inferiority complex that I can’t program, (despite the fact I work as designer, producer, marketing guy, environment artist, and tester). There still feels like an expectation out there that indie game designers should code. Desperate for more progress, I started an online course to learn how to code (this one if you’re interested). It's neat learning the basics of C# but I can tell straight away, coding is not something that I enjoy enough to get good at it. I have to force it whereas the rest of my duties come naturally and just flow. 
 
Anyway, as I struggled with that, Nick exhausted every waking hour on saving and loading. Piecing together his war stories as told over Skype, I think our problems started because we tried to make our own custom solution but I might be wrong. As mentioned in previous blogs, Unity doesn’t come with any built-in support for save games. That left 2 options: Buy a third-party solution or create our own. Both have risks. The Unity Asset Store sells a lot of overpriced crap at times. You really have to be confident you’re getting what you want, especially when money is tight. Then you have to hope whoever is making it will keep it updated. We weren’t convinced by any of the existing third-party save game solutions and felt they'd add as much work as they'd solve.

​So for better or worse, Nick started to make his own that we could use not only on Atomic Society but on any subsequent games.



We hit many unforeseen problems and struggled with so many elements: keeping the system flexible when we don’t know what needs to saved months down the line, learning the complex aspects of JSON and serialisation (without any access to paid tutorials) making it so saving your game just saves the gameplay elements and not all the Unity game engine elements that are entwined with everything. On top of all that, there's a huge amount of testing to do with each step. And we haven't even got started on the UI yet. So many unexpected snags.
 
The lesson we’ve learnt is - do your saving and loading system as soon as you can! Not 1.5 years into development when your game is a complex machine. The catch-22 of that is that a year ago (when we should’ve theoretically done this) we probably weren't experienced enough to do so!
 
It pains me though to tell our customers “nope, not this week” week after week but there's nothing I can do about it. We're working at full speed and there's always the problem of burnout. It stings seeing Nick (one of the hardest working person I know) disappointed because he can’t figure it all out as quickly as we’d like. He's taking an enforced rest at the moment to avoid tunnel-vision setting in.

I still feel we're on the home straight with the problem, but I'm passed the point where I can promise a release date. 0.0.4 will come when it comes, and hopefully there's still something out there who gives a damn when it does!



Stats Screen
 
One feature that we did get up and running this month is our new town stats screen. There’s a lot of stuff for players to keep track of in AS and we needed a single screen where they people can monitor how they’re doing. Adam did the math for this and worked out a system to track the most vital statistics. As you can see in the image below, you can now see things like how many people are homeless, starving, old, builders, etc. It's really useful as a player.

We also made it track crime statistics. The game will track the murder rate in your town for example, letting you know if the laws you’ve picked are having any big effect over the last 30 days. Personally, I’m always a bit wary of stats, I don’t want players staring at a boring old menu for the hours. It’s about finding a line between what we can show in the game world and what should go in a menu. This new stats screen is a definite step in the right direction.



Art Tweaks
 
Summer peaks and we were lucky to regain the full-time focus of our artist, Nani. Nani happens to be a teacher as her day job and that doesn’t leave a lot of time for (almost) unpaid game development. But it’s the school holidays now thank goodness so she started pouring in the artwork again.
 
0.0.4 will see numerous cosmetic tweaks: re-done buttons, clearer background textures, redone menus, certain ruins have gained more details, and some of the quirkier animations have been smoothed out. She also created some post-apocalyptic cattle for the livestock ranch building. Some guerrilla artwork went into this. Every building in Atomic Society has a fixed set of textures. We don’t have many to choose from to keep performance as high as possible. So if you look closely, you’ll see our cows actually have wooden skin. Something to go back and sort later on if anybody notices!
 
In addition to that, I experimented with depth of field, giving our bleak landscapes a sense that they’re much larger than they really are, and I modified many of the lighting and image effects in-game and on the frontend screens. I have to admit, some of our 3D models are on the simple side. They have to be in a game where you can build vast towns. But a 3D model looks only as bad as its lighting. By tinkering with SSAO and other effects I was able to add additional detail to the characters, essentially getting more detail out of nothing.

The quirk of this is that it's given the game a more stylised, comic book style look which I actually think looks quite cool. It's not overdone or cel-shaded or anything, but it makes up for what we lack in verisimilitude somewhat.



Canyon
 
Every new version we include has a new environment to play with.  0.0.4 brings the Canyons. Canyons is a unique map and I’ll be interested to hear how players get on with it. Basically, on most levels you have full freedom to fly across the landscape with the camera. But on this level you don’t. The canyon walls are so high that even the overview camera can’t get over them. You have to explore the canyon as if you were stuck inside it. I’m a fan of our desert-themed maps and its fun building a settlement at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. This latest map, our 5th so far, is ready to go in 0.0.4.

