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.
