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[ScottFarRoad.]

Dev Blog 17: 2017 Begins, Latest New Content, 2 Years in the Making Review!

Welcome to the 17th monthly dev blog for Atomic Society. Another year done, another begins. 2017 should be one of the most hectic but rewarding years for us yet as Atomic Society gets ready for Early Access in the summer. But there's a lot to do first.  

Aftermath of Version 0.0.5
 
Before Christmas we released the 5th chunky update for the pre-alpha version of Atomic Society, the one that finally brought saving and loading and various other stuff that I've talked about in previous blogs. After it was out I decided to bite the bullet and do a marketing splurge to announce it, which is always a fight against shyness. Showing off that trailer wherever I could think to post it without seeming rude. I’m not sure how I managed to do it all in hindsight as we were all so busy. But, like it or hate it, the marketing paid off (pun intended), enough cover a few small bills at least.

On the downside, we exhausted ourselves getting the version out and even a 2 week Christmas break wasn’t quite enough to recover fully. But a slow and steady January helped and progress is smooth and steady again.

Something positive gets added to the game every single day, big or small, and that's good enough.

2 Years in the Making
 
Looking back, it's still astonishing to me that it's 2 years since we started work on Atomic Society, even longer since the planning stages began. I’m not sure where all the months went. So much happened, from learning how to use Unity, to forming a company, to recruiting, to putting the pre-alpha on sale and updating it. And that's just half the lessons learnt! One step at a time.

Taking time estimates for anything in game dev and doubling them still proves to be a good rule. I thought we'd have the game in its present state after a year of development. Not that we’re slacking, I just was clueless about how time-consuming it all is. Would I have made a simpler game now, looking back? Probably not. If you're going to spend years of your life making a game, for practically no pay, with no idea of whether it will succeed, make something you love! AS deserves to be finished.

...But game 2 might be a tic-tac-toe simulator.

Work on Version 0.0.6 Has Begun
 
There’s a lot planned for Pre-Alpha Version 0.0.6, over 20 features of various shapes and sizes. Perhaps too much! I won’t share all of it here, as I don’t want to disappoint if features get delayed. Everything mentioned below has already been added. All in all, I'd say we're about 1/3 of the way done with the new version.
 
Latrines and Diarrhoea
 
Back in December, we designed and coded a neat little virus system with different infection rates, and origin points. This month we've expanded and altered it so we can have multiple, different diseases on the go. Atomic Society now features another killer -  poor sanitation.
 
We've implemented a new building to cope with it though, latrines, (which Nani made and Adam coded) are now buildable. Each latrine provides “sanitation coverage” . The bigger the population, the more toilets you need. You'll have to use your imagination for what happens inside. We considered making citizens physically visit the loo but it just slowed the game down too much. For now, you just need to build them, if you don’t have enough, there is a chance citizens will get stomach bugs and diarrhoea, one of the biggest killers in the third-world. On top of corpse-related diseases it's a big problem.
 
Gameplay wise I'm happy with this new structure, even though it wasn't in the plan (players wanted it). The way we've done it makes it a new challenge, and the way it scales with the population size keeps it interesting.

New Cosmetic Buildings
 
We've also put in (or rather returned them after they bugged out) 3 new “cosmetic” buildings for players to make. They’re "cosmetic" in the sense that they don’t affect gameplay (although there are ideas on the table). At the moment they're just for players who want to make their own settlement more unique/more atmospheric.
 
Currently we've added a post-apocalyptic statue, public artwork, and a burning torch that casts a little light on gloomy maps. We’ll add in more of these over time as they’re relatively easy to make so if you’ve got any wishes for props let me know!
 
With the new latrine, that brings the total number of unique, buildable structures into the pre-alpha version up to 22 and there might be more coming soon.

Difficulty Settings
 
Nick’s total reconstruction of the game last year paved the way for difficulty settings this month. In Update 6 you’ll be able to start picking how challenging you want the game to be. Some people want a real survival experience where hundreds of lives can be lost if you run out of food. Others want a more chilled building experience where messing up isn’t so fatal. At the moment our 3 difficulty settings affect how much loot you start with, and how weak your survivors and new migrants are. We'll add more flexibility as the game gets settled.
 
New Map
 
It's not a new version without a new map. Update 6 brings the second snowy map to the game, "Iceberg". It’s a circular map with 2 levels so you’ll end up building ring shaped cities if you last long enough. The plot it is that the mainland was just too violent and/or radioactive so survivors commandeered a ship to the ruins of an island fishing village. Desperate migrants presumably follow in boats. I’m getting happy with the look of this map, though getting snow to look like snow is tricky!

New UI
 
This huge task is taking up most of Nick’s time so far in 0.0.6. We've had to remake it from scratch. The look of it was fine, but it was the system behind it that sucked. The old way was essentially to make a custom menu item for everything, which was time consuming, and if you wanted to change the way a button looked, you’d have to go and replace it on every single UI element. It wasn't flexible, slick, and it caused a lot of glitches.
 
Nick's big rebuild means Update 6 will have a snappier, faster and hopefully bug-free UI. E.g. clicking on things and nothing happening, stuff like that, will be gone. There are also some cool animations you’ll see. It's just generally better to use.
 
Fingers crossed this is the last big “make it all over from scratch” thing we’ll have to do after the huge rebuild required for saving and loading. There are elements of the game that need a lot of TLC but nothing that needs to be smashed up and started again. I think.

Other Tweaks for Update 6 So Far...

These changes were mostly based on a lot of playtesting and were easy enough to do:

* We've made the storehouse tell you when it’s full of junk.

* You can now build your structures 33.3% closer to each other than before, down to a couple of meters apart. Some people complained that our towns looked too spread out when they saw the trailer. That shouldn't be a problem anymore.

* We've changed how shelters work. It used to be the case that citizens stuck to the first house they were assigned to. This was fine, until the citizen had a job on the far side of town and then had to hike all the way back just to sleep. We’ve found a solution for that which removes the tedium so you should find the game flows a bit better.

* Clouds are back (again!). We at last had breathing space to upgrade our game engine to the latest version and it fixed the glitch with our moving cloud system so you’ll now have a more atmosphere in your towns. The engine upgrade may also boost performance for certain players.
 
And of course there are plenty of bug fixes, nothing too exciting, you can find out about them in the patch notes when they arrive.

​The next 2 imminent things on the list are making citizens age up properly, evolving from kids to adults, and finishing off the execution solution so that the society-wide problems it creates are working.  

There's more to come after that but I better shut up for now!
 
Next Month
 
As I said, we're about 1/3 of the way through the next pre-alpha version, so maybe 1-2 more dev blogs before it’s out? When our pre-alpha version is really good, we'll come over to Steam.

​In next month’s blog things will have progressed enough I can share more info on what's in store. There are much bigger features planned for this version but it all depends on how the UI rebuild goes.

The more things change the more they stay the same. Here's to another year of hard work and successful updates!

[ScottFarRoad.]

Dev Blog 18: Prison System, Innocent Folks Executed, Culture Snobs & More!

Prison Sentence Solution

Been a busy month (and a bit)!

We’ve recently added in the second and third ethical solution to the game. Players now have a choice how to deal with citizens who behave in unacceptable ways (whatever "unacceptable" means to you). You can now execute people, lock them up for a long time (simulates life imprisonment), or lock them up for a short time (simulating a light sentence).
 
I like how uneasy this decision making process feels, how it takes city building to a weird place. One of the primary emotions I want to evoke in this game is unease and black humour.

If you imprison citizens (aside from how that makes you feel as a leader), the main upside is you get your useful citizen back when the sentence is over, and you create jobs (in the form of wardens). The downside is that the building takes up a lot of real-estate, and prisoners need food and water. Build prisons without the means to keep the inmates alive and you’ll have people starving to death in their cells. And if you run out of workers, we made it so the prisoners escape.

Being civilised has its drawbacks...
 
One of the harder challenges of designing Atomic Society is working out how to turn real-life aspects of society into gameplay. For example, we used to have an exile solution in the game, you’d kick the person out of your town. But in terms of gameplay, it was identical to execution – all that happens in reality is you lose a citizen. It's tough coming up with possibilities that are exciting and unique from a gameplay perspective. At the moment a short prison sentence vs a long sentence is merely a matter of taste and time, but we'll make the choice much more meaningful.
 
It’s also hard making sure the player even notices the new content! For example I’ve been designing racism (...typing that feels odd). That involves citizens arguing with each other. But how is the player going to know that it's a racist debate going on and they’re not just chatting about the weather? Challenges like that often crop up. We could code the entire DNA structure of a citizen if we really wanted, but it doesn't matter one jot if a player won't notice it. Gotta keep it simple. One thing that will definitely help with this is putting in text box that reports everything that’s going on. It's on the table for Update 7.

Execution Solution Expanded
 
On a related note, we expanded the death penalty solution this month. Every solution will now have a practical and social downside. After all, no justice system is perfect. Designing these downsides inevitably gets political as we can't code everything in the world and have to make value judgements. For the death penalty I decided that the risk of innocent people being executed for crimes they didn’t commit was the key criticism. Not the only one, but the one that could have the most emotional punch with players.
 
So we modelled that in Update 6. Now if you build a gallows, there is a chance that an innocent citizen will be arrested and hung. The game gives you a nice guilt-inducing message when this occurs but I’d like to add more to that, such as it telling you if they had a kids, etc. Relationships and breeding are on the cards for the next update so we can revisit it then as it’s about time these citizens started humping.

​Culture Critics
 
I wasn’t really happy that the player could just get away with building one type of morale boosting structure so this month we added in a new Culture Critic effect to the game. Basically, citizens now have different ideas on how to party, some prefer the tavern, others the chapel, etc, and if you don’t build an even amount you’re going to get unhappy patrons. It does seem a little amusing that survivors of a nuclear war give a damn about where they relax, but it does make more sense as your city grows and you have less life 'n' death problems to handle and can work on more leisurely hassles.

New UI Progress
 
The New UI is almost finished now. This was a long, arduous task but it’s paid off as we’re now. Here’s a few examples of what’s changed:
 
New storehouse and resource icons:

New object highlighting effect and improved options screen:

New justice solutions picking menu:

Ageing
 
Citizens are no longer vampires. They now age at a rate that feels realistic considering this is a world where a day lasts 30 seconds. When they get to a certain age they have an increasing chance to die. This is a bit severe at the moment, it means no one lives to be 90, but perhaps that’s realistic after a nuclear war. It definitely makes the game harder though, as you no longer have 300 year old grandmas around to help out. In fact Update 6 is a lot harder with the new faecal-based diseases so I’m having to do some last minute re-balancing to smooth that out before we release.
 
Salvage Improved
 
We adjusted how your playable town leader salvages as well this month. He or she now enters the ruin and stays in it until their bags are full, instead of you having to click to keep entering. This makes it less of a hassle, but it’s also a lot more passive. I’m not sure if I like it but it’s definitely less annoying. This is a system that needs to be re-visited at some point down the line. I've never been happy with it but I know it could be good.
​
New Patch Notes

If you missed it here are the full patch notes for the new version covering everything that's coming. When we're on Steam, where it's much easier to update the game, I'd like to put out smaller updates a bit more regularly than we currently doing. At least that's the plan.

New Song
 
To celebrate his “baby” being fixed, Dawid sent us a new bonus song for the soundtrack this month. By baby I mean his vintage 1980’s synthesiser that is apparently extremely rare and difficult to repair these days. It took him ages to just find someone with the knowledge, and these babies aren't cheap. This is the same type of synth Vangelis used on the Blade Runner soundtrack. Dawid was heartbroken when it fried but it’s back together now and the fruits of it can be heard on a new track called Nuclear Nights and will be added to Update 6 and of course the special edition soundtrack.  

