It’s coming up to a month since my last dev blog, and I want to give a quick update on what’s happening. It might be a while until I can relax and take time to write a proper dev blog this month.
Our current goal is to release in late September (think the last week of September) on Early Access. We’re that committed to that as a team that we’ve actually stopped selling the pre-alpha version of the game on our own website. We’ve essentially cut our own tiny income line.
Steam is where our future lies or bust.
Whether or not we actually achieve a late September release depends solely on how many bugs we find in the game between now and release. 95% of the new features for this update are in the game already, but making those new features bug-free is a complete unknown. You can think the game is perfect and then play it one more time and discover something horrific.
Summary: If the game is delayed until October please don’t moan at me. The next version comes out when I can play through it 100% and have bug-free fun.
There is so much to do between now and release that I’m trying not to lose all my hair just thinking about it. I am in the process of making a new trailer, we have YouTubers to contact, Steam keys to give out to pre-alpha players, a huge amount of testing to do (and this is all on top of us having day jobs to work at).
But the game is worth it.
Anyway, here then are the patch notes for the next version of the game. I understand they won’t mean much to people who’ve never played Atomic Society until now, but they testify to what you can expect in a major update from us as developers.
Atomic Society – First Alpha Release – Patch Notes
(This is on top of everything that's already in the game)
- Belief System feature added. Citizens will no longer pay any attention to the laws you set unless they share the beliefs as you. At the start of the game, you can pick what you believe in (ranging from atheism to a variety of existing real-world religions). After you build a Town Hall, you can see what the people in your town believe. To convert people to accepting your legal authority over them, you must choose how to handle the competing religions/belief systems in the game. You can choose to exile the others, educate them, or torture them. Exile is fastest obviously, but will you’re your population number a lot. Torture is fastest, but can cause people to become terrorists. Educate is safest but slowest. Educate and torture require the Town Leader to do the dirty work in person and be inside the Town Hall so you won’t be able to use the Leader for other tasks. Alternatively, you can sell out and change what you believe in at any point if you want a shortcut to being popular.
- Goals feature added. A series of optional challenges have been added to the game to help direct you in how to make the ultimate post-apocalyptic settlement. You will now see a new Goals tab when you begin a game. Complete all 5 goals (more goals coming later) to “complete” the game. Watch out though, as goals can become uncompleted if your town starts to get worse.
- Citizens will now start breeding and having sex. After you build a hospital, citizens will believe it is safe enough to start giving birth to children. Children will be born periodically at medical buildings. Migration has been re-balanced to make breeding essential if you want to grow your town quickly. A new section has been added to the Town Hall stats screen giving more information on the various factors that can affect breeding. After giving birth, women will be unable to work until they have physically recovered.
- Abortion social issue implemented. Pregnant female citizens may now decide occasionally to abort their child. This naturally affects the number of children being born but allows the woman to work without interruption.
- Homosexuality social issue implemented. Homosexual survivors may now decide to “come out of the closet”. If they do so, this will affect your town’s birth rate, but it will make them happier/more productive workers. You can decide how to handle this at the Town Hall.
- Transgender citizens can now affect the town’s birth rate. Transgender citizens can now affect the birth rate if they begin to transition at a medical building.
- Population cap has been increased again to 350 survivors. We have once again increased the size of the settlements you can make. We will keep doing this as long as we think the game is optimised enough and there is enough content to make it worthwhile.
- An Oil Lantern upgrade has been added for the Town Leader. Another special item for the Town Leader can be found if you get lucky while salvaging as the Leader. The lantern reduces the time it takes the Leader to salvage ruins.
- Placing latrines now requires more strategy. You can now only place 4 latrines in the same area. Due to pollution and disease, you must now spread out your latrines a little more.
Other Improvements and Gameplay Changes:
- The Town Leader will now automatically stop what he/she is doing and change task if you give them orders while they are in the middle of something.
- Raiders will no longer attack your town at all if all your buildings are protected by fully upgraded Guard Towers. They will only be activated if you have an unprotected building. A new section has been added to the Stats screen showing the number of unprotected buildings in your town. Aim to keep this at 0.
- Repair Shack workers now have a max range. They will not attempt to fix buildings if they would have to walk too far to get there. This will stop problems where you must wait for a worker to walk 2 miles to fix something when another repair shack is right beside the damaged building.
- On the Easier difficulty, Scavengers will gather loot much faster now, so you will rarely be starved of resources.
- The Builder’s Yard and Scavenger’s Hut can employ more workers now, on all difficulties, making these buildings more useful. In addition many other buildings have had their max number of workers tweaked.
- Raiders will no longer destroy buildings on the Easier difficulty anymore.
- Guard Towers and converted Garrisons now only need 4 weapons to provide max protection (down from 6).
- Food and drink buildings have been considerably re-balanced. Food structures were generating too much, and both food and drink now take longer to make anything.
- Hospital and Greenhouse model have had minor visual improvements.
- The visual appearance of the sun on several maps has been enhanced to make it more atmospheric.
- We have added labels beside the names of engineers and the town leader when constructing so you can identify them more easily on the construction menu.
- The opening story box will no longer appear if you play a custom difficulty game as the text wouldn’t make sense if you change the game rules.
- If you go into Town Leader mode while he/she is repairing a building, it will now open the menu for that building.
- Some news messages have been made less spammy.
- Various minor typos fixed and text elements tweaked.
Noticeable Bug Fixes
- Fixed a bug that made clicking on the repair icon open the menu for a building other than the one you were clicking on.
- Fixed a bug where the amount of housing/shelter you were providing was showing slightly incorrect information.
- Fixed a minor UI glitch with the custom difficulty menu popping open when it shouldn’t.
- Fixed a bug that prevented scavengers finding salvaged weapons in ruins.