​Construction Improvements
 
We also expanded the construction system to give players more choices. In 0.0.4 you can now cancel constructions once placed, and to demolish buildings that are no longer wanted. This took a little effort as when you place a building in AS it actually deforms the scenery, and paints a texture onto the environment. Removing both at run-time took a little fuss. The added (sneaky) bonus to this is that now we can tell players to demolish a building if for some unfortunate reason it gets bugged!
 
On top of that we made a small gameplay tweak to how building materials get delivered. It used to be the case that builder citizens physically had to go to the storehouse, get what they need, and deliver it to the building site. The problem? They’re about as reliable as a real-world delivery person without a sat nav. Waiting for stuff isn’t cool so this is one of the rare cases where we favoured fun over realism and building materials now warp to where they’re needed. This removes a lot of the frustrating and downtime in making settlements and lets people get on with the fun stuff.



Linux

We had a few players who are Linux fans so this month we’ll be putting out an experimental Linux build of the game alongside the Windows build. We were fortunate enough one of our players volunteered to test it to see if it works at all and the results were positive so far. Linux will not be officially supported for a while, but it will give a performance kick to those brave enough to use this test build.
 
Bugs
 
The game grows each month, but the bug log grows too! There are currently 30 confirmed bugs in Atomic Society and who knows how many undiscovered ones. Some are serious, like employees refusing to work. Some are semi-serious, like hanging bodies dangling from their bellies rather than their necks.  As an "Early Access" game (sort of) it's hard finding the balance between what must be fixed and what we can leave lurking in the background for players. It's the weird modern way of development where you're constantly releasing buggy software.

At least our players have been helpful in reporting them over on our forum.
 
Video Nation
 
A very obscure Youtuber who I'd never heard of decided to make a rather crude video about our game. This was a bit surreal as it’s the first time it’s happened (though other streamers have mentioned us). The guy must’ve bought the game with his own money as we're definitely not sending out press copies. Needless to say, his video was a bit of a disaster (it barely got 32 views and isn't exactly fun to watch). The guy got confused immediately, through a mixture of ignoring warning messages and playing at a tiny resolution that cut off help messages. Yet despite all that... I loved watching it! As a designer I just want to watch people play the game. It's fascinating even when it goes wrong. 
 
Based on what I saw him do from afar, I was able to make immediate changes for 0.0.4 that should ease new players in. For example, the town leader now spawns with some starting resources, meaning there’s less busy work at the start of the game. Adam is now working on a more comprehensive tutorial system. And I also locked off unfinished levels in the game. Up to now, we let players play on even unfinished maps if they’re curious enough, albeit with a warning. That was fine, but most players probably ignore those warnings so I've had to disable them.

Hopefully when the next version is out with working save games I might try and contact a few streamers, just to get feedback if nothing else. I'm not sure it's a good idea? It is still very early days.



Wrapping It Up & Prediction Time

So that's it for this weird dev blog where we're stuck between versions.

Reading back, last month's’ predictions of what would happen this month turned out to be pretty spot on. We were able to include all the features I'd guessed at, even if we couldn't finish the dreaded saving and loading we still got most of it in.
 
Next month I predict we’ll start implementing more of the society judgements such as the prison system, (executing everybody is a tad insane), add more buildings that actually work, and start implementing UI adding in more sound effects.

And of course, most of all, I hope we actually finish saving and loading!

Game development never goes at the pace you want it to. It's either too manic or too slow. I know this as a player of other games where stuff changed too often, or too slowly.

I just have to hope that's the way it's got to be.
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« Reply #14 on: September 12, 2016, 06:04:11 AM »

Dev Blog 14: New Update Info, Design Thoughts, Combat + Save Game Tears.

Update the Game Already!
 
At the start of September we decided to upload a chunky new update of Atomic Society to our small but (slightly) growing band of pre-alpha players. I’d been resistant to putting out 0.0.4 for ages, wanting to get saving and loading in, but that's a whole other story (see below).

In the end I thought “what would I want if I was a player?” and uploaded the version we had. So 0.0.4 is now available to download. One day I might get the hang of finding the line between too much and too little content in an update!

Favourite New Bits in 0.0.4
 
There's quite a few things I'm happy about in 0.0.4 with hindsight. First up I'm pleased with the stats screen, which Adam coded. It basically shows you the problems are in your city. That lets you build around them. And solving problems by building stuff is the game so it's become indispensable. With its help I’ve been able to get settlements of 150+ people quite quickly with a clearer idea of what’s going on and who's dying of what.
 
