Atomic Society will be removed from sale at the end of this week.

It's been a long, wild ride but the time has come to shut down our little studio and move on to new pastures. Don't worry, everybody who owns the game will still be able to play it. It will remain in your Steam library forever. However, the game barely sells anything these days, and there are still several costs involved in running a business (accountants, etc) so we have to start winding things up, starting by removing the game from sale.

I guess it's an appropriate time to say goodbuye. 2024 marks 10 years since a friend and I (with the optimism of complete beginners) asked “why don't we make a game for fun?”

2014 was a boom period for wannabe developers with crazy dreams. Steam Greenlight (remember that?) had been running for 2 years, the indie market was opening up, and Unity had made it possible for beginners to test their luck, for better or worse. Our idea of a post-apocalyptic town building game was a brand new concept back then. When we revealed it in 2016 (via Kickstarter), no one had heard of Frostpunk, Endzone, or Surviving the Aftermath. That Kickstarter still failed, but luckily a random YouTuber made a video of our fledgling pre-alpha and suddenly thousands of players fell in love with the game's potential and were clamoring to play AS. After yet another 2 years of grueling work, we released the first ever Steam version in Early Access (one of the most stressful things I've ever done!) and it sold quite well, considering we were making things up as we went. For a year or two afterwards we even earned basic salaries from this passion project - not much but we did get the privilege of doing something we loved.

However, it was really hard living up to everybody's expectations. A fully 3D town building/social sim game was a huge concept for a tiny group of hobbyists working around their day jobs! We could just about handle it, but we were slow, and the games industry moves fast. Richer competitors came along. Also, after 7 years of work on top of regular jobs, “burnout” was becoming a thing too. But we pressed on for 3 years in Early Access, getting the game to the best state, and finally let it go for good back in 2021 (during a real life post-apocalyptic event of Covid).

Unfortunately a game only really gets one big launch, and Early Access had been it for us, so that final release didn't do much, but at least finished and I was done. I couldn't even look at Steam without having a weird panic attack after we released. Making and marketing a game had worn me down (several real life disasters didn't help either). You need a lot of business stamina to stick it out in indie dev, and a peaceful real life. After we launched, our American coder friend had to get a real job, our artist had to give up dev to look after their elderly parent, and main coder Nick started a new family. It was okay though as we had nothing more to add to the game, but life had called us all in new directions.

I'm still extremely proud that we managed to create a pretty big 3D game out of a dream, that we stuck with it even when the problems seemed insurmountable, and that Atomic Society is still something different and quirky in an industry that likes to play it safe. For someone's first ever shot at game dev, it's not bad!

Thanks to everyone who bought and enjoyed the game and supported tiny, no-budget indie devs like us. I hope you all enjoyed being crazy post apocalyptic dictators, setting wild laws that might not show up in other games, and that these old blogs have been inspirational for anyone who wants to make their own gaming dream. If you believe in your game, you've got to make it!

However, now it's time for us to head out into the post-apocalyptic “wasteland” and see what other adventures are out there.

Best wishes from the Far Road Games team:

Scott, Nick, Mariana and Adam

Includes:

• Fixed a bug causing the overview camera to exit the map under certain conditions.
  
• Fixed a bug causing crashes when trying to load an invalid save file.
  
• Fixed bugs causing bad navigation problems on Forest Maps.
  
• Fixed a bug causing AI crashes after a completed construction.

What a manic fortnight! Thanks to everybody’s who bought and supported the game since we left Early Access the other week. The launch turned out to be way more popular than anybody here expected and I’ve had so much feedback that I’m still sorting through it. We were used to be about 3 players a week and suddenly there's 1000s.

Thank you to everybody who’s sent me an email or left a useful forum post. We are looking into everything.

Here’s the first round of adjustments...

• Added the ability to disable all messages that appear in the middle of the screen for players who don't want these reminders.
  
  
• Fixed a mining area that was out of bounds on the Forest map and mining areas not being visible on icy maps.
  
  
• Fixed an issue with the belief menu UI resetting when you tried to change options.
  
  
• Fixed an issue that could've potentially been causing saving the game to fail and possibly causing performance issues. We're still monitoring this one.
  
  
• Fixed a various typos.

We are still investigating some occasional complaints of performance issues (which as far as I can tell seem to affect big towns) and we’re keeping an eye on that save problem. We don't intend to leave any big bugs unfixed.

Please keep the bug reports coming. You can find out how to send me one here.


Thanks to everybody who’s left us a review, positive or negative recently. We keep an eye on them all.

Being part-time devs we have zero marketing budget and rely on word of mouth so if you did enjoy the game and would like to leave a few words, that would be awesome.

It’s finished! At long last, Atomic Society is ready to leave Early Access.

It's been one long and difficult journey making our first ever game, around day jobs. The key ingredient was perseverance.

I'm almost reluctant to release the game. It's been such a core part of my life since late 2014, I can't really remember my pre-game dev life.

But it can't stay in Early Access forever. Time to let it go.

Thanks to everyone who's been a part of our long and arduous game dev journey - and greetings to any new players who've been waiting for this moment!

I hope you enjoy creating your own post-apocalyptic civilisation and deciding its laws, if your town survives...

(Patch notes for this final version can be found here in my last blog, including the fixes and tweaks we made during the recent beta).



I can't believe we've come to this point.

In a sense, Atomic Society has been decades in the making. About 20 years ago, as a teenager, I pitched it to a British game developer, thinking that they would take ideas from a random person off the street. They didn’t of course, but they did give me a job as a tester instead.

However, 3 years as a tester was enough to convince me I didn't want to work in the AAA games industry, so I moved on with my life, and Atomic Society stayed as a daydream.

Then in 2014, a friend told me about this "free" game engine named Unity. I gave it a go and realised even an idiot like me could cobble something together that looked vaguely like a video game at home. This was only a year after Valve had introduced the Early Access system. Greenlight was still a thing back then. The indie game market was opening up and I wanted to ride the hype-train.

Naturally, I had no idea how to code, so I naïvely went onto Reddit and asked does anybody want to make a game. The internet is full of horror stories about amateur game dev teams falling apart. Obviously we haven't, and the one thing that worked was just picking the person I liked the most (Nick), someone I could gel with. Without friendship and ease of communication, we would've never made it. Anything else can be learnt.

The next hurdle was finding a 3D artist who would also work for free. Fortunately my wife saw what Nick and I were doing and thought it looked interesting. So she went and learnt Blender (a free modelling program) and taught herself 3D art, just like that. That was lucky.

Afterwards I contacted an old guildmate from World of Warcraft who made music in his spare time and asked if he’d help us with the soundtrack, if I promised to pay him back later. Thankfully he said yes.

It seemed we had all you needed to make a game: A designer/producer type person, a coder, a music guy, and an artist. And lots of spare time. What could go wrong?

We foolishly pencilled in just 3 years dev time and set to work.

We didn't realise it was going to take twice as long...