Coming Soon
 
A few weeks have passed since I first wrote this dev blog and Update 6 is now available (see post below). As for Update 7, we all have big plans. It's fun now we’re getting more into the juicy gameplay side of Atomic Society. We'll see what we can squeeze in.

[ScottFarRoad.]

Following on from the latest dev blog above we're crawled exhausted over the line and just released a new update for the game (pre-alpha available here). There's a lot in it.

Here's some of the big new features...

Prison System

Joining the existing execution solution, players now have a choice about how to handle crimes. Will you them or lock them up? How long will you lock them up for? Each choice impacts the success of your town in a different way.

Execution System Expanded

The execution ethical solution has been made more complex. Picking it now reduces the rates that all crimes occur, but also allows innocent citizens, who never hurt a fly, to be wrongfully accused and executed from time to time. It should add a bit more food for thought…

New Map

A new environment has been added to the game. You can now try and build a settlement upon a frozen hunk of ice in the middle of the ocean if you want a more remote setting.

Difficulty Settings

3 difficulty modes have been implemented, catering to those who just want to chill and see their population climb, and those who want a real survival challenge. Hard mode on a hard map gives me nightmares.

Culture Critic Effect

The morale building system has been remixed. Citizens now have personal preferences. No longer will everybody will enjoy going to taverns or chapels or theatres for example. Keep your morale buildings mixed or you’ll have unhappy citizens.

Cosmetic Buildings

3 cosmetic buildings have been added (with more to come in the future), including flaming torches and scrap metal statues. This version also lets you build much compact towns meaning you can now fill any spare spot in your settlement with these structures to add atmosphere.

Latrines and Sanitation System

Citizens now need a place to relieve themselves and a new building has been added to cater to their natural needs. Faecal based diseases will now come to strike down your people unless you keep on top of the latrine situation.

Completely Re-Designed and Improved UI

The entire UI has been rebuilt from top to the bottom. It is now faster, slicker and a lot more reliable. The amount of changes made to the UI would need an essay to cover, but existing players of the game should notice a lot of "quality of life" improvements.

Many Bug Fixes

No update is complete without a ton of bug fixes. We test, refine and polish every single update to the death and we’re quietly confident Update 6 will resolve a lot of issues players were having.

Full patch notes can be found here.

[ScottFarRoad.]

It's only been a short time since we released the latest big update to Atomic Society, so this month's blog will focus on behind-the-scenes stuff. Next month we can start to show off the new content. However, there's still plenty to talk about...
 
Update 6 Launched

The 6th big update to our fledgling pre-alpha version is now available if you missed it. Existing customers will need to re-download the game. The latest patch notes are here. I hope everyone enjoys testing it as we keep shooting for that Early Access release in the 4th quarter of the year.
 
Discord Server Now Available
​
If you fancy a relaxed and friendly place to hang out with the devs and any other people interested in Atomic Society, there is now a Discord server (aka a glorified chat room) for the game here. Feel free to pop by and say hello. We'll see if it gets used or not.

One Year of Being on Sale
​
April 20th marked 1 year since we started selling our pre-alpha to the public. It's been a hell of a year.
 
We hadn't intended to go public with the game until about now, but coming off a failed Kickstarter in early 2016 we were left with 3 choices: try Kickstarter again, give up development, or sell what we had and hope it would keep the lights on. Believing it was better to live by what we were able to produce than rely on Kickstarter hype, we of course put the game up for sale way earlier than intended.

That marked the moment Atomic Society moved from being a dream to a reality, where money was on the line and people could actually judge what we were doing.

Out of all the decisions we’ve made, selling early still ranks as one of the best. Player feedback has produced good ideas and helped us focus on problem areas with no downsides (aside from the time it takes to replying to messages). And of course the tiny bit of money AS brings in each month covers basic expenses, like replacement PC parts and bills that would otherwise put us in personal debt - or kill the project entirely.
 
A lot has been added to the game in the past year, more than I could list here. Big things like 3 new maps, execution and prison systems, improvements to citizen behaviour, new buildings and ruins, many more new UI elements, tweaks and gameplay improvements, more music, and most gruelling of all – the damn saving and loading system.

Saving and loading is the crucible for a lot of indie games in this genre I think. If a team can manage that, they’re probably going to make it.

Last Minute Stress
​
The last tweak for Update 6 was actually added to the game a few minutes before it was uploaded. Not being on Steam yet with its superior systems, it isn't simple for us to just release a hotfix or micro-patch. Any update we release has to be the final. And being a perfectionist, I was tweaking the lighting on our new Iceberg map right up to limit. It's tense as games are essentially a house of cards, a single change can knock everything over.
 
After I'd successfully uploaded the new pre-alpha version, I was about to announce it when I realised we had a problem. One of the big new features in Update 6 wasn't triggering. I'd totally missed it. Innocent citizens were supposed to be killed for crimes they haven’t committed if you choose execution but it wasn't happening. The police force in our game is one of the most complex, and fragile systems in the game and this flaw had gone unseen.

The new version was already online at this moment. Thank God the programmers were still conscious and online (working long-distance that's not something you take for granted). However, Nick and Adam were able to fix the bug at once and then I had about 90 minutes to test it and balance it. Mariana was stuck in front of the computer, recording on a notepad how often the effect occurred. She crunched the numbers. I trusted my feelings, uploaded the now-fixed version again and collapsed in a heap.

Coming at the end of an exhausting final sprint to get the version ready, this wasn't easy on the emotions. The game is getting big now, and there's so much to check.

Testing Vs Making
​
To be fair, despite the pressure and exhaustion of the testing period, it does pay off. To date we have never needed to release a fix for a released version. When it's out, it's out and we can start working on new stuff. There are lots of moderate bugs in the game of course, we have a huge list, but nothing game-breaking for the vast majority of players. This could change though as more and more people try the game out and we face more and more obscure hardware configurations. We'll see.
 
Bug-fixing is essential. I used to be a tester at Rare, so it's drilled into my brain, but bugs damage a game's reputation more than anything else (over-promising in marketing aside). There’s nothing more frustrating than seeing a player unable to enjoy the game - not because the gameplay is bad - but because a stupid issue got in the way.

The Youtubers Are Coming...
 
We receive quite a few emails a month from Youtubers who want free codes for the game. That's fine, but I have to keep telling them all we're not marketing the game yet in a big way (I'll save the limelight for Steam). Sometimes that doesn't put them off though. So this month, 2 little Youtubers decided to make videos of the game. They bought the game out of their own pocket so I can’t control what happens after that!

Video series by

and...

.

I feel like a patient expecting bad news from his doctor when I watch strangers play our game. Are they going to understand it? Will it bug out? What unexpected thing will they try to do that I would never think of? But both the Youtubers seem to ultimately come away with positive things to say.  

Early User Reviews

As the game slowly spreads to new players, I've been collecting positive comments that people post about the game in various places. They're a great motivator and I find it absolutely amazing some people enjoy playing a game we made. Making videogames is still magic to me, so that we're creating a thing people can enjoy is freaky. You can read the latest ones here.

Making and Selling an Indie Game With Anxiety
 
This might seem like a weird topic to talk about here, but it does affect the making of Atomic Society on a daily basis, so I thought I'd bring it up. Like plenty of others out there, I personally suffer from social anxiety. I'm speaking broadly here, but social interactions, online or otherwise - even with good friends - can cause me to literally pass out with panic. It's rarely ever that bad, but it's often unpleasant. My whole body feels as if something terrible is coming to kill it.

Like most long-term mental illnesses, you learn how to cope with it. Get good at it, and people will even think you are relaxed, when on the inside you're terrified. Making an indie startup has been a huge challenge with this condition. I had to find strangers to work with, work out contracts and make tough business decisions, have daily discussions, including giving negative feedback and disagreeing. I have to reach out and do "networking". I have to be constantly talking to customers on social media.

All of that scares the crap out of me, to point sometimes I just can't function. But I also gladly volunteer to do a lot of the social stuff because as game designer, I understand the vision of what we're doing better than anybody, and I have occasional quiet periods where there's little to do - unlike a programmer who is always overburdened with tasks.

Social anxiety does hold us back. There have been opportunities that I have turned down because I can't face talking to strangers and I market the game sparingly for fear of "bothering people". I also assume everything I write or do is going to be mocked.

Yet here we are, still making and promoting the game. We soldier on. Anxiety slows us down but it can't stop us. And though it might cause us to miss out on opportunities, it can't control if we make a good or bad game. And that's ultimately all that matters. Anxiety might win a few battles, but it can't win the war.

Forum News & Stories

Our website forum was busy this month. A few chatty folks bought the game evidently. There should be plenty of new threads and feedback if you haven’t checked it out for a while, so take a peek if you're curious. In a strange coincidence two recent users happened to be writers and posted their post-apocalyptic fiction. It was quite surreal.

We also had a bit of random publicity because of the new update, which is always pleasant, with a small sites covering it and IndieDB tweeting about us, making us at the time the 2nd most popular game on their entire site! It's always surprising when stuff like that happens.
​
In Conclusion...

We're hard at work on Update 7 and the first few elements of it have been added, but there's a long way to go. We'll share the first fruits next month. If it all works out, Update 7 (or 8 at worst) could, in theory, be the final one before Early Access. But we'll see how stupidly misguided I was in saying that later in the year.

See you next month!

[ScottFarRoad.]

It’s been a fun and exciting month! Here's a look at some of the things we've been adding to the game lately, plus some behind-the-scenes stuff, as work on the next pre-alpha update for the game on the slow road to Steam.

Slavery
 
In the next version of the game you won’t just have Murderers to worry about, you’ll also have Slavers prowling your town. Adam just finished coding it. Some survivors are happy to threaten others in your town to do their bidding. These Slavers capture the unemployed and build up a little posse behind them.
 
It’s funny when you see a nine year old with five adult slaves trailing behind her. It’s less amusing when you see an adult with multiple child slaves...

​Slavers get their needs boosted due to having slaves helping them. Bad news for their Slaves though: they’ll die young and their own kids (when we implement breeding) are likely to become slaves as well. However, slavery also stops people being unemployed and in Update 7 unemployed people have an increased chance to commit their own social issues, so by enslaving them you’re “policing” your town.

You decide who to keep happy.
 
The bit I like most about this is that it brings a big decision-making aspect to the game, which I've wanted. Now you can't resolve all social issues at once. You’ll have to choose what matters most to you and then wait until you have enough "authority" to implement another solution. The more issues we add, the more you’ll have to plan ahead.

​We have more issues we want to add to the next update. Stay tuned.

Encouraging Crime
 
Update 7 will introduce another ethical solution yet to the game – encouraging a social issue. You will soon be able to encourage your citizens to commit a deed more in future. Want more Murderers or want more Slavers? Go for it! But the fallout (no pun intended) is on you.
 
Although this might sound like an option for players who want to create a dark or chaotic town, it will become enticing later on. For example, when we add in positive social issues, there might be some behaviours you want to encourage.
 
Nick is still hard at work coding this so it’s too early to share concrete details, but currently Encouraging will make issues happen more often and it will also cause more migrants to arrive who like what you’ve encouraged. For example, if you Encourage murder, you’re going to have waves or murderers who hear of your town being a sanctuary for their way of life and come flocking towards it. You'll start to resemble the things you approve of.

Propaganda Station Building
 
As existing players will know, condemning an issue requires a Prison or a Punishment Centre. Encouraging (and later, Tolerating) an issue will require its own building too – a Propaganda Station. You can’t convince a whole town to do your will without getting your message out.