Secondly, we made it faster to manually build stuff as the Town Leader character. And you can now correct your mistakes by demolishing stuff. It makes the game feel more active. More hands-on. Atomic Society isn't a game where you can sit back and relax, you really have to get involved if you want to prosper. It's quite unique for a city-builder I think. The relief is that there's no game over. Just a big mound of corpses and failed cities. But you can always recover.
 
Thirdly, the new tutorial. Seeing one hapless Youtuber try and play our game was enough to make this a priority. It’s now in the game. It's nothing too fancy but I don't like tutorials that restrict you. I enjoyed working out how to teach the player in the fewest words possible.


Fourthly, I think our graphics have reached a milestone. My experience in AAA testing taught me games get prettier in tiny degrees. One day you’ll hit a tipping point and the game will suddenly look “not bad”. I think we’re almost hitting that point. I'm constantly tweaking and finding a line between realism (which is hard to do on a budget) and having a unique style, as indie games tend to. AS doesn’t look like a prototype anymore.
 
Fifthly, it's cool how citizens now tell you what they’re doing. This another Adam Gwin task. As a player (and a tester), knowing what my citizens are doing is vital. Now you can find out just by clicking on them. A lot of them seem to be “performing trait” (which means they’re shanking each other).
 
Finally, we squashed a few persistent bugs and glitches that were irritating, such as citizens who refused to enter a storehouse and take out food they desperately needed. Oh, and for a few weeks the citizens were immortal, so we sorted that. Mariana also managed to make executed victims hang from their necks rather than then their bellies and I tweaked the animation to stop citizens seeming to slide on ice.

You can read the full patch notes for 0.0.4 here.

The Ultimate Hybrid
 
Mariana was until this month “just” the game’s model/UI artist and accountant. Now she’s also a part-time programmer. It’s rather awesome having a hybrid developer on the team!

​She spent the last month studying an online course about how to code C# that wasn’t actually crap (apparently they do exist - though bear in mind we purchased this at 75% off!). She’s now able to help us fix minor bugs with hopefully bigger things to come. It’s fantastic having a new hand on deck to solve small stuff. 10 minor bugs equal at least 2 serious bugs in terms of impact. Nick and Adam can't solve them because they’ve got more serious stuff to do. She can. 
 
Maybe, Almost, a Videogame?
 
This month I realised that Atomic Society feels like a game. It's playable. The gaps in the code that stopped it being game-like have almost been plugged. If saving and loading was in, I could (if I were mad) release it as an extremely basic city-builder. Of course we're a long way from that but the the core is there. We can start to think more about adding content rather than building systems. It's quite a relief as it's taken 18 months to get to this point but we're there at last.
 
Music Explosion
 
Dawid, Scandinavian music lord, must have snorted some Grade-A creativity this month because he decided to produce 4 new songs. He's produced so much great music lately in fact that I can now say our soundtrack is done, give or take maybe 1 track. There is so much music I was able to start actually removing songs that didn’t fit into the larger “sound” of AS. A little bit of pruning has really helped give the game a cohesive musical backdrop.
 
Dawid has also been a gentleman this month when it comes to dreaded contract re-negotiations. Dawid is the first contractor I’d ever had to hire and it’s taken a lot of learning. Signing contracts when the future of the game and the entire company is so uncertain is hard, but Dawid's been a pleasure to work with from day 1.


Design Musings
 
As the months roll by I think I have a better understanding of where ideas might go wrong in advance. And I’m getting better at turning ideas into systems. Game design appears to be the meeting point between lofty art and engineering.
 
Simplicity is still my guiding key when working on the game. Ideas can be complex but then must be converted into a system that has to be slick and streamlined. For example, I’ve been planning the Faction system, which is a feature we’ll implement later. The idea of citizens having different political leanings and reacting to your leadership in different ways is complex. But working out how to turn that into gameplay requires a robust yet simple system that one person can code in a relatively short amount of time.
 
My design approach is to work out precise flow-charts for the idea and then try and break that down until it's so simple and elegant (in my view) that I can offer it to Nick, our lead coder. Working so closely Nick has sped up my learning process so much.
 
I also have my boring day job to thank. Cleaning and repetitive maintenance turns out to be great for contemplating mental problems! If this game ever pays a wage, I wonder how I’ll cope without that enforced space to just daydream. I'd need a replacement.
 
Saving and Loading Still “Coming Soon”
 
I didn’t want to write about this again but so be it! The saga of implementing saving and loading consumed yet another month of heavy-duty problem solving and copying and pasting code by Nick. He even had to battle illness on top of that.
 
Touch a lot of wood, Nick has at last beat Unity into submission and he should be about to throw AS over its biggest hurdle to progress since we started. We have saving and loading working at our end. Now it’s a case of tying up the loose ends and sorting the last bugs. In theory, we could release it to the public but the last thing you want is a buggy saving and loading system.
 