Gradually we all adjusted to the new way of life: work by day, game dev by night.

Things were fun and exciting at first but after about 8 months the sheer scope of the idea started to kick in. It became apparent we were never going to finish a game like Atomic Society if we didn't find a second coder. So it was back to Reddit again.

Fortunately I struck gold again and found a guy named Adam – who lived across the Atlantic – to join our unpaid ship of fools. He'd never made a game before either, but he had the right personality, and that's what counts.

Now we were getting somewhere: Nick could focus on systems while Adam made the gameplay features.

Then after a mere 14 months of learning the ropes, we had something that vaguely resembled a video game, at least if you didn't look too closely, or expect to enjoy it.

We took this scrappy prototype to Kickstarter with an extremely optimistic £70k fundraising goal and presented the game to the world for the first time.

And that's when realised we weren't going to be one of those amazing indie success stories you see in those documentaries. Our Kickstarter flopped and only earned about £3k.

The reception on Steam was much better admittedly, and we cruised through Greenlight, but it was a worrying sign.

Wiser devs have told me since that we should've given up at that point and chosen a different idea. Perhaps they were right, but I was in love with this idea, and we couldn't chuck away 14 months work.

So we decided to keep going and released what we had to little fanfare on our website.

We sold about 20 copies a month.

But that was great! At least to people who'd never sold something they'd made by hand before.

However, there was no turning back after that. We would never abandon a game after people had spent money on it. We had an audience to serve, albeit a tiny but loyal one.

Atomic Society had be finished, no matter what. We believed in it that much.




Having release on our website, little did I know it was going take a whole extra 2.5 years of work before the game was ready for its Early Access debut!

Why has it taken so long?

Partly because of real-life troubles. Work, family and health get in the way.

But the biggest time-sink was the mistakes that come with making your first ever game. For example, I slowly realised that Atomic Society was actually two game ideas in one - a society-building one and a town-builder one. It was extremely difficult to do both ideas justice and took an immense amount of work.

I was also bewitched by player feedback. Obviously you want to keep the audience satisfied, but I didn't realise doing nothing can be better than not living up to expectations. For example, we had many requests to add in combat and raiders (which would make the game a town, society and combat game in one!). Naturally we couldn't do 3 games in one, so we did a story thing with the raiders. That still took months and naturally wasn't what combat-hungry players liked, so in the end all this work became an optional bonus feature. There's been so many detours like that.

Coding problems added up too. Implementing a saving and loading system 18 months after starting the project (rather than at the start) took ages. And so many systems have had to be rebuilt from scratch as well because we just didn't know where we were going at the time. We've also had nightmares with 3D pathfinding, especially as we're stuck using a lot of third-party tools. AI navigation is one of the trickiest things in game development and over a year of Nick's life has been devoted to this one aspect of the game.

Then there've been things that turned out to be far harder than expected, like last year when we had to scrap a 90% complete feature after 6 months because the last 10% was too much. That was a real low-point. A lot of time and money has gone down the drain.

All these delays are expensive, emotionally and financially. Making indie games from home is cheap but still has costs. PC hardware blows up, you need a website, company email address, and online repository to upload content changes. We also have to pay for a business bank account and accountant. And most importantly we had to stay friendly with each other, no matter what mistakes were made.

Throughout these early years, the main thing that kept us going was the hope that the game might be a success on Steam, even though its Kickstarter had flopped. But it was a tense guessing game. We had no idea if the work would ever find an audience.

Our hopes increased though when a famous YouTuber made a video about the pre-alpha version (without us even asking him to). Overnight that quadrupled our sales. It also boosted our wishlist numbers into viable territory. Perhaps this crazy idea was going to be mildly successful after all?

A few publishers must've thought so, as following that video suddenly we were contacted by various companies who wanted to help us out. We had a small taste of popularity.

However, for better or worse, we turned them all down because we wanted to work at our own pace, and publishers don't work for free either.

After about 4 years of work by this point, we were too attached. We still wanted to do things our way. That has good points - it's the independent spirit - but it also has downsides...




I still haven't recovered from our Early Access release in October 2018. I didn't know how shy and reclusive I can be until I had to do marketing!

However through gritted teeth I did what publicity I could, and after nearly 4 years of work we were ready - or fed up enough - to put the game on Steam and see what happened. It was time to face the wider public.

I can't say I enjoyed the launch. It was terrifying and exhausting and I was pretty much a wreck from nerves and working overtime by the time we hit the release button.

Thankfully our prayers were answered. The game sold. The stars aligned. People showed up! All that dreaming and hoping finally paid off.

We sold more on the first day than our entire 2.5 years of being a pre-alpha. Nobody on the team could believe it. It was incredibly exciting and rewarding, but then it started to sink in that the journey was far from over. We hadn't finished. This was just a new beginning. And not everybody was happy with the first ever Steam version of our game.

There was an insane amount of player feedback and a real pressure to come up with the goods in a timely manner.

And I soon realised I didn't have the answer to a very important question: when is this game actually "finished"?

How can you finish a race if there isn't a finishing line?

It turned out the finishing line can't be whenever you put in every idea you or a player has, because that day never comes. Ideas are endless. And as we didn't have a publisher, and were self-funding, we could've technically continued until death.

Early Access proved to be the hardest part of the journey. Months rolled by as we kept trying to create the magical version that would make the game seem finished. It never came. In fact the finishing line seemed further away.

After a year on Early Access, sales and hype dried up. Our review score started to wobble as people became impatient. Team morale started to fade because 5+ years is a long time to stay energised and invested in anything, and what we did add in Early Access didn't seem to make a huge difference.

I was starting to despair, and to be honest, if I hadn't written about all last year in a blog, and if another experienced game developer (Tomer Barkin from Suncrash Studio) hadn't read it by chance and told me what to do, we might've never finished the game.

Thankfully Tomer gave me some hard-earned lessons pointed me in the right direction again.

I didn't realise that when you release on Steam, even in Early Access, the creative phase is essentially over. No more daydreaming. Now the developer's job is now just to fix complaints bit by bit, until one by one, until the players are satisfied with what you've offered them. When you launch to a big audience, the game belongs to them.

So we abandoned our never-ending idea list (mostly) and turned instead to what players were telling us instead. The Early Access audience was going to be our guide to finishing the game. Not every idea a random player had, but what they didn't like.

And that is how we've spent the last, and final year of game development: fixing what players didn't like.

Suddenly we were making progress again because we had a direction, and our review score started climbing.

But it's been the most gruelling 12 months. Partly because 2020 was brutal for many reasons. Partly because giving up your own vision is difficult. And mostly because we were exhausted!

However we didn't give up even as another Christmas rolled by, and through sheer bloody perseverance we managed to solve the big remaining problems, and double the game's length in the process.

It worked. Everything I've heard from people about the latest version is really positive.

Could it be that after 6.5 years in total, Atomic Society is finally ready? It better be!