​The ultimate point of this is (aside from giving you a new building challenge) is to make it so a very permissive town looks different to a very authoritarian town. Different buildings for different styles. The design of the Propaganda Station is based around an old cellphone tower and it has noticeboards outside telling citizens what to do on it.

News Feed Feature
 
Update 7 will also, thanks to Nick, feature a new UI element in the bottom left of the screen (see above) that reports about the most recent events in your game. This really helps you learn about all the crazy deeds that are going in your town. I tried to avoid putting this feature in for a while as it seemed a bit of an old-fashioned feature, but in a game where you have 100s of people constantly doing different things, a news feed is essential. I think players are in for some shocks when they see what is really happening in their towns in Update 7.
 
Biography Tabs
 
In Update 7, all citizens have their own randomly generated Biography. This was one my favourite little tasks to add to the game. I like how adding just a few characteristics can give an otherwise bland person a personality. These characteristics don’t affect gameplay, they're just fun to read and make your citizens feel more like people. We've written lots of answers so there should be a lot of possibilities.

Making the Game Stay Fun Over Time
 
One thing I’ve been giving a lot thought about lately is how to make the challenge of the game scale over time.

​At the moment Atomic Society is tense and tough until players figure out how to get going, and then it gets easier until you hit the population cap. It's still fun, growing a city, and the social issues add a lot of randomness, but I want to bring back that initial panic that players experience at the start of the game from time to time.

It’s way too early to discuss what we might do to improve this, but we have plans in mind. I’m raising it now as I’d love to hear any suggestions people have for ways to bring back the panic.
 
New Buildings...
 
Mariana has been artwork crazy over the last month and has created 5 new models for buildings that will be coming to the game over subsequent versions (see screenshot below). These are the “second tier” of buildings for the game and they'll fill in the gaps in the build menu. But with new buildings will come new problems those buildings will fix so the game is going to get tougher.
 
Things you can build at the moment are core structures every town needs just to survive. Over time, we’ll be adding in the next tier of buildings – things you’ll want to make the town thrive. These buildings generally rely on first-tier buildings to function, so you’ll have to start thinking about supply-chains.
 
Of course not all of these buildings in the screenshot will make it into Update 7. It takes weeks to design, create, code, and test a single building. But a start has been made.
 
Our goal for for now is to get the Chemist building in the next update (for reasons that will become very apparent) and a Maintenance Shack. The Shack is inspired by Caesar/Pharaoh games. Build several of them so workers can maintain your structures and or your town might start falling down - killing people inside. This help keep the gameplay lively even when your town is self-sufficient.

Sound Effects & Video Options:  
 
Update 7 will at long last have sound effects for several core interactions. Nick has now prepared a really awesome system for adding and tweaking them and I've been going through sound libraries to find just the right effect. Although this isn’t the most exciting feature, I think it’s going to add a lot more to the game than people realize. It makes everything that little more satisfying when there's an accompanying noise with it.

In addition to that, Nick has also expanded our video options a lot more so players on low-end hardware, or just those who want to tweak how the game looks will have a bit more customisation soon.

Mysteries in the Wild
 
Update 7 will also introduce a small feature that will help tell a little story in the game... If players can find it. We're hiding it across the maps.  This feature is just there to give the world a bit of backstory and flavour, and to give you something to hunt down if there is a lull in your town.
 
Decorative Buildings Useful + Post-Apocalyptic Shrubs:  
 
This month we’ve made Decorative buildings (formerly known as cosmetic) useful beyond just looking pretty. Now every time a citizen now walks past one of the artworks there is a chance to be “refreshed” and gain a boost to their needs. You actually need to think now before you place a Decorative structure. There isn’t much point putting one in a region where nobody will walk past it.

We've also implemented another player suggestion and created a new Decorative building, a planted tree growing in a flower-bed ringed by salvaged car tyres. So you can bring a little greenery to your outposts soon.

New Map & Ruin:
 
Update 7 is bringing the new map "Wasteland" to the game. It's one of the biggest maps so far. A river down divides the land in two, aside from very narrow land-bridges. This is the final desert themed map we’ll be adding to the game. I do like a good desolate region for some reason. Only 2 more maps to go after this and we'll have implemented every area in the game at least in a basic form.

Mariana also created a new salvageable ruin for us that was also based on a player suggestion, so thank you. I'm not going to say what it is yet, you'll find it eventually.

Prison Tweaks:
 
Adam loves dirty jobs. Plague? He made that. Diarrhoea? He implemented that. Slavery? Yep. We try to give him non-grim jobs but he goes into a mad rage and so this month we had to pacify him by letting him add a starvation aspect to the prison. It was the only thing that would calm him down.

​This was something we didn’t quite have time to add the game for Update 6, but in the next Update you will see prison workers going out and fetching food and drink for their inmates. And you’ll also see a pile of corpses if you run out of food and drink.
 
Youtube Madness
 
Lastly, a little behind-the-scenes stuff before I wrap up.

​In April one tiny Youtuber made a video of the game just by chance (we’re not sending out any codes for the game). Then a second, slightly larger Youtuber made a video. And so on. And so on. Until we were receiving emails from people like the Yogscast with their 30 gazillion subscribers.

Here's a playlist of all I was able to find.

Thanks to this, and a lot of positive reactions to the videos, we have doubled our pre-alpha player size in less than a month. Aside from the fact this means (for the first time) we might actually be able to pay ourselves something over the summer, the most important thing is seeing people enjoy the game even in this early form. That helped motivation so much.

I finally got to see strangers actually having fun with the game and wanting more. The core is there. It just needs polishing and expanding. I spent hours watching every single video and reading all the comments (a scary job) and it's really given me a lot of confidence that we're on the right track even though there are bugs (we're not on Steam yet for a reason) and with a bigger player-size comes a lot more pressure/emails!  

Combat

Because this question comes up every week from someone, I made this thread on our official forum giving our position on combat. In short, please don't buy Atomic Society expecting battles or combat or raiders.  
 
Next Month…
 
June should see us squeeze in the remaining features for Update 7, and then July will probably be spent ironing out all the new bugs and re-balancing the game so it’s fun again. And then we'll release the new update. That’s usually how it works.

I hope you enjoyed this little peek and what we've been working on. There's a lot more to share about Update 7 coming soon.

[ScottFarRoad.]

Dev Blog#21: Euthanasia, Publishers, Drug Use & Janitors

New Pre-Alpha Version Approaches, Patch Notes Arrive

We’re entering the final month of development on pre-alpha version 0.0.7. Still work to do before we let it out, but here are the tentative patch notes showing everything we’ve managed to squeeze in:

Read the prospective patch notes here.

The goal with this version was above all to expand the social side of the game so players can get more of a sense that shaping the morals and laws of society is a key part of Atomic Society.

​Also, to add a little more complexity to the city-building. Last version was us just finishing the foundations of the game. Now we’re starting to fill in the gaps.
 
It might not be the best for our marketing, but we're happy adding a big new update to the game every 3 months (2 months work, 1 month crushing bugs). We want every new version feel like a mini expansion-pack for the game that make it worth your time to revisit. And being just 4 people with day jobs, 3 months gives us time to take risks, make mistakes, and be creative.
 
The above are tentative patch notes of course. 70% of the stuff in the notes is already done but who knows what might explode. We'll do our best to squeeze in the most content.

All being well, before next month's blog rolls around, our pre-alpha customers can try it out and see how it feels. I look forward to the feedback.

Vegetarians, Euthanasia, Drug Use and Transgenderism
 
Slavers joined the game last month.

​Now Vegetarians and citizens who wish to be Euthanised are almost complete too.

Drug users and Transgendered survivors are also in the works for this version.
 
We took a scatter-gun approach to the issues in this version to demonstrate the variety of social problems in Atomic Society. Some issues will be pure post-apocalyptic fantasy. Others will be present-day issues. It all adds to the desired feeling of "you run the world" feeling we're going for.

You can judge them all how you see think best and each issue visibly affects how people live.
 
Vegetarians refuse to eat meat or work at the livestock ranch. The good side to vegetarians is that you won’t need to build livestock ranches, (a slow and polluting building), to feed these people.
 
Euthanasia is going to be a factor in such a depressing future, and it's a current political hot-potato, so it also made sense to include. This issue is a little different to others, in that it isn’t the person who committed the action who gets impacted by your judgements (can't arrest someone who committed suicide), but the doctor who killed them who gets in trouble. The upside of euthanasia is putting very unhappy citizens out of their misery. The downside is obviously the death of someone who might have overcome their depression if you'd just waited.

Drug users are big fans of the new Chemist building (see below), and can have a great life, if they don't overdose and if you're willing to burn medicine on them.

Trans people will be a rarity in your towns but this issue had to go into the game. These people will be unhappy unless they transition. It's up to you whether to spend medical time and supplies letting them swap genders.

Obviously we're dealing with some meaty topics here, hence the good thing about being a little-known pre-alpha. We can sneak these issues out, get feedback, see what happens, and continue.

My political mantra remains: just make a good videogame.

Chemist & Industry
 
We definitely wanted to include a few more buildings this version as people were burning through pre-alpha content in about 2-5 hours depending on addiction levels.

So now, aside from the Information Station and new Encourage solution, and that new Decorative building I mentioned in the last blog, Nick has gone and coded the new Chemist structure.
 
The Chemist is the first of several “Industry” buildings coming to the game, in the sense it’s a building that needs other buildings to function. It takes herbs from your greenhouses and converts them into homemade medicine. Workers at your medical buildings will come and collect and use all the medicine they can get their hands on. If they don’t have medicine, now medical buildings are much less effective. This also makes salvaged medicine much more useful if you can find it in the wasteland.
 
It’s really satisfying seeing 3 entirely different buildings working together like clockwork according to Nick’s code. Seeing the simulation work feels good.

More industry buildings are in the works, so you'll soon have "factories" (e.g. buildings that convert something into something more valuable) to burn through all your salvaged resources.

A bit like the real apocalypse, the longer people stay alive, the fussier they'll get.

Maintenance Shack - Day Job Incarnate
 
The last building we want to squeeze into this version before it goes live is the Maintenance Shack (pictured above). This is a building that might be familiar to people who played the old Pharaoh/Caesar games. The workers here will patrol your town and repair buildings before they fall down.  

As someone who works as a janitor when he's not making Atomic Society, I will soon be able to see my day job in my game. "Yay", I guess?

Collapsing buildings are not just a problem in that they cripple your town - a collapsing building has a chance to kill anybody trapped inside it when the walls tumble. Janitors can save lives.

I'll do what I can to find the perfect balance between this being a problem and it being an annoyance.
 
Dancing With Publishers

I have a prejudice against publishers.

To be blunt, I assume they're all vultures who want to swoop in and get a cut of our income.

Like I said, it's a prejudice.

​But we're not earning any profit from the game, so we're wary about handing over what we do earn.

And the days are gone when a game dev needed a publisher to be released or noticed. Steam and Youtube/Twitch solved those problems.

What use are publishers these days? Especially in a world where I can pay far less for a good marketing company to do a one-off press push if I really wanted to?

This month we had a couple of offers from publishers that really stood out from the herd though. Atomic Society has had a dozen unsolicited offers from publishers over the years but I've turned them all away. I didn't feel we were in that league.

But these 2 seemed different.

So we had a chat with them. I was just curious to find out what it would be like talking to a publisher. It sounds like something a game dev should do! We were all nervous beforehand. This is our first game, we’re a new business… No one taught me how to talk to business people.

So we listened and tried not to make idiots of ourselves. My main goal was to find someone who knows business. I basically want someone to say "leave it with me, I'll handle all your marketing, I'll make you a star" and to charm me out of rev-share. I want that stereotypical talented Hollywood producer of yore to sleaze his way into my good books.