All it takes is one citizen to reload in a slightly different position and the complex clockwork simulation that is Atomic Society can unravel, (and then crash). These bugs can be really hard to spot.
 
Personally, I’ve gone through the 5 stages of grieving when it comes to the deadline on this particular task. I’m now at acceptance.

​We Haz Newsletter
 
I felt bad for the people who check our forum every day for an update on 0.0.4 that I decided to reinstate our email newsletter. You can sign up for it halfway down our front page here and receive periodic emails when something big and newsworthy has occurred with the game. Quite a few people have done so already. I recommend anybody who is following the game at a distance, waiting for that “yeah I’ll buy that” moment to try it.


A Note on Combat
 
As our close followers might remember, I've been pretty against putting combat in the game. I want this to be a game about social stress. Not battle stress. However, this week I was playing the game as normal and had that feeling of vulnerability as a player; I’m building a town in a post-apocalyptic wilderness here. The borders of my town felt exposed. Who might be out there, watching us?
 
It did make me rethink my previous position, especially as almost weekly somebody out there asks for combat to be in the game (and mutants and zombies too, but I draw the line somewhere!).

​The truth of the matter is we need to focus and perfect the core experience of the game first. This will be a game about building a town full of weird and controversial social issues and will remain that. Only when we've achieved that goal could we add in some kind of external threat.

So combat (or at least building defences to keep them out) has now shifted from the “nope” pile of ideas to the “maybe” pile. It's kind of redundant, as we have so much to put in the game first, but I'm definitely more open-minded about it than I was.
 
Winter Comes
 
That’s about it for this month's blog and pretty much the end of our second summer working on Atomic Society. The nights are getting longer again here. It’s crazy how far we’ve come looking back at last summer’s dev blogs. How many more summers are left to the end?

From time to time I do regret inventing such a complex city-builder as our first ever game. It certainly goes against the grain of common sense. But I love Atomic Society and I can see it, month by month, becoming the game it should be. It’s like slowly excavating an artifact from the dust.

​Tomorrow is unknown and for all I know I’ll never get to make a second game so I’m glad the one I am making is what I care about the most.

As always, if you'd like to support the development of Atomic Society and try the pre-alpha out today, do so here.
 
See you in October.
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« Reply #15 on: September 12, 2016, 02:07:19 PM »

Nice! Smiley
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« Reply #16 on: October 24, 2016, 03:56:49 AM »

Dev Blog 15: Corpses, plague, death, going viral, and save games working...


​As I write this blog we’re finally on the home stretch of another update. 0.0.5 is the big one, the one that actually has saving and loading. At long it’s working! It's implemented and I’m so relieved to be able to write that.
 
Worryingly, full-time work on saving and loading has been happening since May. That’s a long time to keep optimistic and sane (it’s also a long time to have your single lead programmer tied up on a single task). I can only compare our process to building a house and then realizing you need to put in the piping and wiring after the walls are already up. And then realizing you have to work out how to make wires and pipes from scratch.
 
But it's done now. As we finish up 0.0.5 we still need to patch up the “walls” again but that's the easy part. To get it working we had to basically remove every single element of the game and now we’re putting it all back where it was. At least it doesn’t require reinventing it all.
 
Now we're almost at the end of this heavy task I’m so grateful we didn’t rush to Steam despite being Greenlit way back in February. We have the best of both worlds at the moment, we can take months to fix something, but the game is also open to the public to try if they want.
 
And here’s a look at what’s coming next in 0.0.5 alongside the finally-finished saving and loading, and a few tales that occurred along the way. If you just want the basic patch notes version, you can check that over here.


Plagues and Burning Bodies

One new addition coming soon in 0.0.5 is the plague system, which Adam implemented this month. It started when artist Nani crafted a new crematory building. Atomic Society is a brutal game in its unbalanced form and it’s not uncommon to see towns littered with corpses. Now you can hire workers at the crematory to clean up the bodies and burn them. (We went with a crematory over a graveyard as we’re trying to avoid anything that a medieval game would go for if possible, and because half the map would be a graveyard if every citizen had their own tombstone...)
 
With the crematory smoking away, we decided to go a bit further and put in a plague feature that makes disposing of corpses a gameplay necessity. Uncollected corpses now have a chance to infect nearby citizens, it’s not guaranteed, but it can happen. And the living have a chance to spread it about in an organic manner as they walk about. It was a little weird working out how a virus might behave in mechanical terms but I think we've got it. It surprises even me as I play. The plague in Atomic Society cannot be cured because the survivors don’t have the means, so you’ll have to contend with a potential epidemic if the virus chooses to go wild.