Before I wrap this up, I asked our little team for their top 2-3 tips now we've come to the finishing line:

My Tips (Designer/Producer):

• Games essentially involve doing the same thing over and over again, that whole “30 seconds of fun” thing might be cutting it a bit short. I’d say it’s 60 seconds of fun, but that’s all a game is. A game is doing something fun over and over again. I didn’t realise this at the start. I had really big picture ideas when I should've been focused on the moment-to-moment fun.
  
  
• As mentioned before, find the one thing your game is about and focus on that. Don't make 3 games in one. At least if you want to finish it in a decade!
  
  
• This rule has never been proved wrong – everything takes twice as long as you think it will. So if you think your game will take 3 years to make. It will take 6. If you think a feature will take a month, it will take 2.

Mariana’s Tips (Artist)

• Animations aren't worth the effort - unless you find yourself loving the process, buy them off the asset store, or avoid them.
  
  
• Perfection is the enemy of progress - get it done, get all your tasks done, THEN worry about making stuff look greater. You won't have time (and you're not getting paid!) to spend a week on a single model, use your time wisely. Atomic Society has over 100 (?) 3d models alone, plus UI, artwork, etc.
  
  
• Choose what you want to be responsible for - if you're in charge of art, fight to get your point across to the designer/programmers. If you're not in charge of e.g. design, let the designer have the last word.

Nick’s Tips (Lead Coder)

• The importance of company and communication. Even if your co-workers won't have a clue what you're talking about it's still required to vent. To externalise the frustration of that bug that just will not squish, the feature taking taking longer than it should.
  
  
• Don't adopt new technologies. Use long well trusted documented APIs. There is always a time cost vs performance/convenience gain.
  
  
• The importance of being idle. I've never wanted to work on something so much in my life and I did this to the point of physical and mental exhaustion. Burn out. I remember the 28 hour shift that did it.

Adam’s Tips (Assistant Coder)

• Find yourself a good team. I CANNOT emphasize this enough. I probably started a dozen and a half different game ideas, tried learning probably 8-10 different engines. only to drop them after a few weeks. There's no better motivator than working with others and holding each other accountable, getting excited about new features, and sharing in the progress you've made. Game dev requires so many different skills, its hard to be proficient enough at all of them that you can work through the frustrations alone. I tried learning blender, I'm a terrible artist and couldn't figure it out. I bought a game design book, which I did find fascinating, but ideas are only ideas unless you have the skills or team to bring that idea to life. Find what you enjoy most (art, design, programming, etc) and work to improve your skills in that area. Burn out is real, especially if you are working a full time job and doing game development on the side. Make sure you give your brain time to shut off every so often, sometimes that’s when the best ideas come about or when you figure out how to solve that impossible bug.

That's a good question! God, I wish I knew.

As I say, it still hasn't sunk in that this is the end. It's over.

I wanted to do so much more marketing for this release but right now, I've spent all I've got. Hopefully you could help us spread the word, or leave a little review so we get noticed.

I'm in a daze right now. For over 6 years Atomic Society has been a persistent background thought in my brain. I need to rest and clear my thoughts.

I was probably ready to be done over a year ago, and my teammates have carried me over this final finishing line. I couldn't have got this far without them.

Before I see what lies ahead, I have to regain my energy and love of games again. Making Atomic Society turned my favourite hobby into a job. I haven't played a new game purely for fun for years and I need to get that passion back.

Then we'll see where life takes us... It's a new life chapter ahead, that's for sure.

Of course we're still going to monitor and track Atomic Society in case anybody finds a bug in the meantime. And we still need to investigate translations too. I haven't forgotten about them!

But today I just want to appreciate crossing the finishing line and turning a dream into a reality.

And to appreciate the fans, teammates and supporters who helped us turn a crazy idea into a game tens of thousands of people have enjoyed.

Sometimes crazy dreams do come true.

• Gameplay Modifiers
  
• 85 Achievements Added
  
• New Building - Miner’s Shack
  
• New Building – Refinery
  
• New Reputation System
  
• Brand New In-Game Goals System
  
• Extended Goals
  
• Map Completion Progress
  
• The Leader’s Mansion can now be upgraded with electricity, letting your spouse(s) and children survive for longer
  
• Citizens no longer die when their morale is zero. They now pack up and leave town instead
  
• A new type of ruin (a burnt church) has been added on certain maps
  
• The “raiders are considering an attack” warning messages can now be disabled in the options
  
• Added a new message when a child becomes an adult worker
  
• Citizens now age up physically as they should, changing from children to elderly models
  
• Various menu/UI tweaks
  
• Various balance tweaks
  
• The AI navigation system has been upgraded, removing various oddities and bugs like citizens walking around the map
  
• Frame-rates have been improved greatly
  
• Fixed: A rare bug that could cause saving to freeze
  
• Fixed: Prison and Punishment Center was draining nearby morale far too quickly
  
• Fixed: A bug where the pause button didn’t behave correctly after pressing Escape to open and close the menu
  
• Fixed: The “would you like to save” message getting stuck on the screen if you were building at the time it popped up
  
• Fixed: Certain the hidden skeletons having incorrect text
  
• Fixed: A rare pathfinding issue that could cause citizens to stop moving for a while
  
• Fixed: A typo with the extended goals. The text now correctly shows 60% for the needs goal
  
• Fixed: Stats screen was not adding citizens who had come to the town because you encouraged a certain law
  
• Fixed: Certain status effects on citizens were not lasting as long as they should
  
• Fixed: An issue with the news feed where it played the "migrants with encouraged issues" more than it should if you encouraged multiple issues
  
• Tweaked: Certain social issues are now make less impact on the birth rate. This will however increase the odds of people having abortions (more pregnant people = higher possible abortion rate)
  
• Tweaked: The camera can be zoomed out further on the Summit map
  
• Tweaked: Reduced the chance for migrants with encouraged issues to occur, as it was happening a lot at maximum migration speed
  
• Tweaked: Increased the chance people will give birth in big, established towns

To keep people updated, the final, finished version of Atomic Society is currently on the beta branch (you can play it now if you have the game). We're almost ready to do the final release and leave beta, but we’re going to wait for the summer sale to end first. It’s not ideal to do a big final release during a sale when people are distracted by so many other games so we better wait.

Thanks to existing players who have tested the beta so far. We’ve got a couple of fixes for it coming up but nothing too serious. It all seems pretty solid so far.

If you try the beta, your progress should roll over when we do the final release in 2-3 weeks.

And welcome to any new players who check us during the summer sale!

To Access The Beta...

1. Right click Atomic Society in your steam library and select properties.
2. Select the betas option on the left. Then choose the beta branch from the dropdown menu.
3. Close the window and in your library Atomic Society will automatically update to the beta (if it doesn't restart Steam). It should say version 1.0.0.0 when you start the game.

I'll let you know as soon as we're ready to do the big final release. Enjoy the sale in the meantime.

After months of work the final content update to Atomic Society is now available to try on the beta branch for those who want to give it a road-test.