Unfortunately, (or fortunately), that didn't happen this month. It all comes down to money. A publisher is probably going to want 10%+ of your income for their efforts as a minimum. That's a big chunk of change for something they "might" be able to do, and if your game flops, you're barely going to earn enough to pay expenses, so then you definitely don't want to be handing out 10% of your livelihood to somebody who has done a fraction of the work you have. At least that's the way I see it.

I might be a dumbass to think like that but neither publisher we spoke to was able to convince me I was misguided, so the meetings didn't go anywhere. The publishers were nice and talented folks, but we just can't afford to take that risk.

Or maybe we're just arseholes who can't work with others.
 
So now it's back to my random efforts to get publicity, and the luck we've had so far. The game has marketed itself. That might be enough, and if it isn't, I don't care.  Game 1 for Far Road Games Ltd is all about learning how to make games. Atomic Society is our Master’s degree in indie dev.

​And if the very worst happens, we’ll all have come out of it having made a good videogame – which is beyond a dream come true. ​

Gameplay Balance Incoming
 
Thanks to AS going viral last month, I had hundreds of hours of Youtube footage to study. Out of many things that stood out, one was that players were drowning in loot. This might actually be realistic - there's going to be a lot of scrap in a post-apocalyptic world - but it doesn't necessarily make good gameplay.

This wasn’t unexpected. Being a pre-alpha there aren’t enough buildings to soak up all the loot yet, but it does get a bit annoying having to build a storehouse every 5 minutes.

Players of the next pre-alpha build are going to have much tougher time getting salvaged and homemade resources. This slows the pace down of the game quite a bit, and means your Town Leader is required more often to help search the wasteland.
 
I’m a little worried about how hard and slow this makes the game. And then releasing that to the public. But every update is a gamble in game dev. People will soon let me know if I've got it wrong.
 
Skeletons Implemented/Story Writing
 
I flexed my creative muscles this month writing the story for the skeletons, which are a new feature in 0.0.7. I'm misguided enough to have a first-class degree in Creative Writing which unsurprisingly hasn't been a skill I’ve needed much since then (as I mentioned, I'm now a janitor).

But it was fun to dust off the old writer in me, and I’ve now added a short, 9-part story, that conveys a little bit of backstory to the game world and the nuclear war that must’ve happened and hidden it around the game.

I hid it because I didn’t want players to feel the story was necessary. I like games where you only stumble across a feature weeks after playing it.

Reading them all will also make a neat achievement one day.

Game (Almost) Earning a Basic Wage?
 
Above you can see Atomic Society's pre-alpha sales peaks thus far from release to June, alongside the 2 times the game went "viral" (without us doing anything).

I can't reveal the actual sales/income figures because money-earned is a Poker card in business, and you'd be dumb to hand it over. But we're still a long way from the day when we can consider giving up our day jobs nonetheless.

As you can see it's been pretty busy May/June thanks to Youtube madness. Could there be a future where making Atomic Society earns as much as a basic menial job? This recent period was the first time that idea moved from "dream" to "something that might happen."

It seems strange to actually dream for the stage where you can earn minimum wage, but that's indie dev. The market isn't getting less crowded. At least compared to the world of apps, or books (my forte), the indie scene is still a desert of content.  

I remember when Atomic Society had sold less than 50 copies and it was utterly bewildering to us that strangers would buy something we'd made. We're a bunch of strangers who have never made a game before! I still remember when we sold 6 copies in a single month. 6 copies! (Thanks, you 6 by the way).

I have an unproven, and probably wrong, theory that the best paid jobs in life are actually the shittest if you actually dig down into them. There's a reason you need to pay people that much to do them. They might seem glamorous on the outside, but in terms of what they do to your soul, you need the money to keep you from committing suicide.

Making indie games is not one of those jobs. I'll take minimum wage for life if I can keep doing this. Making indie games is wonderful.

My dream is just AS sells enough that the 4 of us can make game 2 with a basic, low-paid salary and so on. All we need is that magic recipe: One unique idea that resonates with a lot of people (including those beyond our immediate circle), then to hit the market at the right place at the right time, and then to have the luck/skill to execute on the idea.

In other words: 3 things we can only slightly control.

I don't know if AS will tick any of those boxes. This is our first ever game. We were clueless idiots when we started it. If we do succeed, it's based on hard work and good instincts.

But at least this month alone... We ain't poor.  ​

Interview About the Making of Atomic Society:
 
I did an interview with a little but cool indie game website where we discussed what makes Atomic Society unique and the chances of nuclear war:

Read that here.
 
And our Youtube playlist of videos about the game has also grown slightly this month again. If you’ve missed it, check it out here.

I'm a Youtube playlist, come look at my lovely videos.
 
Next Month Predictions...
 
One day I’m going to read through all these “next month” endings and laugh at everything I had planned. This time I'm going to guess by the time next month's blog comes around that version 0.0.7 will have just been released, by the skin of its teeth, and the whole team will be exhausted wrecks as usual after crunching.

And then who knows what will happen? Will the random Youtubers who made videos of it come back for more, or will it be a quiet period again? Will we go "viral" again and earn enough?

Let's find out next month, readers of the apocalypse.

[ScottFarRoad.]

Dev Blog #22: New version out, stress, design changes, and crystal ball peering...

Version 0.0.7 Released!
 
It turned out the game needed six weeks of intensive tweaking and bug-fixing to finish the new update! But we did it and I'm pleased to say 0.0.7 is now available for those who enjoy seeing the game grow up step by step.
 
For those who haven’t seen what’s new yet, here’s a quick glance at some of the changes:

---

* 5 new social issues added: Settlements can now be home to drug users, slavers (and slaves), and people who are transgender, vegetarian or suicidal. Set laws for these issues as you see fit.

* You can now Encourage any social issue you want and attract more migrants who want to do it.

* 4 new major buildings added: An Info Station to educate citizens on what you want encouraged. A Chemist that requires herbs grown at your Greenhouse and converts them into medicine. A Giant Storehouse that takes up a lot of space but can solve your storage woes. And a Repair Shack which is very important as buildings can now collapse and kill those inside!

* In addition to the above, a new decorative building (planted tree) and a new ruined missile silo have made their way into the game.

* The sprawling desert map Dunes has been added.

* New story elements have been added, hidden skeletons with journals now lurk in each map, and now all citizens have a randomly generated biography.

* Tons of UI improvements, such as a scrolling news feed to show you what’s going on, a clearer stats screen, and a new windowed mode.

* Lots of gameplay tweaks: Decorative buildings give random buffs, unemployed people getting into trouble more often, criminals sentenced to short prison sentences coming out wanting revenge, etc.

* And of course lots of technical improvements as well, such as letting you use the menus when the game is paused, sound effects, new music, and more.

---

It’s a pretty big patch so you can read the full patch notes for it here if you like.

Version 0.0.7 certainly doesn't make the game feel like a finished product yet, so don't expect that. It is, however, the next big step on the journey.

Under (Release) Pressure

​Now that version is out - and a quick hotfix patch we quickly released to stop all citizens spawning as female - I’m able to unwind a little.

I get so stressed in the run-up to release. Being a perfectionist and releasing a pre-alpha makes for a bad brain combo. I must have proof-read the tutorial 50 times for example and still managed to miss a serious typo!
​
It reminds me of when I used to do a bit of acting, that pre-show tension, when you're waiting for the curtain to go up before a paying audience. You're as prepared as you can be, but you have to get it right because people have expectations. It's even worse when you know that Youtubers could be streaming your update to thousands!
 
Adding to the tension, we still had a serious crash in the game with less than 24 hours to go until I'd definitively told people the version would be out. It was a crash that occurred when saving, destroying people's towns. Over many hours we pinpointed the problem to cops arresting themselves for being slavers and doctors euthanizing themselves! Fortunately, coder Nick, powered by pure caffeine, came to the rescue and was able to sort it out in the nick (get it?!) of time.
 
And then, feeling immensely excited and stressed, I released the new build and... It was all quite anticlimactic. You're so hyped and you've worked so hard, but most of the world doesn't even know the game exists yet. It can take days or weeks even for the news to spread. But that's a different marketing problem...

Smaller and Faster Updates From Now On
 
Because of this stress, and because most of the big core tasks in Atomic Society are more or less done (just about 700 medium-sized tasks left to do), we should be able to release more frequent updates from now on. This will be good for players, who get fixes and new things to tinker with more regularly, and good for us as they'll be less to test and fix each time.
 
So rather than 10 features per version over 3 months, I’m hoping for about 3-4 features every 6 weeks roughly. I wasn’t keen on this approach initially, as I thought smaller versions would be less exciting, and more hassle, but I might be changing my views.

We’ll see how it goes with the upcoming version 0.0.8 and whether it proves beneficial for the game and getting noticed.

​

Design Philosophy Ver. 240
 
Smaller versions will also fit neatly with the latest patch to my game design philosophy.

Basically, I’m now forcing myself not to plan ahead. I have dev scars now, I know how much work new features are. I can't make others work on something that isn't 100% what the game needs.

And you only know what the game needs when a new version is finished and you can actually play it without bugs or missing bits for the first time. Then you find out something I was certain the game needed a month ago might not be required anymore.
 
So from now on, rather than adding 10 new things to a version and hoping they’ll still be what the game needs in 3 months, I’m designing just 2-3 at a time, then we'll release and review. Only then do I decide what to add next.

This is a scary method for me. I like to plan and know where we’re headed. Now I don’t know where we're going beyond the imminent future. Now the game is dictating to me what it needs.

Where will it end up? How will I know when Atomic Society is “finished”? It reminds me of the old quote that “a poem is never finished, it is only abandoned”. Perhaps even the best games, that have years of work poured into them, are forced out into the world. One day you just have to move on.
 
For now, I think my satisfaction levels with AS, and the pressing need of not going broke, will be our judge, not any plans I invent. Right now I'm probably 28% satisfied with Atomic Society. I would like to get that figure to 40% before we even hit Steam.
 
If it’s taken us 2.5 years to get to 28% satisfaction, there's still a (far) road ahead...

Plotting Version 0.0.8
 
What I am sure about, and player comments seem to be confirming, is that the next version must be getting things we've already added to work more reliably.

​Therefore, 0.0.8 is primarily going to be a bug-fixing version. Not the most exciting thing to announce, but it should make a huge difference as all those little glitches add up and I'm tired of seeing players frustrated by the same few things.

The core focus will therefore be path-finding, the routes and paths the AI takes. It needs a big overhaul that we've been putting off for ages. The second focus will be squashing some long-standing bugs, like not being able to build where you want to. And thirdly, we’ll do something about scavengers, as people want more control over what loot is coming in.
 
We've known about these problems forever, but only now does it feel we've got some breathing space to address them. As soon as that’s all done, we’ll release and then I'll play the game and work out where we go next...  


​The End of Summer Madness
 
The spark of interest the game received back in May, when a dozen random Youtubers examined it out of the blue, took about 3 months to die down and even now sales are a better than they used to be. The game has been publicly available for about 15 months, and 70% of all copies sold were in the last 3 months!
 
You can imagine what hope that gave us. Hope holds us together as a (mostly) unpaid team, as is the case no doubt for a lot of indie devs. Hope gets us through long days in our day jobs and long nights on AS. This summer helped a lot.
 
The problem with even a little sniff of success can be addictive. It's tempting to start to working for sales figures, not for yourself. It's never enough. Sales increased by 10%. That's becomes the new baseline to feel "good". Keep feeding the numbers. It's the same with social media. If I wanted to work for the bottom line, there are much better jobs to get than making games, so I'm trying my best to ignore it all.

Other Bits

Patch notes for the 0.0.7b hotfix we've just released.

My post on how salvaging has changed in 0.0.7.
 