​Or it might not. Every infected person has a chance to live. The plague might fade away naturally, or it might lay waste to your population. The basic tip is; you don’t want corpses with green gas above them lying around in your town.
 
This new disease mechanic is also something we will revisit and use in different ways later on, such as using a modified virus as a punishment for poor sanitation, which is something coming as we delve into human waste (in the game, not real life). Right now the key thing is balancing this plague stuff so it doesn’t feel too harsh.


A Virus of a Different Kind
 
A few days after posting last month’s dev blog, I posted some screenshots of Atomic Society on imgur. Imgur is a site that is generally hostile to anybody using it for marketing purposes but one night I’d had a beer (or three) and thought what the hell, I’d try again as the game is looking better these days.
 
The next day I couldn’t believe my eyes. The little pics I’d posted had done that mythical weird thing of modern life and gone viral. In 24 hours they’d had almost 150k views and 6000 likes from random folks, putting our game right up there on the front page. For comparison that’s more traffic and likes than our Greenlight page received in 2 weeks.
 
This naturally a gave a boost to our pre-alpha sales, which is always handy as we try to finish this game out of our own savings. Thank goodness 0.0.4 had been put out just beforehand so people could appreciate the latest progress. It also brought a lot of new players to the forum, which is always cool to see.

The best part of it all is knowing that people out there from a wide range of backgrounds are excited about what we’re making. Reassurance is almost as good as money in the anxious world of indie dev.


People Power
 
There are 2 features coming in 0.0.5 that are a direct response to player suggestions.

​First up, it is now be possible to destroy goods from your storehouse with a simple click if you’re overstocked on a certain resource. This was something we’d overlooked until people started playing the game in ways we hadn't anticipated.

Secondly, we’ve changed the employment mechanism so now you don’t need to keep hiring workers if somebody dies, reducing the amount of tedious micromanagement. This is one area where I had to eat humble pie and realize player’s suggestions were better than what I had in mind.
 
Also in 0.0.5, we can now thank our special edition players (and ourselves) for their extra investment in the game's development as we have also stuck in a credits screen with everybody's name. Please send me your name if you’ve bought that version and want to see your name in glowing pixels as well!
 
I know some might say polishing things this early is a unnecessary, but it's been my experience the small things count when it comes to games. Improving a minor but very commonly used element over bringing in a big new feature adds an equal amount enjoyment, and it doesn't take long to do.
 
Some of the other quality of life improvements include making it possible to click on a corpse and see what killed it, tidying up the UI so it’s no longer as messy when a building is crowded, making it much more obvious where you can and can’t build and re-working the camera so it automatically adjusts speed based on altitude. It moves very fast high up in the air and slowly when you’re zoomed in on a citizen. This was something we had implemented a while ago and only recently realized was broken! There's a lot more coming that you'll probably only notice if you go back to an older version of the game and feel the difference.


Bugmageddon & Mod Preparation
 
While Nick was off making saving and loading a reality, the list of bugs in the game grew. Bugs come when you add new content, and Nick was focused on saving and loading so the pile was mounting up despite Nani and Adam tackling a few. (Though on the whole, I am pleased with the standard of our builds when they go out to the public compared to other Early Access games. It’s one advantage of having a semi-dedicated tester (aka me) on the team to break things.)

​What I didn’t realize was that Nick was secretly fixing almost every bug I found on his own isolated version of the game where he was completing saving and loading. He's been off in the coding wilderness for so long it's been a challenge keeping everybody on the same page. We had to improve our team communication with daily reports and switching to Slack to deal with this but it's so good to have him back with us properly .

The end result of this is there’s a lot of fixes coming in the next version. For example, our cops are now not so dumb, you can make your town a police state if you want to by building multiple town halls, and some of you may see big performance increases, at least on mid-range PCs as cranking up the game speed no longer impacts framerate at all.
 
And while Nick was off tearing apart and rebuilding the game, he was also able to revisit some of the underlying database work and make it much simpler to load in different sets of values, which should make modding the game possible in the future.
 
To be honest, I'm not a modder. I like my game they way it was first born and I'll stick with that, aside from patches. But mods, like combat, are among the most requested features from players and I’d be a fool to overlook them. Speaking of combat, since mentioning it in last month’s blog, I’ve planned a system for it that I think will please both warmongers and peaceniks (but we won’t start on it for a while yet).


Waterworld
 
It wouldn’t be a new version of Atomic Society without another map being added to the game. This month "Floodplains" was finished, a map set on a series of verdant causeways in a flooded woodland. The backstory is that nuclear detonations triggered an earthquake (which is something that can happen, I checked!) and submerged this area. It’s a challenging map where space is extremely limited and this adds strategy as you really won’t be able to build what you want wherever you want. Putting a building in the wrong spot can really damage your town’s productivity on this map. Because there was no way for the migrants who flock to your village to logically get there as it’s cut off by water, we had to add in in a new rusty trawler ruin to explain how they arrived.
 