This last major update is probably our biggest yet and contains new buildings, more than doubles the length of the game, and has as many player suggestions we could handle.

As soon as the beta is over, Atomic Society will be ready to leave Early Access at last. The end is nigh!


Atomic Society has been a labour of love from start to finish. It started 6 years ago as a hobby project which magically found a small yet loyal audience, even though I have no interest in marketing. We created it by working day jobs to pay for things and developed in the evenings & weekends (at home), all while dealing with those serious heath and personal issues that life loves to chuck your way.

There's been a few times I've wanted to give up and walk away to be honest, but we hobbled on, and for the first time the game feels truly "finished", or as finished as any creative thing ever does (maybe I should move that tree 3 feet to the left...)

It's just as well as the game engine we've been using hasn't been updated since 2017 (because updating would break everything) and it's starting to catch fire, so after a week or two of the beta, we’ll flip that scary button and leave Early Access after 10 big patches, countless new features, 2.5 years in Early Access, and a heap of learning.

Of course we’ll continue to fix bugs, look into translations and make minor tweaks if necessary. I'll also write more about the process when I've had a chance to recover.

We've definitely had a small but dedicated bunch of players over the Early Access years, so thanks to everybody who made it all worthwhile and took a gamble on ultra-indie games like this. I'm not saying Atomic Society is the best game evar!11!, but we're very proud of it, and it wouldn't exist without you.

Hope you enjoy the new content.


1. Right click Atomic Society in your steam library and select properties.
2. Select the betas option on the left. Then choose the beta branch from the dropdown menu.
3. Close the window and in your library Atomic Society will automatically update to the beta (if it doesn't restart Steam). It should say version 1.0.0.0 when you start the game.

Patch Notes

Warning: Update 10 brings so many changes to the game that it makes any existing save games incompatible, so please don’t try the beta unless you want to start over. Achievements WILL carry over from the beta to full release however.

• Gameplay Modifiers: 18 game-changing modifiers have been added to the game, creating new challenges, goals and perks (see below). 6 modifiers are unlocked each time you beat the game until you’ve got them all. These mods essentially give the game levels or stages, and should test any veteran of the game (but some of them are just for fun). Good luck to anybody insane enough to use all 18 of them at once!

Available Mods:

1. Outpost Builder: A new goal to build your town around 3 randomly chosen landmarks.
   
2. Bartertown: A new goal to trade a number of resources in each stage.
   
3. Progressive: A new goal to set at least 6 laws to “encouragement” forcing some tricky moral choices upon you.
   
4. Tyrant: As above but now you must set at least 6 laws to execution or flogging.
   
5. Resource Package: Spawn building and food supplies in your storehouse immediately. Good for emergencies (or cheaters!)
   
6. Double Loot: Ruins contain twice as much salvage, so you can just build and relax.
   
7. Assassin: Target a citizen and terminate them!
   
8. Plague Outbreak: Struggle against a new wave of infection that will decimate your population once a year.
   
9. Reinforcements: Spawns a new group of citizens instantly. This mod can be essential if you are playing on the hardest difficulty with other mods turned on.
   
10. Bad Behaviour: Citizens commit social issues a lot more frequently, making the town more chaotic.
    
11. Radiation Sickness: Occasionally a radioactive wind will sweep through the town, culling a percentage of your population.
    
12. Storehouse Rats: Food supplies will go missing periodically when you have more than 10 of something, so you can never be totally comfortable.
    
13. Full Refunds: Get back all the building materials when you demolish a structure, letting you redesign your town more easily.
    
14. Slow Builders: Increases building times, forcing you to plan ahead and also making the town leader’s upgrades more vital.
    
15. Harvest Time: Food and drink buildings produce twice as much, for a much more laid back experience.
    
16. Hard Times: Citizens are depressed and morale drops much faster than usual, making this need something to really think about.
    
17. Slow Learner: Research times are increased so you have to be more tactical and keep your researchers as happy as possible so they stay at work.
    
18. Lone Wanderer: Start the game entirely by yourself, no help from engineers or citizens.

• 85 Achievements Added: Many achievements have been added, ranging from simple ones that will help new players learn the game works to new challenges for veterans.
  
  
• New Building - Miner’s Shack: Every map now has a few mineable areas if you can reach them. Once researched, the Miner’s Shack can dig up these buried resources endlessly, if you tell it what to dig for.
  
  
• New Building – Refinery: Mined resources need to be processed into useable materials at the new refinery building before you can use them. Together the Mine and Refinery will help your town become self-sufficient, and move away from scavenging, giving a sense of progress.
  
  
• New Reputation System: A reputation meter has been added which goes up or down as your population changes. It goes up through 8 levels and each time it “levels up” you’ll be swamped by a wave of migrants and people will flock to your town more quickly. This keeps the tension going as you master the wasteland, but the good news is you won’t have to wait so long for people to show up and can build bigger settlements.
  
  
• Brand New In-Game Goals System: The goals system has been overhauled from scratch to make the game more compelling and addictive. Goals now appear on the right side of the screen and come in various stages as you play. Each stage can have different types of goal to add variety. We have also added some brand new goals. (You can minimise this if you don't care about the goals).
  
  
• Extended Goals: After completing all the regular goal stages (which beats the map), players can now keep on building with advanced goals that will require you to build a huge town and raise a brood of kids.
  
  
• Map Completion Progress: You can now earn stars and medals for every map letting you track your progress through the game. Beating each map’s extended goals also adds an additional cosmetic medal for those who are really dedicated.

• The Leader’s Mansion can now be upgraded with electricity, letting your spouse(s) and children survive for longer.
  
  
• Citizens no longer die when their morale is zero. They now pack up and leave town instead.
  
  
• A new type of ruin (a burnt church) has been added on certain maps.
  
  
• The “raiders are considering an attack” warning messages can now be disabled in the options.
  
  
• Added a new message when a child becomes an adult worker.
  
  
• Citizens now age up physically as they should, changing from children to elderly models.
  
  
• Various menu/UI tweaks.
  
  
• Various balance tweaks.

• The AI navigation system has been upgraded, removing various oddities and bugs like citizens walking around the map.
  
  
• Frame-rates have been improved greatly.
  
  
• Fixed: A rare bug that could cause saving to freeze.
  
  
• Fixed: Prison and Punishment Center was draining nearby morale far too quickly.
  
  
• Fixed: A bug where the pause button didn’t behave correctly after pressing Escape to open and close the menu.
  
  
• Fixed: The “would you like to save” message getting stuck on the screen if you were building at the time it popped up.
  
  
• Fixed: Certain the hidden skeletons having incorrect text.

Here's some of the things we fixed during the on-going beta. Thanks to all the players who took time to send us a bug report.

• Fixed: A rare pathfinding issue that could cause citizens to stop moving for a while.
  
  
• Fixed: A typo with the extended goals. The text now correctly shows 60% for the needs goal.
  
  
• Fixed: Stats screen was not adding citizens who had come to the town because you encouraged a certain law.
  