Future Prediction Time
 
I know I said I need to stop planning ahead, but it's okay to make mistakes in a dev blog!

​At the end of the last blog I guessed that by the time I wrote this one, we’d all be exhausted after working overtime on version 0.0.7, and waiting to see if the version engaged the public. Aside from the fact we were delayed by 3 weeks getting the version out, that’s proven to be perfectly accurate.
 
So, by the time September’s blog is out, I won’t be insane enough to guess version 0.0.8 will be ready... But I’d like it to be about 70% finished, which would be nice. I'm looking forward to being able to polish stuff rather than invent new stuff for a change.
 
Anyway, thanks to all the readers of these blogs. They seem to get a pretty good reception.

​Hope you enjoy version 0.0.7 and I’ll see you in the next edition…

[ScottFarRoad.]

(Been quite a while since I posted our dev blogs here for which I have no excuse except general laziness! Apologies. However things have been going really well for the game and you can catch up on all the past month's blogs over here if you want to catch up.)

Development Update #27: Raiders, Religion, Radiation and Ratings!

It's been another busy month as we get  ready for our summer 2018 Early Access release. Some big and vital elements of the game are just taking form.

Raiders

This might be the biggest feature coming to the next pre-alpha version, and perhaps one of the largest features we've ever added. Nick spent the whole of this month working on it. I'd say we're about 50% done with it at the moment.

Raiders are what I call a “milestone” feature. In other words they're a game-changing challenge that will occur at a certain point. If you lead wisely and overcome them, they'll be a "milestone" in your town's epic story. Atomic Society doesn’t have traditional levels, it’s one long experience, but I do want to throw memorable moments like this at players to spice up the town building. Raiders will be the first such moment we add.

(Spoiler Warning: If you don't want to know what raiders are going to do to your town when you play, skip this next section!)

​So, in version 0.0.9 it will be the case that when your town has grown large enough to be noted by existing forces in the wasteland, you will be contacted an aggressive band of raiders who look greedily at your outpost of civilisation. They won’t attack you immediately. Instead, they will make 1 of 3 random demands of you. It's random what they'll pick.

Give them a percentage of all you have in your storehouse. Or give them a slice of your population to use as slaves (which will be ironic, if you legalised slavery!). Or change a law to please them.

You then decide whether to agree or resist. If you resist, then occasional destructive raids will start on your town on a periodic basis.

​You won’t get to know exactly when they're going to attack, and there's no actual combat. Think of it more like a "disaster" in other city-building games. Admittedly, the first time Nick got raids up and working it destroyed his whole town in one go, but we won't make it quite that harsh at release! They'll keep raiding you until they think they've taught you a lesson. Then give you a chance to give into their demands again.

If you’re feeling tough, you can tell them to get lost. However, to resist you will need to start building defences. This is where the new Guard Tower structure we're making comes in (we've also added the ability to convert existing ruins into defences too, which is cool). These defensive buildings will protect nearby buildings when a raid occurs. You’re going to have to arrange your town around these protective structures and also find workers for them.

But it doesn’t stop there. Guard Towers are only good enough to partially reduce raid damage. Not block it entirely. To make them totally effective you’ll need to upgrade these new defensive buildings you've made. To upgrade them requires another new building that’s coming to 0.0.9 – the Weaponsmith... And a lot of scrap metal to make weapons! So you can see it's a pretty big feature that should add a fair bit of complexity to the latter stages of the game. I’ll talk more about it next month, when hopefully it's finished.

It'd be good to know if this approach to raiding sounds interesting to you. It’s been a struggle to design a system for raiding that fits as this is a town-building game, not a game about combat. The eureka moment for me came when I worked out to let players choose whether to resist the raiders or not. Atomic Society is about tough ethical choices after all.

​For example, are you going to be willing to change your laws and values to avoid being attacked?

Release News Update

It wouldn't be a dev blog without the latest thoughts on our Early Access release! To be honest, I can't wait until the game is on Steam and I can stop living in a state of constant anticipation. As a team, we've been building up to this for over 3 years now and I'm sick of thinking about it!
​
As mentioned, we're still on track for this summer (May-July). We'll get the next big pre-alpha version done, spend a few weeks integrating it with Steam, then release, try and market it, and see what happens. 

It will definitely be this summer. I couldn't cope with delaying it any longer. I know releasing on Steam will probably cause me as much stress as it solves, but at least the day we press "launch" will be one to remember. The dev blog after release should be interesting!

However, if you're already playing the game because you bought the pre-alpha, that does mean a 5-6 month gap between 0.0.8 and the next update. You'll appreciate why when I post the patch notes for this upcoming version, it's a big version with lots of new stuff to do, but how do our current players feel about such a long gap? Personally, I like games where they release fewer but much bigger updates because it makes playing the game all over again worthwhile, but what are your views? If I get enough feedback, we might try and release an interim pre-alpha version between now and summer, though I'd rather not.

Likewise, how often do the people who are waiting for this game to arrive on Steam feel about long waits between updates - but getting updates that will be really packed with new stuff? What do you prefer? Obviously I'm not counting bug fixing patches, we'll release them as soon as we can.

Survival Rating Added

Another new addition that happened this month is Survival Rating. Or that's what it's called right now as I'm writing this. It changes its name about once a week at the moment!
​
This feature (and the insane amount of design work it subsequently caused), started off when I began thinking “if our game had a high score, what would it be?” That opened up a whole can of worms, causing me to spend a lot of time nailing down the essential element of skill in our game. What separates a good post-apocalyptic town leader from a bad one? In the end, I figured it came down to survival. If you want to be a complete evil tyrant, or the kindest leader ever, you’re still going to need people who aren't dead.
 
This led me to scrap the old Approval Rating system we had and replace it with this new Survival Rating. The old system was pretty pointless and doesn't really fit with the setting, as this isn't a game about making people happy necessarily.
 
Basically, this new rating now tells you how dangerous life in your town is. It shows the odds of someone surviving to old age. A town with a 70% Survival Rating means there's a 70% chance the average person will make it and have a chance at dying the way nature intended (a rare thing in this game).
​
I felt this was the fairest measure of a player’s skill for now. The next step will be to connect it to actually completing the game. So you have to get good at survival to win. Over time we can add in scores per map, so you can see “oh, I managed to have a really good rating on this map” etc or something like that.

So much to do. I sometimes feel we're only getting started on this game after 3 years of building the basic foundations of it, but fortunately things will accelerate towards the end. This version is proof of that.
 
Also, Survival Rating is also going to be connected to another brand new building coming in 0.0.9 that I’ll talk about next month. The model has been made, but we need to bring it to life...

Who's going down that hatch?

PC Apocalypse
 
In this month's behind-the-scenes news, it finally became time to replace some of our team's PC hardware after years of making this game on glorified hairdryers. Unfortunately, it came at a bad moment, with graphics card and RAM prices going nuts, but what can you do?

Luckily, our pre-alpha has sold just enough to provide new PCs that let us keep working, so it's a good job we decided to start selling early! But we weren't exactly keen to burn money on hardware as funds are still tight. However, my old PC was refusing to stay on for longer than a few hours, causing me to lose lots of work when it went down (fun when working on a game!) and Nani’s PC just couldn’t handle Unity. The latest pathfinding update to our game broke it. The game is a mass of code and systems nowadays and running the game in Unity's editor adds a huge performance overhead.

And she doesn't even have the weakest PC on the team! Adam likes to code on a laptop so old he literally had to create a way to disable all the game’s shaders just to make the game run (literally called “Adam Mode”) 

Getting some new hardware meant we had to stop working for a few days and force Nick to stop coding so he could help us select the best PCs on our limited budget. And then he also had to build them so we could carry on working. We had a little a team get-together at our house/office and spent a day assembling new hardware, but at least we're more productive now than ever thanks to it. Plus, we were able to get an ATI card and an Nvidia card to help us debug any problems in the infinite hellscape of differing PC hardware.

It's weird finally getting to see your own game run at a framerate you've only ever seen in YouTube videos until now!

New Social Effect Feature Added
 
I talked about this new feature briefly last month but Adam has now made a lot of progress on it to the point where it's mostly done. Only 1 aspect left to tackle.
 
The first aspect of this new feature is called “Grim Surroundings”. Basically, you'll want to be careful in the next version where you put your Prisons and Punishment Centres. We've made it so seeing these brutal buildings is going to drain citizens morale faster than usual. You don’t want to build them in the middle of your town anymore.
 
The second feature we've put in is called “Influence”. Right now, that means that your Town Hall is going to have an influence on people next to it. It will slow down how often they decide to commit a social issue. So for example, a murderer is less likely to go and shank someone near the Town Hall.
 
On the flip side of that, the Tavern now actually encourages the rate people commit social issues. So you’re going to get a lot more acts of murder and vegetarianism (for example) around the Tavern. Maybe you want that. Or maybe you don’t. Just be careful where you put these buildings.
 
The last aspect to add, which is still work in progress due to some technical hassles, will affect where you place crematories and latrines. In short: people don’t want to be near these buildings, so build them far away from other stuff or they’re going to negatively affect them. My ultimate hope is this will add an extra level of strategy to where you place stuff.

More Publisher News!
 
Anybody who’s been reading these updates for a while will know the talks we've had with publishers over the years. We've had several offers but haven't really been convinced they're going to justify their share of our income yet. Some of the publishers have been great people who have done good work on other games, but I think we like working on our own a bit too much. We’re antisocial and like working on our own at our own pace, and I don’t particularly want a lot of marketing fuss! Having a popular game doesn't always = having a fun life.

If a publisher ever does win my heart, they’ll probably be someone who convinces me they really can make my life genuinely easier. Less stress. No one has yet managed to do that. If there's any publishers out there who want to make my life easier in exchange for money, let me know!
 
However, to prove I’m a hypocrite, this month a pretty big, well-known publisher contacted us out of the blue and wanted to talk and I got all excited like a starstruck indie dev again. Funnily enough, I’d actually pitched to this particular publisher years ago (the only one I've ever approached) and was turned down by the time! But I think they've forgotten about that, or the game has moved on so much, as they’re approaching us now. We’ve got a meeting with them in a couple of weeks. I don’t think it will lead to anything on this particular game, but on our next game… Who knows? Offers like this are educational even if they don't go anywhere. I'm avoiding saying who it is yet in case it gets me in trouble but stay tuned.
 
Another Essential New Feature Added This Month:
 
Forget raiders, forget everything else. The most important feature for 0.0.9 is already up and running...

We have now made it so you can now choose your Town Leader's hairstyle!

Adam dusted off his crappy laptop to program this feature as well. So above all the big moral choices in the game, you can now decide: want a beard or no beard? Want long hair or short hair? It's challenging stuff.

There's more coming though, lots of little upgrades. Sometimes I reckon the bottom section of a game's patch notes can make more impact than the top part.

Game Design Evolution 3.0
 
We might be slightly odd as a team of 4 in that we have a game designer (me) who can’t code. However, being the dreaded “ideas guy” isn’t always an easy life. Game design is a race when you have a tiny but hardworking team constantly producing stuff. When they’re done with their present tasks, I have to be immediately ready with the next job for them, all written up nicely with detailed steps that make sense to someone who doesn’t actually live in my brain. And it better be a good use of their time.

​It’s a stressful job (not that the others team have their stresses). I have to make all kinds of decisions on what people - who are basically unpaid volunteers at this stage - should spend time doing, based on mere instinct and theories. Then I have to hope after 4 weeks (for the really big features) that what I told them to do makes the game any better! Sometimes I have the extra fun job of saying “sorry, that idea isn’t’ working out. Can you redo XYZ?” and add lots of smileys to the comment.
 