Coming Soon

So there we go, nothing that major this month as it's been a case of finishing off things and there hasn't been any massive dramas, which is fine by me!

Coming up, I’d like to get 0.0.5 released in the next few weeks and then publicise it with new trailers/videos. What will Nick do when he doesn’t have to spend every waking hour working on saving and loading? What will we do when we’re not nagging him all the time to finish it?!

In reality, we’ll be too busy to celebrate. We've got to redo the UI to solve a lot of crummy bugs, put in sound effects, and add more social behaviours and punishments. That and possibly add toilets to the game.

Early Access draws nearer. I'm not sure if we'll reach it this year but it's possible. But all game deadlines without a big hammer looming are fictional so who knows.

​See you in November.

PS) As a reminder you can sign up for our newsletter on the front page of our site and get big news about Atomic Society delivered to you so you won’t miss anything important.
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« Reply #17 on: December 14, 2016, 01:28:31 PM »

I'm pleased to announce that pre-alpha version 0.0.5 is now available!


This is probably our biggest update so far and brings the vital saving and loading feature. Your towns will no longer be blasted back to dust whenever you quit.

If you haven't yet ventured into the pre-alpha of Atomic Society and would like to try it now, you can support development by buying an early copy here.

If you own it already and want a challenge, try to beat my high score for a town!

Work has already started on the next version. Now saving and loading is in we can really start to focus on content again, more laws and more citizen behaviours.

Hope you enjoy trying the game this Christmas.



Update 5 Patch Notes (Final):


* You can now save your game! You can even load it as well. Saving can take a while with big cities but it does work. We will reduce saving times for big towns in the future.

* You can now delete resources from your storehouse if for some reason it is full and stuffed with things you don't want. Look for the bomb icon on the storehouse menu.

* Big performance increases. We optimised the game in many ways and turning up the speed no longer impacts performance. In general the game should run better for people on mid-range PCs. We have seen increases of 20-30fps.

* A crematory building has been added. If you build it, it will collect and dispose of dead bodies. Make sure you build enough of them though because...
* Plague and virus mechanic added. There is now a randomised virus element to the game. Dead bodies now decompose if not collected and can spread the "plague" to other citizens. The plague is incurable so you better contain it.

* Floodplains map has been added. This is a challenging level due to its narrow causeways and not recommended for first time players.

* Employment is a lot simpler now. Auto-Employ is now a toggle. Turn it on and the building will hire replacement workers as it needs them.

* Improved UI throughout the game. Almost every element has been touched up in some way. There is also a new tab called "users" that shows who is using it in a more informative way.

* Credits have been added to the game. Alongside the names of the team, credits also show the Special Edition customers who have given us their name to date (part of their reward). If you bought a Special Edition version of the game and your name is not on the credits yet please let me know and it will be added in the next version.

* Made it easier to tell how someone died. You can now right click on a dead body and see their cause of death.

* Easier to tell where you can place a building. We have improved the visual for placing buildings to make it more obvious.

* Stronger law enforcement (if you want it). You can now build multiple town halls, letting you employ more law enforcers.

* Smoother camera controls. Camera control has been improved. The camera now moves at different speeds according to its height (faster high up, slower low down).

* Many, many balance tweaks. Building a big city will require re-learning what you know to a degree.

* Added a "contact us" button to the title screen. Click on that to see a list of ways to send us a message if you ever need to. * Also added a button to the saving and loading menu to make it easier to send us your save game if you do find a bug.

* Your town leader now starts with more resources to help you get started.

* Tutorial text updated somewhat. Added a new goal for expert players to the end of it.

* The costs for converting ruins as you deduct salvage from them have been re-worked to be logical and consistent. The most an empty ruin can cost now is 4 of each resource.

* Fixed: Buildings that were hard to click on.

* Fixed: Town leader now loading with the clothing choices you selected for your town leader.

* Fixed: Certain ruins were called "Ruined ruined".

* Fixed: Hanged victims now dangle from their necks.

* Fixed: Law enforcers now behave a lot more consistently.

* Fixed: Scaffolding now appears at the correct speed.

* Fixed: Issues where engineers were not using the correct entrance for buildings.

* Fixed: You can now destroy storehouses.

* And many more bug fixes than can be listed here

---------------------------

I should have a new dev blog and some video footage of the game to share soon.

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« Reply #18 on: December 19, 2016, 01:53:44 PM »

Now Update 5 is done, we did our best to put out a new trailer for the pre-alpha. You can view it here!