  
• Fixed: Certain status effects on citizens were not lasting as long as they should.
  
  
• Fixed: An issue with the news feed where it played the "migrants with encouraged issues" more than it should if you encouraged multiple issues.
  
  
• Tweaked: Certain social issues are now make less impact on the birth rate. This will however increase the odds of people having abortions (more pregnant people = higher possible abortion rate)
  
  
• Tweaked: The camera can be zoomed out further on the Summit map.
  
  
• Tweaked: Reduced the chance for migrants with encouraged issues to occur, as it was happening a lot at maximum migration speed.
  
  
• Tweaked: Increased the chance people will give birth in big, established towns.

On top of all the many big updates we've made before this, we hope it all adds up to make a satisfying little indie game for you.

Please do let us know in the forum if you find a bug or use the “contact us” button on the title screen to tell us directly.

Happy building and thanks again for supporting Atomic Society!

Here’s how the final version of Atomic Society is coming along before we leave Early Access.

Christmas came and went with a few (more) personal tragedies which slowed us down unfortunately. It's been a rough winter, and being such a small team if one person can’t work, we have to limp on without them. But we're back together now, and started the New Year determined to get this project over the finishing line.

Rather than breaking up the next version, we’ve decided to squeeze everything into one update before we leave Early Access!


The next big update is the last, but we’ll keep supporting the game afterwards with translations (when we can afford them), and by fixing bugs. However, content-wise, I think we’re done after 2 and a half years on Steam and 6 years of part-time development in total.

Looking at how the game is ending up, I think we (like most devs) have been able to do about 70% of what we actually envisioned years ago. But sometimes you just need to say goodbye to a project and move on, and our time is nearly here.

I’d always wondered when Atomic Society would be “done”, as this was our first ever attempt at making a game, and nobody on the team had any past experience to rely on. It turns out we’re done when we can’t go on any more, physically, mentally, financially or creatively. It's the old saying that "at work is art is never finished, only abandoned."

But I’m still extremely proud of what we’ve achieved, or will be when I have time to reflect. Despite having no money and no clue, we actually made a pretty complex game that thousands of people have enjoyed, and that’s not a bad achievement.



Here’s a look at the patch notes for the next update so you can see what we’ve squeezed into it.

• Unlockable Gameplay Modifiers. Now when you beat the goals on a map (which have also been improved) you will gradually unlock 18 gameplay changing modifiers. Some are beneficial, letting you cheat at the game, and others bring brand new challenges for replays, like radiation, trading a number of resources, or setting a number of laws in a specific way. The most complicated mod involves you building multiple town outposts on the same map and juggling 4 mini-towns instead of one central town.
  
  
  
  
• New Improved Goals System. We’ve completely remade the goals, and they now appear on the screen like a list of objectives. They will now guide you through 4 stages or chapters of the game, so you always have an target to reach for. We’ve also mixed up the goals and added in brand new ones to keep things fresh.
  
  
• Extended Goals. After beating the normal goals mentioned above, committed players can now try extended bonus goals that require you to make a gigantic settlement that is completely perfect. These “master” goals effectively double the size of the average town and should give you something to focus on if you just want to playing with your city. There is also a little cosmetic reward if you manage to complete the extended goals on a map.
  
  
• 95 New Achievements Added. We’ve finally added achievements and we might have gone overboard! 95 achievements are now up for grabs in the coming version. Many are aimed at new players, to help them learn the basics, but others create new challenges. If you like achievements, this should add hours of content.
  
  
  
  
• New Miner’s Shack & Refinery Building. As mentioned in a previous dev blog, the next version comes with two new buildings that must be researched. These two structures allow towns to become self-sufficient when possible. The Miner’s Shack can only be placed in difficult, hard to reach areas of the map – which may be a challenge – but it can produce an unlimited amount of unrefined stone or metal if you keep it supplied with workers. These 2 new resources can be converted at the refinery, meaning that you don’t need to go salvaging at all (if you can get enough wood from elsewhere). Hopefully this adds a sense of progress to the game, that you’re moving away from being a mere scavenging society.
  
  
  
  
• Reputation Feature. In order to keep the pressure on as your town becomes self-sufficient, it now has a reputation meter. This increases – or decreases - with population. The higher it gets (through 8 levels) the more migrants will find you desirable, though you can still keep them out with guard towers. This does make the game more difficult, but at the same time it makes it easier to form a big town and we’ve even had to increase the population goal to cope with this.
  
  
• Map Completion Stars. To go with achievements, every map now has a set of medals showing if you’ve completed it and on what difficulty. This adds a sense of completion and lasting progress to the game.
  
  
• New Improved Tutorial. We’re currently working on improving the tutorial to make it easier and more fun to learn how to play.

There are several other smaller changes coming too, like a new upgrade for the leader’s house, several bug fixes, and changes to how morale works, but I’ll stick them in the final patch notes.

We hope this, on top of every else added over the last 2 years, creates enough content for a satisfying game.

Right now I’m swamped trying to test all this at the moment (testing 95 achievements and 18 game-changing mods is a lot of work), but we’re getting there, one day at a time.




Now things are winding down, we finally said farewell (sort of) to our 2nd part-time programmer Adam, who I think joined us back in October 2015 believing he was signing up for a year or two of casual work. But making a game took twice as long as expected (6 years instead of 3) so he ended up settling in for the long haul. He didn’t have kids when he joined us, now he has two. As I've said, it took us bunch of noobies a while to work out how to make a game.

At the start of the project I didn’t think we’d need 2 programmers, but we soon learned we did. We need 1 person to make the behind the scenes stuff (main coder Nick in our case), and 1 person to code the little gameplay stuff that players actually notice.

I therefore naively posted an ad on Reddit in October 2015 asking if anybody wanted to work with a bunch of nobodies and Adam signed up. I don't think he'd ever used Unity before, but he was a quick learner and afterwards he became our go-to “little task” guy.

It’s weird spending 5+ years working with someone and you haven’t ever seen them beyond a photo or a voice on Discord. I want to thank him in person, but unless I’m willing to fly to America that isn’t happening. Anyway, thank you Adam! We couldn’t have got this far without you.



I finally have a new idea for a game, though I’m surprised I want to make another game after this. To be honest, I’ve been playing fewer and fewer games lately, as I just don’t have time for big 50+ hour experiences while making a game, and so many modern games are (in my view) worse versions of games that came out 20+ years ago.

Aside from that, being a self-employed game dev isn’t easy. This hobby definitely has perks (you’re earning a bit of money from making games!) but it can still wear you down. You come home from a day job which pays the bills, then spend evenings doing a lot of tedious tasks in a game engine that loves to crash (we haven't updated Unity since 2017 as it would break everything). You also have to work with others and explain complex things awkwardly over long-distance. And you’re perpetually on the verge of going broke and making bad design/business decisions because there isn’t a right or wrong path (except perhaps in hindsight). Meanwhile deadlines slide as things inevitably become too complex or too buggy.