As a guy who suffers from anxiety, I’ve occasionally tried to combat all this pressure by finding a formula that makes game design a bit more predictable. This month I spent an insane amount of time studying games, trying to find their common elements, and even worked out a list of 108 elements a game needs to be good! It busted my brain and took a huge amount of time. And guess what?

Formulas produce formulaic answers. No matter how much design time I spend theory-crafting, it doesn’t help. Every game is different. If there is a universal formula that Tetris, Chess, Doom, and Hitman all share I haven’t yet found it. Looking for it almost drove me insane.
​
I guess I'll have to keep stabbing in the dark and relying on instinct a while longer.

Not a good idea to stand this close to one of the new radioactive ruins, but somehow so alluring...

Radiation and Religion
 
To end this month's blog, I’ll talk about 2 upcoming features I’m hoping we can squeeze into the next update as well (told you it was going to be a big one). These are still in the early stages of development but they're on the conveyor belt of stuff that is coming at least.

​First up is radiation. Nani has made the art for this but the coding is yet to start. My goal is that radioactive ruins will add a random element to every map. You won't know where they'll spawn each time you play. Naturally these unique ruins will be radioactive and impossible to build near, so you’ll have to plan your town around them. There will be a way to remove them, but at a cost. I'll hopefully discuss more about this feature next month when we're a little deeper into it.
 
Religion is another "milestone" feature, like raiders, that currently in the design phase. It's definitely something I definitely want to add. Choosing a religion/ideology is a massive element of every society. But I’ve found this one of the hardest elements to design. There might be a reason why so few games make religion a core part of their gameplay! In fact I can only think of the Civ games where religion is big part of gameplay and I personally find their use of it a bit superficial (though Civ 6 was better). Reducing belief to numbers, and all games revolve around numbers, is tricky stuff. We're prototyping various approaches at the moment.

What would you like to see from religion in a post-apocalyptic settlement game?
 
Time to Get Back to Work!
 
That about ends it for this month. As you can see from the length of this blog not a day goes by without something being added to the game. And the truly hectic time is yet to start.

Launching on Steam is going to be insanely busy. I don’t really know how I’m going to fit it in around my day job.

However, our passion and love for the game remains. We think we're making something unique and worth all the effort and late nights. The game should be something fun and unique on Steam, and that keeps us going. We just need to take breaks occasionally!

I'll see you next month.

[Zireael]

Survival Score definitely makes 100% more sense than Approval Score, given the setting.

[ScottFarRoad.]

The final parts of 0.0.9 are now coming together. 0.0.9 is going to be “part 1” of the big, final update before Steam. I was originally going to save up all the latest content and just have one massive update before Steam, but it’s more practical for us if we break it up into 2 parts.
 
That means after 0.0.9 is out (probably in May) there will be one more large patch and then the Steam release at some point will definitely come in the summer. We haven’t decided a specific month or date yet of course for Steam, but we need to start thinking about that soon as I’ll need to book time off work (my day job) for it and we need to make sure nobody on the team's going on holiday, etc!
​
Anyway, here’s some of the things we’ve been finishing up this past month.

New Elder’s End Building
 
This is one of 4 new buildings players can build in the next content patch. It's a surprising one as I didn’t actually have plans to add this building. It was an idea that came out of nowhere really. And then Adam coded it this month.
 
Basically, the Elder’s End is where your elderly citizens - the survivors who have been with you the longest - will go to die in peace. At the moment the old people in your town just drop dead in the street. If you build this structure though, they’ll be looked after by the workers and get buried in the catacomb/vault underneath it (that’s what the trapdoor is from last month’s blog), saving you the need to cremate them.
 
I felt this building was needed to complete the journey of the survivors who come to you town. Your town starts with chaos and misery, and then over time you improve it, and people live longer and longer, and then at the end there’s hope that the old people can die in peace. If the majority of your town are dying in an Elder’s End, you’ve clearly managed to bring civilisation back to the wasteland.
 
This idea came to me after we changed the score in the game from being Approval Rating to Survival Rating, or “Hope Rating” as it’s now known (name change #5). In other words, the new score in the game shows how hopeful people feel about surviving until old age and dying comfortably in this new Elder’s End building. The more survivors who make it to old age, the more hopeful people think about the future of your town. 
 
It was important to us it wasn’t just a retirement home though, more like a place where survivors go to meet their demise when it’s time. That felt more appropriate for the setting. We added the vault door to bury them off the idea that the survivors want to rest in peace forever underground because they feel that’s a place of safety since the nuclear war!
 
On the UI for this new building, you can see how long they’ve been a citizen in your town, and there’s a quick shortcut button that takes you to their Biography, so you can read up who this person was (though you better read quickly as they tend not to hang around for long in this building!)
 
This building does consume food, water, and medicine and is relatively expensive to build though, so it won’t be a luxury you can afford at the start of the game, but if you want to give your survivors a happy ending, you'll need it.

Raiders Progress
 
The huge (work wise) Raiders feature is at the moment the main thing still keeping the version from coming out. It’s taken us about 3 months to put together and it’s probably 80% done at the moment, though it’s going to take weeks to balance and bug-test (remind me not to design a feature that I have to play through the whole game to unlock).
 
Raiding is not a feature you need to worry about for most of the game. It doesn’t even kick in until the final stages. We wanted it to be a dramatic shake-up of the game in the latter stages, when you kind of think you’ve got everything worked out. Skilled players will keep it mind though that the new Guard Tower and Weaponsmith building are there for a reason, and you should expand with them in mind.
 
I know some players are worried about this, as they fear having to do combat, etc. Let me just stress again that this is a game about decisions, not combat, and if you’re a total pacifist you will be able to totally avoid combat... but at a cost. There’s cost to every choice, aggressive or otherwise. You can also upgrade all your Guard Towers and keep the raiders out for good (in fact that’s what you’re supposed to do).
 
There’s still a lot left to fix and tweak and test with this though between now and release, but all the hard work is done now. I’m really nervous about this feature actually as I still haven’t been able to experience it properly as a player would due to bugs. We have debug tools of course that let me trigger the raiders whenever I want, but I can’t get the emotional sense of how a player is going to feel when raiders turn up after 2-3 hours of regular play.

Lots of Smaller Improvements This Month
 
While Nick has been coding the raider feature, Adam has been ticking off lots of smaller tasks now that the big stuff is done. I won’t go through everything added here or I’ll just be making this into patch notes, but here’s a few of the more significant alterations.
 
One of the bigger (in terms of player requests at least) is the new camera snapping option we’ve put in. At the moment if you give the Town Leader an order, the camera snaps to them so you can control them manually afterwards. I personally like this as I think it connects you to your leader, but there is a sizeable chunk of people who think this utterly sucks and so now we’ve now put in an option so you can now stop the camera snapping to the Leader and basically direct him or her around like a unit in an RTS game and the camera will never leave Overview Mode.
 
Another player request we’ve put in this month is a new button on the main UI panel that if pressed will open the employees menu of any structure that has locked worker slots. This probably won’t mean anything to people who haven’t played the game, but for those players who like to micro-manage their workplaces, this should enable you to quickly zoom through all buildings that have closed off worker slots.
 
We’ve added a tips box feature, next to the tutorial, where I’ve can put information on some key concepts that can trip up newer players and stuff that only appeared for 2 seconds on the loading screen. I’m a little worried about this as it might spoil some of the game challenge, but my belief is that if I know something as a designer, you should know it too, so now you can read them if you want. Experienced players won’t find anything new in there though.
 
We also added new buttons to let you randomly choose a name for your Leader because if you’re like me, naming your character can be one of the hardest decisions in a game! This also lets us get some extra use out of the names of our Special Edition as players will see them if they hit this random button.
 
Obviously nothing too exciting here but when put together with everything else in the version, it all adds up.

So many menus to make in this game...

​Nani’s Art Improvements
 
Now she’s done most of the big tasks this version, it’s fun seeing Nani, our artist, keep herself busy. Some of the most creative work gets done at this time.
 
One biggish thing she’s done this month is improve the readability of the whole UI. We agreed with some complaints that text was hard to read and so we’ve lightened the whole UI and done what we can (so far) to make text easier to read. She’s also added some fun details, like sticky notes to the stats screen to double down on the appearance that the whole UI is a burnt clipboard.
 
Aside from that, eagle-eyed players will notice several little tweaks and additions to existing buildings. Our Theatre building now has props on the stage for example, the ruined church has a bell in its tower, and the animals in the Livestock Ranch actually look a lot more like animals now and are no longer making my eyes bleed! Little updates like that forced her to redo her textures though as until now every single building uses about 3-4 textures, for everything, which is rather limiting as you can imagine. It’s fun to be adding a bit of polish to things though at long last.
 
Behind the Scenes News
 
Not much happened of note behind the scenes this month. Still no publisher news now (the big publisher I mentioned before forgot to get back in touch with us), and given we’re months from release, I can’t see anything new on that scene happening at all. It is funny though how many marketing company emails you get as you approach release. We’re not particularly interested in that kind of stuff. Youtube and blogs have always served us well enough when it comes to spreading the news of this game, plus our Wishlist numbers are high enough, relatively speaking, that I think we’ll avoid destitution.

Taking a Breather
 
For the past month I made a somewhat bizarre change. I have stopped acting as if I care about videogames. I stopped playing games. I stopped reading/watching game news. I detoxed from the games industry.

The effort to stay on top of the latest game industry news, reading expert hot takes, what’s the latest hyped videogame out there… I constantly felt as if I was studying for an exam on “how to be a successful game developer” but the exam was constantly adding new questions. Twitter was the worst. So many people on Twitter seem anxious (including me).
 
So I decided to just close the door on all those internet voices, and for about a month I have more or less acted as if videogames (other than Atomic Society) just didn’t exist. I uninstalled everything, dragged Youtube off my bookmarks, stopping buying/renting games (that certainly helped my bank balance) and I went from a guy who would check gaming forums and websites 5-6 times a day to voluntarily living under a rock. Consequently, I’ve never been so out of the loop gaming-wise in my adult life. I have no idea what’s going on in the industry, what “rival” games there out there, or what the latest hot tips on marketing are. (I still respond quickly to our customers and answer anything that gets posted, but that’s about it.)
 
And unsurprisingly nothing terrible happened. AS kept selling, more or less the same rate. The team kept working. I didn’t suddenly lose my ability to design a game. What I gained was peace. I stopped caring about trying to “survive in the marketplace”, my mind was free of 10,000 random opinions, or contests over whether game X beats game Y. The games industry never slows down, it’s relentless.
 
To get this point I had to tell myself in advance “It’s okay if you never sell another copy of AS” but I got there. We've already sold enough for me to think "making a videogame" has been ticked off my list of random things to do with existence. And that was the final part of my peace. It's crazy how chilled you can be when you don’t care if people buy your product or like you.

Now, before some smartass comes along and asks me why I don’t give the game away for free if I don’t care about financial success, I still want all my teammates to get their fair share so they get by. They’ve put years of their life into this game now, so it would be nice if they get anything out of it. We don't get salaries from making AS.
 
However for me, I think I’m going to keep up this laid-back approach and stay unplugged a bit longer, maybe even to the end of the project. We'll see how it goes.
 
Conclusion
 
I didn’t think I was going to have much to discuss this month, hence me being a bit late with this blog, but it seems when I start to write, more’s on my mind than I realised.

I will be posting upcoming, tentative patch notes for 0.0.9 soon and then by the next time you hear from me, it should be me announcing the new update is out there for those people already trying out the game before it hits Steam.
 
Thanks for reading and I’ll see you next month.

[Tusky]

I went from a guy who would check gaming forums and websites 5-6 times a day to voluntarily living under a rock.

I had to do this as well. Very cathartic, and you're right! Nothing bad happened

Really good to hear the progress you've made. Can't wait to pick up a copy!