It should tell you more about the game than I can...



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« Reply #19 on: December 22, 2016, 12:53:27 PM »

Dev Blog 16: Update 5 Out, New Trailer, Features to Come, 2016 in Review...


Breaking News!

As I was preparing this wintery blog for final release, our friends at Valve approved our store page for Atomic Society (in 30 minutes, which bodes well).  The game isn't available on Steam yet, don't get too excited, but you can now add it to your wishlist and share it more easily: track Atomic Society on Steam here.

Now, on with the scheduled blog... Oh wait a sec, we made a new trailer to celebrate the latest progress in the pre-alpha, did you see it? Here it is:  




Now, definitely on with the blog...

Update 5 Released At Last!

After 8 month’s hard labour, Atomic Society has a proper (though slightly slow if your city is huge) saving and loading system. No longer does quitting the game bring annihilation back to your post-apocalyptic town. Getting this important feature in the game and bug free has been a great Christmas present to us. Now we can stop stressing for a bit and give our customers something to tinker with during the holidays.
 
If you missed it, Atomic Society Update 5 is available to download for existing players or here to buy. Saving and loading is just one new element. I covered the big new features in the last blog, but you can read the full and final patch notes here if you missed them.


Now that update is done, I can write this dev blog, which I know is a month late. Getting a new version out is exhausting and involves a lot of overtime. There were days when a dozen bugs would be reported and all fixed in the same day, then the version would be checked all over again... Then I'd go to my day job and fall asleep on my feet! Perhaps we over-test for pre-alpha, I don't know. But I do like it when our "report a bug" forum is quiet.

Not that I'm complaining about the work. I love making this game and that loves grows each month. Update 5 has been the biggest hurdle for the team, our biggest challenge. But we overcame it and I feel we've levelled up several times making it, as a team. The whole year has taught us so many lessons. And AS remains one of the best things I've ever done.

There was so much to rebuild after saving and loading was finished. Practically nothing worked when Nick had stripped out the game, by necessity, to put that feature in. But seeing that nothing worked except saving and loading inspired us. And rebuilding the game from scratch (which mostly fell on Nick's shoulders despite our complaints), led us to revisit and improve dusty and forgotten elements of the code and game design.


As a random example, we recently redid how ruins get more expensive to convert into housing when you take salvage out of them. It's supposed to be a risk vs reward thing. It was one of the earliest systems we’d put into the game way back in 2015. Problem was, It just didn’t make much sense! The design of it was illogical and code behind it was in the "don't remember why we did it this way" box. So we redid it because we noticed it, and now ruins get expensive much more logically.

​A lot of things got revisited like that: the cost of buildings, the number of employees required, the size of houses, the speed of construction. It’s all been tweaked in Update 5. Maybe it's good to revisit everything once a year, though I doubt we'd do it voluntarily.
 
The most reassuring sign is for me, I can't play the old version anymore. It feels so sluggish, almost a crime it was ever on sale! Nick’s performance tweaks in Update 5, combined with Nani’s UI improvements, are really starting to pan out. And I know I'll think the same when Update 6 is out in the new year.

Best of all is the feeling of saving my game at the end of the day and reloading it the next morning. Makes us feel like we've made a real videogame, not a pie in the sky fantasy, as it sometimes does feel when you're making things up as you go along.


Back to Work
 
Time doesn’t stand still in the world of indie dev, where you only earn what you release, so we’re working on Update 6 already (though we'll take a week off for Christmas... maybe). The list of features to put into the game next has been drawn up, and I suspect it's going to be a gameplay-heavy patch after a few systems-focused updates.

However, there is still a little behind the scenes stuff that needs doing,. That's unsurprising, given that Nick has been tied up with saving and loading for months. A few ugly monsters in the basement of Atomic Society need to be cleansed. First up, is our UI. Not the way it looks (though that always gets improved) but how we set it up in the game engine. We have a lot of UI bugs based on the inflexible way the UI was setup during the Jurassic period of Atomic Society development. It’s time to revisit it. The good news for players is that this will fix a ton of bugs.
 
Secondly, and I can’t quite believe we’ve got away with it for so long, but Atomic Society has no sound effects. Just ambient wind noises and music. One of the perks of making a city building game where the camera is always in the clouds! Good sound effects can add so much to gameplay though, even if players don't notice them, and I think ours will when they come in Update 6. When I play other city building games, it’s not the gameplay that impresses me but the sound effects!


Gameplay-wise there’s a lot to do for Update 6, it’s more of a question of where to get started...