I must admit, there have been plenty of times when I’ve wanted to give up over the last 6 years. I usually want to bail when the next update is half-broken, or I’m sick of playing AS, or all my “great” ideas turn out to be less than amazing. At times like those I was sure there had to be a better hobby/side income out there than making games, especially when it feels like a thousand new games come out every day. Who wants another game?

But now we’re at the end of Atomic Society, the game-making excitement is flowing back and 1 new game idea out of the 100s I've had simply will not go away, no matter how much I've discovered about the pains of making software. I think the appeal is the potential of applying 6 years of hard-earned lessons and believing that next time we'll really hit it out of the park.

Making Atomic Society has been a lot like a bad relationship. We went into it blindly with a lot of hope and naivety, but without realising how hard it would be or all the implications. It was really guessing what to do most of the time and the fact the game has turned out to be slightly decent is astounding.

Wisdom is the main thing we’ve gained from the project. I'm looking forward to cashing it in on a new project later this year.



Coming to the end of the project is also the right time for reflection and one of the biggest battles I’ve had making this game is with my own personality, as these dev blogs prove. I often sound like I’m on the edge of a nervous breakdown when I read them back.

I just don’t feel at all suited to running an indie studio and I don’t think I’m even a born game designer. But here I am, weirdly making a game and co-running a “studio” (if you can call a corner of my lounge a studio).

I love creating things, but I rarely release them. For example, I’ve written big novels that nobody has ever read. I just put them in the drawer. I like the process, not the selling. I like making games but whenever I try to be a business guy, I get so stressed it’s literally bad for my health. I either feel super-excited or extremely anxious and that’s a dangerous combination. It can (and has) led to self-medicating just to calm down.

I’ve personally enjoyed the last 3-4 months because most people out there seem to have forgotten we exist. The forum is quiet. Reviews trickle in but they’re mostly positive. This lets me just focus on my game without the stress. I feel free again as I haven’t since the early days of the game.

I’m saying this to myself because with the end of Early Access coming, I’m growing tense about the amount of "extroverted" stuff I should be doing. I was so emotionally burnt out by our Early Access launch that I still get a queasy, sick feeling when I think back to those days.

I guess I’m trying to accept that I just need to stay within my emotional limits, to stay in the calm zone even if that means switching off or losing out. If I was more outgoing and practical, we’d probably be richer, but I’m an introvert, working with 2 other introverts, and we’ve still managed to make a game that took the financial strain out of life for a year or two. Hopefully we can get by in the future.

Can you run a lasting business as an introvert? Probably not. But you can make a game without becoming stressed or addicted, at least that's the plan.




I’ve never been remotely accurate about a release date projection since I started writing these blogs years ago so it would be pointless to do so now! However, my least favourite rule to take your estimate and double it is true, and my personal estimate is 6 weeks to release… Which means 12 weeks.

Which would mean first week of May. That sounds stupidly far away so I hope it’s a lot sooner than that. We cannot keep the lights on that long. But somehow we'll manage. We’ve never given up as people know by now, despite how bumpy the road can get.

I will be in touch when we’re ready to flip that "leave Early Access” switch and I’ll keep checking the forums, emails, etc when possible (even as an introvert).

Thanks for reading this far. Can't wait to share this final version with you!

Here's a little update on how we're doing with Update 10, which is probably the most content we've added to the game in one go.

As I revealed in the last blog, this next update already includes 1) new mining and ore processing structures, 2) a brand new reputation system for migration that keeps the challenge going and lets you make bigger towns (see the new bar on the needs menu, in the pic below), 3) a completely new goals system - including some new goals - 4) and numerous tweaks and fixes.

But over the past month, we've been working predominately on the version's biggest feature…




In update 10, each time you beat a map by completing all the goals you'll unlock several new gameplay changing modifiers that can add replay value and extra challenge on future play-throughs, a bit like a mini campaign.

We’ve made 18 mods in all, some which add new challenges and goals, and others which are basically "cheats" for those who just want to make a big town. It's up to you what to enable or disable.

Here’s the full list (90% of these are finished):

Challenge Mods:

• Bad Behaviour: Citizens are far more likely to commit social issues, making your town more chaotic.
  
• Bartertown: A new goal to trade a set number of resources in each stage before you can proceed.
  
• Storehouse Rats: Food and drink resources will begin to decay if you have too many in stock, making stockpiling tricky.
  
• Wanderer: Begin without any engineers or citizens, making the start somewhat harder.
  
• Slow Learner: Doubles the amount of time it takes to research new buildings, forcing you to plan ahead even further.
  
• Radiation Sickness: Radiation as an effect that can periodically cull a random percentage of your town, forcing you to adapt to an unexpected loss of people. This one is for expert players only.
  
• Tyrant: A new goal to set at least half your laws to flogging or execution.
  
• Progressive: Same as above, but you must encourage at least half the laws.
  
• Plague Outbreaks: Enable this and occasionally everybody in your entire town will catch the plague at once.
  
• Multiple Towns: A big new goal that requires you to build at least 3 small town outposts rather than just having one big town and manage them all together.
  
• Misery: Increases the rate which morale drains, making this need far more threatening than before (and people now also leave town when their morale runs out, rather than dying!)
  
• Cowboy Builders: Construction times will take much, much longer meaning you have to plan ahead again.

Positive Modifiers:

• Resource Packages: Periodically spawn a bundle of essential resources in the storehouse.
  
• Bounty: Food and drink production buildings produce twice as much with this turned on.
  
• Reinforcements: Periodically spawn a group of citizens instantly, rather than waiting.
  
• Full Refunds: This will instantly give you back the resources you consumed making a new building. It should make perfecting your layout easier.
  
• Assassin: An ability that lets you kill any citizen you want on demand. This is actually a debug tool we have but we thought we might as well chuck it in as using it feels rather sinister...
  
• Double Loot: Ruins have twice as many items in them.

(The UI below is still being developed - we've got a lot of icons to draw!)



When you unlocked all of these (perhaps you'll get 3-4 per map), you can turn on all 18 at once if you feel like it, it’s up to you. Hopefully unlocking and trying them out will significantly increase the length of the game, combined with all the other features I’ve already mentioned, and achievements and medals for completing maps (which we're still working on)... As I've said, there's a lot coming in the next update.



Sadly I don’t think we’re going to hit our Christmas deadline having to work around day-jobs as we do, and with some nasty things that have happened to me personally this year (2020 has been tragic in some ways). But on the whole things are going well. In fact I think we’ve made more content faster than ever before, which is just as well because there’s so much to test and balance with these new features. I don’t want to cut corners and introduce new bugs that could hurt our review score by charging for a Christmas release date, especially as we're tottering on 70%, just 1% above the dread “mixed” zone.

We also need a really big version to mark our 1.0 release. If we don't, nobody will notice when we leave Early Access, which certainly won't help sales. So hold in there, fans of the game, but our survival as a company depends on getting it right. Hopefully it will be out quite early in 2021, with a beta version to try even sooner.