[ScottFarRoad.]

I had to do this as well. Very cathartic, and you're right! Nothing bad happened

Really good to hear the progress you've made. Can't wait to pick up a copy!

Thanks! And good for you. I definitely recommend any other stressed out indie devs give it a try even just for a week and see how it goes. That's how I started, seeing if I could last 7 days.

[ScottFarRoad.]

Been a little while since I posted a new dev blog, and that's because we've been doing the non-stop bug fixing that goes with releasing a new update. I can tell when a version is almost about to be released because I get a bad back from too much chair-sitting.

However...

Pre-Alpha Update 10: Now Available!

(Pics from the latest version)

This is the version that's been keeping us busy for the past 5 months. I'm quietly hopeful this will the the largest and longest update we have to make, and from now on, there won't be as many gigantic things to add. But we'll see.

Update 10 is our last pre-alpha version, before we hit Steam, (which also means it's your last chance to get your name in the game if that suits you).

This update introduces lots of new features:

A raiding system has been added where you can choose to defend your town or make a deal with the bandits.

4 new buildings have been added: Guard tower, Weaponsmith, Elders End, and Enforcer Outpost. You can now also convert ruins into garrisons.

A cannibalism social issue has been added for you to deal with however you see fit.

Custom difficulty mode has been added, letting you make the game as hard or easy as you like.

Story elements have added for those who want them.

And much, much more. Full patch notes can be found over here.

Of course several bug fixes and tweaks too.

Coming Next

Coming up next we're going to have to figure out how to launch on Steam and how to do that in a slightly successful way. I'll post a new dev blog update about that soon though. We've been gunning for Steam for 3 years now. I always wanted to hold off and do it when the game felt good enough which has been a battle of perfectionism vs just release it already, but I think the point has almost come!

[Superb Joe]

For the past month I made a somewhat bizarre change. I have stopped acting as if I care about videogames. I stopped playing games. I stopped reading/watching game news. I detoxed from the games industry.

joe style asceticism, only way to live baby

[ScottFarRoad.]

Hello and welcome to another development update for Atomic Society. This blog is a few weeks overdue because we’ve been busy finishing the latest - and possibly biggest - update to the game so far. Version 0.0.9 is the final big update we’re going to release before coming to Steam later this year.

Audio Version of This Blog Now Available!
​
I've decided to try an experiment with this month's blog and recorded myself reading the words below, over some footage of me playing the latest version of the game. It's a little rough and ready, but if people enjoy it, I'll keep doing it from now on. It's the exact same content as the written version.

You can check it out here:

Or if you prefer to simply read about the making of the game, then read on...

New Pre-Alpha Update Released

After several months of hard work, update 0.0.9 is now available for our pre-alpha players to try out. This update brings several new features including: hostile outsiders to make or break deals with, 4 new buildings to construct, custom difficulty mode, story elements, town leader upgrades, and numerous other improvements.

Pre-alpha players can download the new version by finding the email from Humble, which would’ve arrived when you purchased the game. New players will access the latest features as soon as they buy the game.

Full patch notes for the version are here for those who want to read them.

Right now, we’re taking a few well-earned days off to recover our strength (writing dev blogs aside) and then it’s back to work turning this pre-alpha into an alpha.

My Thoughts on Making 0.0.9

The game has a life of its own nowadays. There's so much code in Atomic Society, and so many gameplay elements rubbing up against each other, that the game pretty much tells us what we should add to it next. It’s not a blank canvas for ideas anymore. If we want to add anything now, it has to fit in with so much that already exists. The “invention” stage is gradually coming to an end. Now we’re entering the long “improving” phase.

It definitely feels we're working on a downwards slope, which is great after wandering in the wilderness for years, with so much to create, and only hope and a few strong ideas to keep us going. I can see the end of the project when I play the game now. It's just a case of filling in some rather large gaps and applying a heap of polish. I think that by summer 2019, 12 months from now, Atomic Society might be at the point where we could say “yep, it’s done”. 

That doesn’t mean we will stop there. There's still tons I want to do with the game if it’s financially possible. I have pages and pages of ideas, as there’s so much you could do with this game, but it's going to be more and more a case of improving what already exists rather than inventing completely new systems. For years the team has been swimming in a big ocean but now we can see land. We can finish this!

That’s quite a comfort, because there's a short time during every version where I think “making games sucks”. It’s a feeling that comes when things are taking massively longer than I predicted, when the new features are half finished and unbalanced so the game isn't fun, when sales and media coverage are relatively slow, and when the team is busy with their own tasks (or real-life troubles) and there isn’t that social aspect to making a game.

And then, about 10 days before release, the whole thing comes together and I can actually play the game like a player and not a frustrated developer. Then my motivation becomes sky high, and I want to make games for the rest of my life, and I truly love what Atomic Society is becoming. I become a cheerleader for the game all over again, the team is happy, and I think AS could actually pay a salary one day. This pumps me up so much that I'm desperate to start on the next version and make the game better and better.

There’s light at the end of the tunnel now. Whatever happens, we're going to have a computer game out of this crazy project, plus some new friendships and supporters. More importantly we can spend the remaining time making the game more fun instead of having to invent the fun out of nothing (which is a lot harder).

I guess the only analogy my frazzled brain can think of at the moment is moving house. We have finally moved in most of the boxes. Now we get to unpack and make the rooms feel like a home.

Or maybe it's way too hot in the UK this week and I need to move on.

Making the Final Features For 0.0.9

It's been a while between blogs so there's a few features that slipped into 0.0.9 which I haven't discussed before.

You have to be pretty careful what you put into the game near version release, as testing takes ages, but we had some negative feedback on the game and nothing makes you want to work harder than fixing something people dislike! I love getting well written, polite, intelligent feedback, even if it’s negative. Perhaps I don’t love it at the time all that much, but afterwards it always makes the game better, and as I don't have a private army of user-testers to get feedback from in my home, I rely on the public.

Here’s a look at some of the last things we squeezed into this version…

Custom Difficulty

Based on feedback, we made the custom difficulty feature a priority, which is now in the game. This lets you make the game ridiculously easy or impossibly difficult to suit your taste. You can now start a game completely on your own, without any citizens for that Omega Man vibe, or start with 49 trained engineers instead if you like building things really quickly. You can also make it so the migrants who come to your town drop dead instantly, or make them as well fed and rested as pampered VIPs. My theory is that you know how hard you want the game to be better than I do, and if you don't like any of our balanced presets, there's now an alternative.

Story Elements

Because context is important, and words are cheap to produce, we also added in a few story elements to this version, which should help explain things like why you start the game standing in a field with a bunch of strangers (play the game to find out). This is the closest our budget will get to cutscenes. You can totally ignore this story, or read it if you want to get immersed.

Adding story elements forced me to write fiction which thousands of people will experience. This was daunting, as I’ve never knowingly had so many people read my words. However, it was also enjoyable. I’m a writer at heart, and coming up with post-apocalyptic fiction is a pleasure to someone like me.

Enforcer Outpost

We don't usually dare throw in a new building into the game right at the end of a version, as it can generate a lot of bugs, but this one was an exception. The Enforcer Outpost is essentially a stripped down Town Hall. It acts like a mini police station, which lets us keep the existing Town Hall building as something unique and special. We had plans for doing this eventually, but hearing someone in a YouTube video talk about it made us push the feature forward.

I still watch every single YouTube video about the game by the way, even the ones in Spanish or German (and I still feel horribly anxious while doing so!)

Bugs Are Getting Nasty

The longer we make the game, the harder the bugs become to squash. Finding them isn’t too difficult, but getting them to repeat on command, which lets us see if they’re truly fixed, is becoming harder and harder. I tested this version to the point of exhaustion, but as soon as the public got their hands on it, serious bug reports from players started to arrive. It’s a little disheartening.

We always fix the most obvious bugs, but there’s still dozens of cryptic ones lurking in the code. For example, we really struggled with a bug this version where someone died in the old people’s home, which caused the whole town to die of diarrhoea (I guess at least our bugs are humorous).

We thought we’d fixed it, but we couldn’t be sure as it was impossible to repeat on demand. Turns out it’s still in the game, in a modified manner. If you’re playing the pre-alpha right now, please make multiple and frequent saves, for your own sake!

However, even when we fix the big bugs, we discovered they were concealing 100s of small ones. When the game was an early pre-alpha, we could ignore certain bugs, but I don't think we can anymore. The public’s tolerance for bugs drops as we become more mainstream with each version. Unfortunately, fixing bugs takes time that could be spent making new features, so I have a decision to make. It'd be really nice if there was enough content in the game we could devote ourselves to bugs, but there isn't really. Not yet.

Which brings me onto...

The Last Pre Alpha Version!

Well, despite what I just said about bug-fixing, we still have to squeeze some new content into the next version, even if it ends up a bit buggy…

In fact, Adam has already started work on the first new feature for 0.0.10. The breeding system.

At long last, the citizens will start having sex with each other.

This is going to be quite a shake up for the game, which until now has relied solely on migration to control town growth. I'm quite nervous about it actually. It could change the feel of the game quite dramatically. This feature has to be done though. We can't make a game about setting laws and moral choices while leaving out sexual topics.

But whatever we add has to affect gameplay as well, and the most obvious way to do that is to tie sexual moral choices into birth rates. If you want to grow your population in a more predictable way than random migrants, you'll need more babies. But that requires certain laws. And if you don't like those laws, its back to migration for you.

As regards AS, we're going to skip the infant phase, because there isn't time for them to grow up while you’re playing the game. It will probably be the case instead that older children spawn at hospitals (if you have them) and we’ll see how it goes. I'm hopeful I can balance it into something fun.

Citizens shacking up leads me on to 2 social issues I've wanted to put into the game for a while. And it’s probably easier if I do it before Steam…

Homosexuality and Abortion

There are going to be gay men and women in the next version, who you can choose to make welcome or condemn. If you at least tolerate them, they'll be happier individuals and more productive workers. However, in Atomic Society if you encourage something, you get more people who are affected by that issue coming to your town, so it could affect procreation.

As for abortion, I've always wanted to put really big life issues into Atomic Society, and this has to be something players decide for themselves. Having lots of pregnant women and new mothers is going to hurt the productivity of your town, and there will be women who choose to abort their pregnancy. We leave the motivations of the citizens up to the player's imaginations, as it makes for better storytelling, but I can imagine some grim towns coming in the next version!

I guess I am a little anxious about adding these issues because you know what the internet is like with anything remotely controversial, but so far the audience for Atomic Society has been really mature and chilled, so I think it'll be okay. Anyway, it's what the game needs, so I've just got to roll with whatever happens. I'm bored of games that ignore topical issues.

Cut Features

If you’ve been reading past dev blogs, you might remember me discussing features like religion, radiation and electricity. Rest assured these are still in the early stages of development, there just wasn’t time to put them into 0.0.9. When the time is right to work on them again, we’ll do our best at finding fun ways to add them into the existing simulation.

Steam Draws Ever Nearer

After two years of our game only being available through our website, we are finally working on getting the Steam release ready to ship. Last week we met up in person, as we do from time to time, and discussed what could be the biggest milestone in our journey as fledging indie devs. We sketched out the new version and pencilled in a possible release date. As soon as I think we can hit it, I’ll make sure everybody knows, but I’d like it to be within the next 3 months.

In the meantime, I have to work out what to do about the Special Edition version of the pre-alpha. We put a time limit on selling it, because I want to reward our earliest backers by making the rewards unique for them, but the Special Edition sells well and has kept us going at times.