Looking at my list as producer/designer, the big things that stand out to me include a new trait for citizens. We're overdue for one. Racism should be next. Soon we can say that Atomic Society is a racist game... I guess (if players let it be). We might have to dabble with new animations for this one (fighting) which could open a can of worms as we're animation-lite so far.

​We definitely need to expand our list of legal solutions. Right now only execution is working, which is a little severe if that's the only outcome for every single crime. I think adding in the prison system will be next to join the game, so look out for that.

Work has already started on (believe it or not this is a player requested feature), toilets. I didn't want to do them but since we added in a plague system I've had new ideas. I think we can do something fun with it. We're concepting a latrine building right now. Can't wait to assign the "code dysentery" task to someone.

We also have 3 cosmetic buildings to add in, things just to make your town more unique. Nani made the models for these a long time ago. They may have some gameplay function if we have time to do it, such as reducing the negative effect of polluting buildings, etc. I'm not sure yet.

Aside from that there at least 5 big gameplay tweaks that I really want to put in, things like making salvaging more fun, which would be relatively easy to do. Things that the player has to do frequently need the most loving.

Stay tuned for next month's dev blog where we will have started on these things, and I can then tell you how much communal hair we're losing trying to get them in the game. But on the whole, stupidly or not, I think 2017 is going to be a more fun and more productive year for us. We've learnt a lot. And even if it is a harder year in terms of tasks, we're hardier folk.


A Look Back at 2016...
 
As this is our last dev blog of the year that was 2016, I’ll take this moment to review the last 12 months and then I'll gaze into the vortex of yummy that is the future.
 
2016 really started for us back in February, when we bright, semi-young developers decided to plead for money from strangers on the internet based on optimistic promises. It didn't work out of course. It was an insane time, a period I’d never like to revisit.

​Our plan B to sell actual copies of a game for money now seems much saner and honest, though KS is fine if your game hits finds its fans immediately.

I still think our biggest mistake was asking for £69k, an insane amount of money considering we had a crude prototype and no credentials. People saw our goal was never going to happen so we missed the chance to bask in that Silicon Valley glow of  self-satisfaction. We’d have been lucky to get 10% of that.
 
Yet - and this isn't sour grapes - I’m really glad it failed. Because, in all honesty, I don’t think we were wise enough at the time to handle £100k. We would’ve wasted big chunks of it on things we don’t yet need . Lack of money has taught us what we can really do. I feel like one failed Kickstarter was the line where we became hardened game devs, to a degree.
 
In April, as mentioned, we  put the game up for sale on our website (working out how to do that was... fun). Good old version 0.0.1. And to our relief, people bought the game. Not many, but who would at this stage? Those 250+ people were enough for us to earn something, enough to keep going.


In September we had our viral day, aka the remedy for the insecurity caused by a failed Kickstarter! We ended up on the front page of a website where game stuff tends to die (Imgur) with over 140k unique impressions in 24 hours and 4500+ up votes. We sold more copies of the game on 1 day than the whole of 2016 combined. Now, whenever I'm in doubt about whether my idea sucks, I think back to that time.

In September, Adam, our all American freelance coder completed his first year working with us. We get on so well with Adam and he’s a core part of the team now even though he doesn’t have oceans of time, we couldn’t do it without him. Adam might be the nicest man ever made. Dawid Dahl, Swedish composer ubermeister, also finished the soundtrack this year, so sadly I've more or less stopped working with him. I miss that.
 
As a whole, that whole saving and loading business looms over this year. My heart goes out to all devs trying to work on that. It was a task we were all convinced would take 2 months. It took 8. The stress and pressure of it, the deadline that went back and back... Nick's isolation from the team as he figured it all out single-handily.... The meetings where he reported one approach after the next hadn't worked... There were times I was “We’ve bitten off more than we can chew,” and “People are going to desert us over this,” and “We need more coders!”

But we're still here and our game is still awesome. So that's all that matters. ​


2017…
 
2017 is possibly the make or break year for us, as we will, sooner or later, have to go onto Steam Early Access. And then we find out if we're going to earn enough to live off this game.

Getting the game on Steam, working out how to promote it, dealing with an influx of new customers (hopefully!) will be big challenges. Bigger than Kickstarter ever was. We’ll start showing the game off to Youtubers, for better or worse, and we’ll have our work cut out adding more gameplay elements under the lens of a public who are perhaps less sympathetic.
 
But I know we can handle it. My biggest fear making this game was never that Atomic Society would be bad (I think I can fix that if it happens), but rather - will we finish it? Our greatest weakspot has always been a tiny team sticking together despite hard deadlines and lack of pay. But we’re all still here, learning and growing, and as focused and determined as ever to see this project through to the end. Even though we had no idea what we were getting into.

That more than anything is what I hope continues throughout 2017. I'll see you there, in the next dev blog.
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