There hasn't been too much behind the scenes drama since I last wrote a blog, at least game-related drama. Just when I think we’re going to run out of money for good, we get a good sales week and can limp on a little further. Just when I think I can't take another bad review, a good one or email comes in and cheers us up again.

Right now, as we're getting to the end, I think the 4 of us are focused on getting to the finishing line like exhausted marathon runners. It’s been almost 6 years of work to get to version 1.0, and though we want to make the best game we can, we're also keen to be done. December 2014 (when we first came up with the idea of making a post-apocalyptic city builder) was a loooong time ago…

It’s strange knowing there's nothing else I need to design after this. I've been constantly planning one version after the next for so long, always trying to keep two steps ahead of the coders (and players), and now that part of my job is almost over. I can’t quite believe it. Our part-time American contractor, Adam, is finishing up his last few small tasks at the moment and then he’ll be moving on. He joined us in 2016, thinking this game would be a year or two of his life, but has stuck with us ever since even though it certainly hasn't been a money-maker. Adam has such an easy going, positive attitude, we're all going to miss him, and finding out what British slang words he doesn't understand.

Approaching the end has pretty much made my dilemma over how to make a game in Early Access redundant. Readers of these blogs will know I was wondering whether to stick to one’s personal vision - and therefore lose money and get insulted in reviews - or adopt an admittedly very sensible business strategy and focus on complaints and basically making the game players request, even if - in my view - that leads to a generic game, and even if I don’t have the personality or interest in being a business guy.

Those problems don’t matter now. The game is almost finished. It is what it is. We did our best.

I think on the whole things may have been better if we didn't need to use Early Access. I’m not sure making something you care about in front of an anonymous audience is necessarily the best approach, or games revolving around “updates” and being a "service" to keep players hooked leads to interesting experiences. I'm an old-school gamer and liked it when single-player games were content to just give you a few nights entertainment and be done. I hope that’s what Atomic Society does for the price of a cheap take-out (or even less if you get it on sale). I liked the days when we got 3 Grand Theft Auto games (for example) in one console generation instead of… none, as it was in the last, because they kept updating the same game infinitely.

I do think our game is “better” because we listened to players, but I think at the end of the day, you can only really make something for yourself, even if that makes you unpopular.

What happens after this update? I’m not sure. This year has been pretty good at teaching me not to plan ahead. I have ideas for other games naturally, but I’ve been reluctant to commit. I'm not the same person I was 12 months ago, so deciding what to make in advance is foolish. One idea has risen to the top however, but it will be a long time before anything is playable. The only criteria I have is "would I buy and play this game?". 6 years of experience making AS is going to come in very handy.

I know some people in the comments seem reluctant to make games after reading my depressing blogs, but I think the answer is to keep the hobby attitude. Pretend that money and success don’t matter and won't come, and just make the game you enjoy making.

As soon as I personally think about making games as a business that’s when all the fun gets replaced by stress. But that’s just me. You can only do what you can do.




I'd currently say update 10 is about 80% done (excluding translations). I’ll let you know as soon as the beta is ready to try out.

Thank you to everybody who's been a part of our Early Access journey. The fans of the game have made it all worthwhile.

After a frantic summer trying to resurrect our little game dev business following a difficult start to the year, things quietened down while we focused on making one of the biggest updates so far.

If all goes well, this next update could bring us to the end of our Early Access journey, if we manage to get it all done in a single update (if not, we'll break into two parts).

Things are going reasonably well so far, given that it's been little more than 6 weeks since our last update. We haven't hit any big problems yet, as we did with the dreaded path system, and the business and teamwork tweaks we made (focusing on complaints, giving each other daily progress updates, etc) made working part-time from home around day jobs more productive, which is just as well, as lockdowns mean we can't get together as a team any more even to say hello.

The core focus of the upcoming version will be addressing the last major complaint some people still have: that Atomic Society is too short and could use more depth. If our new ideas pan out, the upcoming changes should add a lot more value and interest, at least for those already enjoying the game.

Here's what we've been working on so far (note: screenshots are from a work in progress dev version, so excuse any weirdness)…




In the top right of the above pic you should see the new goals tracker. For the next update, we've redone and expanded the goals aspect completely, making it more addictive and interesting. Goals are now pinned to the screen (you can minimise them) and divided up into stages or tiers. Each time you complete a stage you get a large wave of migrants to deal with.

Each goal stage is different and bigger than the last, and some stages have unique goals. We've also added in some new goals to spice things up a bit. This should also make the game easier to learn.

On top of that, we've also added new "extended goals" for hardcore players and those who really want to make a big settlement. You can activate these when you beat a map, and the reward will probably be an achievement (as we don't want to force players to go for them). At the moment an extended goal involves going for 800 citizens, double the current amount, among several other tasks.


In the bottom left of the above pic, you may also notice a new vertical progress bar (ignore how it looks, we're trying out different styles).

One of the problems I've been trying to solve is the old survival game problem of the game getting easier rather than harder as you craft stuff and get stronger.

To help with this in Atomic Society we've added a new reputation feature. From now on, as your population grows, your town becomes more attractive, and migrants will start coming faster (there's levels of intensity) rather than migration being random, as it is now. On top of that, the higher your rep gets, migrants will become weaker as they've travelled from further away to find your sanctuary.

When we've balanced it properly, this new feature should help maintain some of that addictive pressure from the start when it feels like you're being overwhelmed with mouths to feed and corpses to clean up. It's going to be tricky to balance it correctly though, as overcoming that survival challenge and building a strong town is part of the fun, but we'll try to find a decent middle-way.

This feature should also help with those lulls when you're just waiting for people to show up. Now you're always working towards something, the next reputation "ding".




In the picture above you can see two brand new buildings that we're working on right now for the next update. Given in mind people will try to make larger settlements, thanks to the new features I just mentioned, we're also going to let advanced towns become completely self-sufficient. In the next update you may eventually be able to get to the point that you no longer need to salvage at all, but you'll have to plan your town around resource areas instead, if you want to go down that route.

The new mine and refinery structures both need to be researched. When you try to build the mine, certain areas of each map will be highlighted, showing where you can get ore from, and you can order the mine to focus on stone or metal. The refinery obviously converts it into useable building materials. This should make those pesky mountains a lot more useful and add more strategy to how you expand your town.


After putting it off for so long, as the text in our game kept changing so much, we've finally started getting quotes to translate the game into other languages. And it isn't going to be cheap. Each translation is essentially a month's entire income from Steam (for us), but apparently it pays off as it opens the game up to a new audience. I suppose we could get volunteer players to translate it, but this is apparently slightly risky, as a weak translation can lead to bad reviews, and it's also something we'd need to manage and monitor on top of everything else.

We haven't ordered a translation yet (as we'd just have to redo it after this version) but we're probably going to test the waters with a popular language first of all, to see if it pays off.