There is so much to do. At least launching on Steam must be easy from a technical point of view, given the incompetent garbage that pours onto it every week, but it's still a huge thing as it could decide whether game development becomes a job for us, instead of being a hobby that pays expenses. The overly optimistic and overly negative parts of my brain are at war right now, trying to predict the future. As the designer, I'm probably more terrified of the reviews than the money, but money has its uses. It's not like I'm going to starve to death whatever happens, but I’d love indie dev to be a little more financially secure so we can make a second game one day. Ultimately I haven't got a clue what's going to happen. Am I going to be kicking myself for turning down various publishers or dancing around the room? Does it matter either way?

Anyway that's enough rambling for now. I am still incredibly proud of the new version and the work that went into it, to the point I even dared do some marketing and social media afterwards. I'm really looking forward to making the game bigger and more reliable over the next year, and the work is always worth it in the end no matter how it all turns out.

See you next month.

[ScottFarRoad.]

Welcome to the latest dev blog for Atomic Society. Right now, we’re all becoming a bit manic as we prepare for the Steam release. It’s been a hectic month as usual.

Latest Video Version

My little experiment recording myself reading the dev blog last month seemed to work out well. Some YouTubers randomly re-posted it, and over 6000 people discovered it on one person’s channel alone, which was rather nice although slightly terrifying at the same time.

​If you want to hear and see this blog in video form, you can find it here...

New Bug-Fixing Update Released

We’ve spent the whole of June fixing bugs, and have just released another large update to the game. Anybody playing the pre-alpha can upgrade to version 0.0.9.1 right now if they download the game again.

This new update contains over 25 bug fixes, including solutions for issues that have been in the game for ages, the kind of fiddly bugs that always got put at the bottom of our to-do list when we were feeling exhausted. There's still a lot to do of course, but the game is definitely running more reliably than ever before.

If you remember last month's blog, I was concerned about the number of bugs in the game as Atomic Society became bigger and bigger. I didn't know whether to divert onto fixing them, or press ahead and get as much content in the game as possible before Steam. Both routes had advantages.

In the end, we chose to focus on bug fixing, and I'm glad we did. It’s amazing what a month of bug-fixing can do for our sanity. Every bug fixed is one less thing to store in our heads and fret over. I feel slightly more confident about the game surviving its Steam launch now, though we’ll have to see.

Full patch notes for the update can be found here.

Some of the most bizarre and complicated bugs we've fixed involved raiders stealing corpses out of the old people’s home, and drug-users overdosing on their own supply even though they were dead. Nick (our main coder) also did a complete redo of the storage system to make it much more robust. You’d think NPCs using a storehouse would be pretty simple, but it isn’t when various things can happen to that NPC on the way there. Perhaps he’s murdered, or arrested, or raiders kidnap him, or disease gets him, or he simply decides to wander into the wasteland. The storehouse has to be aware of where every item is. Multiply that by 300+ citizens and you'll get a few bugs. I think we've fixed most of them now though.

To help find bugs for this patch, I started playing the game in a way I absolutely hate. For each gameplay decision, I worked out what I really wanted to do, and then did the complete opposite. I built the worst post-apocalyptic settlement possible and hated every law I implemented.

​It felt horrible and was also surprisingly tiring having to override your own views constantly, but at least it helped with the testing process.

Current Views on the Project

​Considering we're on the verge of what might be the biggest shake-up to our lives as indie devs since we started, I’ve been thinking about the process of making this game quite a lot lately.

Steam has been on our minds since early 2015, but we kept delaying our Early Access release over and over to add more content, which annoyed a few people. I've always had in my head that the game should be worth $15 when it hits Steam, but it took us 3 years to get to that point in my opinion. Fortunately we had pre-alpha players who were willing to pay based on the game’s potential, and that kept us going.

We've definitely changed as people since 2015. We began as clueless beginners, and had that naive optimism that helped us get going. We had no idea how complex and time-consuming Atomic Society was going to be at the time, and there was still a romantic air around making indie games back then. Blind optimism started to fade around Summer 2016. That’s when the market became obviously oversaturated with games, and I started to realise how long it would take us to get Atomic Society in a good state.

To be totally honest, I still don't know if the game is good enough for Early Access. I've been playing the game so much recently that I've lost my objectivity. I still like playing it, which is a good sign, but perhaps I have terrible taste. I need to take a break from playing it for at least a month to gain some perspective, but I can't see that happening anytime soon.

I keep telling myself nothing bad can happen when we launch on Steam. Even if the game is a disaster, it's not going to hurt, but I'm having a weird sense of renewed optimism and hope, and with that comes a risk of being disappointed later down the line. There is a remote possibility I could be a full-time (paid) indie dev by the end of the year. That would be my dream job. It's hard to be a pessimist with that career possibility even being on the table. I feel like a man who’s been waiting 3 years to find out if he succeeded at a job interview.

New Features Ready For Steam

Focusing on all the things to do before Steam has kept me grounded. While Nick was working on that bug-fixing patch, Adam (our other coder) has been busy working on the new social issues I mentioned last month. I'm pleased to say that abortion, homosexuality and breeding are now fully working. They need balancing and bug-testing of course, but we were able to get the core work done in a month. 

For breeding, it’s now the case that when you build a hospital, survivors will decide it must be safe to start raising families, and young kids will begin spawning periodically. Back when I was first designing this game, I planned a massively complex system with citizens falling in love and forming relationships and so on, which sounds great on paper, and then you realise players would barely notice any of it. When they’ve got 300+ people to keep alive, there isn’t time to inspect who's sleeping with who. Fortunately player's imaginations fill in all the gaps.

Abortion is now working too. Female citizens who have just given birth won’t be able to work until they’ve physically recovered. Obviously a woman who has terminated her pregnancy will be available. If you're short on workers, or just overwhelmed with new kids to feed, there could be a cold practical reason to tolerate or encourage abortion in your town. This was also the first social issue where I had to decide who should be punished if you choose to condemn it, the woman or the doctor? In the end, I decided to go with just the woman, as I felt that would make the choice more dramatic.

Homosexuality was a bit challenging because there has to be a town planning aspect to everything, and it’s not always easy to connect someone’s sexuality to building a settlement. In the end we made it so that gay survivors will come to your town but not all of them will come out of the closet, to speak. Some of them will keep it hidden, and this will affect their productivity. If they do come out, it will affect your town's birth rate slightly, and you can decide how accepting to be.

I’ve struggled a bit trying to make it so the morals and laws you pick are meaningful, but you can still go in whatever direction you personally think is best. I don’t want this game to be sentimental or full of guilt trips. My hope is the important social issues come with built-in emotions, because we’re all human at the end of the day, but it means accepting people are going to do awful things with our game.

Choosing A Release Date For Atomic Society

We have finally decided to commit to a September Early Access launch. It will be one day that month, unless the whole team dies between now and then (in which case, I shall put it in my will to release the game). We have a basic target at last and it will not change, even if we end up coming out on the last day of September. No matter how much better the game could be, or if feature X was ready, the time has come to face the music. I don't know if all teams decide like this, but for us we emotionally need to share this game with a wider audience. I’m tired of hiding away.

Technically, the game is on Steam already. This week Nick integrated the game with Steam, and it is currently sitting in our personal game libraries. It doesn't actually work, but merely seeing it there is exciting. I've also started looking up how to give our pre-alpha players their Steam keys, which will be important when we switch from Humble to Steam. The process doesn't look too difficult at the moment, but there’s a lot to learn.

I think the mood on the team has changed now we’ve committed to a release month. There’s an energy in the air, and the 4 of us seem more focused on the game than ever before. I still see Early Access as a journey, not the destination, but if we're this excited now, I can't imagine how manic launch day will be.

Progress On Religion

The religion feature has now been fully designed. I'm really hoping we can squeeze it in before Steam, as it will fill a missing gap in the game. Out of everything I've designed, religion has been the hardest thing to get right. I'm not sure why. Perhaps the challenge has been turning something so personal into gameplay without resorting to clichés. The system I've come up with is either going to be really good, or really awful.

When we’ve coded it, religion or your ideology will help explain why the survivors listen to your Town Leader when he tells them to imprison vegetarians for example. Your moral authority - and therefore people giving a damn what you say – will be linked to people sharing your belief system. However, rather than converting people, I'm more interested in making players decide how to get rid of those who disagree with them, for better or worse.

Hopefully this feature will be in the Early Access version on the day we launch, but that will be very tough, considering how big the feature is. I could just delay the game until religion has been finished and tested, which might be the smarter option, but right now we’ll keep hoping. I always believe we can do it, no matter how many delays there have been in the past. Worst comes to the worst, religion will be the first patch after Steam.

There’s also another feature to add as well, which could really make the game last longer, but I’ll talk about that next time.

Dungeness

Although it sounds like the boss of an RPG, Dungeness is actually a place in England. Nani (our artist, also my wife) went with me on a short break recently, because even poor indie devs need to get away when they work and live in the same place day after day. We travelled to the south-east of England, where I used to live, mostly to meet family, but I also wanted to visit Dungeness, which is a very weird place I used to visit as a kid. It's sometimes called the only desert in England, and you can't build there. The people live in shacks in the shadow of a giant nuclear power station, which you can walk right up to and even see people fishing in bubbling hot waters where the station vents into the sea. The area is a bit more touristy these days, but it still has that Cold War bleakness that appeals to me. As you can see from the photo above (which I found online), it basically looks like a level from our game. As a post-apocalyptic fan living in boring old England, Dungeness is the closest I’ve found to stepping into a Fallout-like environment, minus the rad scorpions.

Stuck in the Past With Unity

We have finally locked down the version of Unity we're using, which was already a year out of date. Updating it any more would give us some nice treats, but would break too much of the game's code, so it isn’t worth the hassle.

It's strange that we'll never have to upgrade Unity again on this project. It ties into what I was saying last month, that we're coming to the final phase of development.

We don't have any regrets about using Unity, especially considering it hasn't cost us a penny yet. The only small hassle has been working with third party assets. A few shaders in Atomic Society were made by others, and most of them have been abandoned by their creators over the years. We had to fix them ourselves to keep them working, but it didn’t delay us too long. I’m sure we’ll use Unity again, if we ever make a second game.

End Result of Gaming Abstinence

Earlier this year I wrote about how I’d taken a complete break from the gaming industry and social media. I stopped checking gaming news and forums, and gave up buying new games. I had to do it because I was going crazy spending about 10 hours working on a game, and then trying to relax by spending even more time with games. Day after day, year after year. That's the problem when your hobby is your job, even if you're doing that job for love.

This detox lasted about 6 weeks. It was amazing how much extra time I gained back in the process, but I couldn’t find anything else to plug the hole video games had vacated. I love games too much and I can’t suppress my passion for long, even for my own mental health. I still get the same pleasure seeing a video game today as I did when I was 7 years old and saw Pong for the first time. Some things just fascinate you, there’s no explaining it.

So I'm back to being a gaming addict again. The break has done me good though, I don’t feel burnt out right now, but we’ll see how long it lasts before I need to retreat again.

Wrapping It Up

That's about it for now. Next month’s dev blog should be a fun one because we'll be days away from taking a gamble on Steam. Where will our review score even out? Will I be able to give up my day job anytime soon? I haven't got a clue. Whatever happens, we're launching next month. That fact feels like a black hole. We can't escape it.

I’d like to give a huge thank you to everybody who’s bought the game so far and enabled us to get to this point. The pre-alpha phase has been a fantastic 2 years on the whole. I genuinely feel like everybody who’s bought it has been doing me a personal favour. We’ve met some really nice players, and been able to improve the game in ways that definitely wouldn’t have happened if we’d hidden the game away. That’s why we won’t be carrying on the Special Edition rewards after we hit Steam, even though it might benefit us financially. They’re just for the people who helped us get to this point.

I'll see you next month.