What you see above is just the things we've started on this month so far. The biggest feature for the next update isn't quite ready to talked about it yet as it's still early days. But I will do so in future blogs.

My hope is that, despite 2020 trying to destroy society, we can get the update out by December. Hopefully it won't be like last year we were working until 11pm on Christmas Eve to get a version out. That sucked. Ideally it will be sooner than Xmas, but if anything goes wrong I'll let people know.




I know a few people just read these blogs to hear about the ups and downs of trying to make your first ever game with zero experience, so the rest of this blog will focus on that...

Fortunately, I don't have new disasters to share. As mentioned, we spent the summer trying to make amends for six months of work on a feature nobody actually wanted, and were close to being flat broke after several months of losing far more than we earned. But after getting some great advice, I started focusing on what players didn't like about the game (as such people hurt the review score, and thus our bottom line) rather than just focusing on fan requests (although of course if somebody requests a great idea, it won't be ignored) and my own personal vision for the game.

The response from existing players to us being open and honest about our development woes was incredible. If you look at the review graph on the store page, you might see a large big spike straight after the previous blog. I'm amazed and deeply grateful to anybody who left a quick review. And the encouragement came just in time. Steam reviews are percentage based, so obviously the lower you go, the harder it is to climb back up. If we hadn't changed course to deal with what the dreaded "red thumbs" were saying, we may have never climbed back out of the mixed zone.

We had a nervous month checking the store page as the trend of reviews changed from negative to positive. For one ludicrous week our review score literally hovered on 69.9% until somebody pushed us over the edge. That was a good day. And to my surprise, it kept on going and levelled out at about 71% where it's now holding, which I think is fair, though I'm not exactly objective.

We'd hoped getting above 70% would automatically increase sales for the game (after all, not many people will take a risk on a "mixed" rated Early Access game) but unfortunately getting above 70% hasn't really made a huge difference to our sales. We've started gaining wishlists again instead of losing them, but I think people may just waiting for us to leave Early Access, considering we're almost there. It may also be that we've taken too long making the game (by picking such a big game as our first project, unavoidable health issues and day jobs). When we first went public with Atomic Society, rival games like Frostpunk, and Endzone and Surviving the Aftermath didn't exist. Now they've come along and eaten our lunch to a degree, though I personally prefer Atomic Society... but I'm not exactly objective.

But it isn't doom and gloom. Following my business "mentor" Tomer Barkan's (of Judgment: Apocalypse Survival fame) advice, I took the risk of running a sale on the game after getting the review score up. This was a gamble. Sales attract people who aren't especially interested in the game, and such people tend to leave bad reviews if they're unimpressed. It could have undone all our hard work getting the score back up and I didn't think we could recover it twice.


Fortunately the latest sale worked. It gave us just enough cash to press on without having to think about spending more time to staying alive rather than finishing a game that is draining the bank account.

​The picture below is Atomic Society's sales graph from the past 12 months. That mountain on the right is the aforementioned one week sale at a 20% discount (the other smaller bumps are the Steam summer and winter sales from the past year). In fact, we haven't seen anything like this since around May 2019 (the first ever sale).

As you can see, daily sales remain quite low (5 copies a day is roughly normal at the moment). Therefore I don't check sales that regularly, so you can imagine my coffee being spat out when I saw this sale spike. The sale marks the first time we've broken even financially for over a year.

In this regard, focusing on complaints really worked out. And thankfully, the game's review score held above 70%. It took a little battering, but didn't decline.



But everything's relative. That spike equates to about 8 weeks of funds. I think that's all we need for now to finish the new update and get the game out of Early Access, but beyond that, I don't know. We've been tottering on the edge of being broke for so long. There have been several moments where I've wondered if I should take more hours at my day job, or apply for development job elsewhere, assuming anybody would hire me (and I'd be willing to move). But I try not to think about it. Staring into the unknown is a good way to spoil the present day and tarnish past successes.

It's quite possible that with the right mindset, we could continue to turn things around and become one of the rare indie dev successes out there...


Having Tomer as my business mentor (he isn't really a mentor, just a nice guy) made a huge difference to our survival. The changes we made by becoming complaint-focused fixed the review score and gave us a great sale. It was fun if manic seeing what we were doing wrong, and implementing practical business changes. But it was also like getting a new job I hadn't applied for.

It seems that to survive as an indie dev, while keeping a team of 3 employed (plus contractors), you 100% have to be passionate about business and marketing or know someone who is. In fact, "business dev" might need to be your first passion, with game development in second place. And though I can muster the energy to act like like Mr. Business on occasion, I'm not that guy by nature and this summer has been gruelling. In fact, I joined a group of professional game developers over the summer, and to be quite frank, I feel stressed just looking at their conversations. I don't want to live my life around wishlist conversion numbers, percentages, Valve's latest blog, etc. I don't want to be controlled by numbers like that. If you're into business and marketing, it probably doesn't feel bad, but I listen to people like the Clark Tank and I just think "I'm middle-aged, I'm going to be dead in about four decades at best, I want to follow what I love". And marketing just ain't it.

On top of that, now we've fixed many of the biggest complaints, a new complaint is emerging that wasn't there before: "This game isn't unique enough". It seems if you focus on complaints, which makes sense, you will inevitably start making something generic because complaints usually compare you to something else that person likes more. However, on the other hand, if you follow your passion and personal vision (at least if you're me), you get bad reviews and go broke.

I'm now wondering if you can actually make "art" (e.g. something you feel passionate about) for anonymous people on the internet rather than following your own heart. You can definitely make "products", but if making products or answering complaints is your thing, there are lots of better paid day jobs out there for such a role. I could spend the next 2 years adding in everything players want, but in the end, I'd just have to ask myself "why did you actually want to make this game in the first place?"

This probably sounds like I'm ranting or depressed. I haven't figured it all out myself, and write largely to figure out what's in my head. I do like solving problems/complaints and I'm enormously grateful to have made it this far, to have created a game that's far more ambitious and successful than I expected. I do still love our game. You don't spend 5.5 years making something if you don't love it. But what do I want to do for a living? And what am I willing to pay to be that person? I think for me, personally - and I certainly don't speak for the whole team - I'd rather be broke than make "products", but I still have my health, which not everybody does.

Whatever I personally think, we will absolutely finish Atomic Society as best we can, focusing on what negative feedback is loosely indicating, and hopefully make a game we can be proud to send out of Early Access. And then perhaps, next year at some point, we can start on a second game of some of the knowledge we've gained. But what should Game 2 be? A game for the public... or a game for me?

Thanks to everybody for reading my muddled thoughts! Apologies if they don't make much sense. Let me know your thoughts on the new content and anything else. I will check comments and I'll be in touch to let you know how this version is progressing between now and Christmas. You can always reach me on the forums in the meantime.

Big thanks again to anybody who left us a positive review and helped keep the lights on so far and for those who somehow make it to the bottom of these blogs. Making your first ever game continues to be a learning experience...