It’s been a little while since I checked in, but progress is going nicely on the next update. Here’s some of the things we’ve been working on lately…
Paths
The next version of Atomic Society will feature paths at long last!
We’re using an auto-pathing system that organically creates trails where the citizens walk most frequently, similar to other games. We're just ironing out the last technical tricks to it at the moment.
One challenge has been making it play nicely with the scenery, which changes as you place buildings and likes to mess up the paths, but we're figuring it out bit by bit. The screenshot below is just a work in a progress shot (textures will change), but it definitely makes the settlements feel more like actual lived-in places.
There will be a small speed bonus for citizens using a path, and trails will fade away if citizens stop using them.
Leader Family System
The other big new feature we've been working on over the past couple of weeks is the Leader's House, a new building that will be awarded to player's after a certain period of time, if their town lasts that long.
The Leader's House, aside from giving you a "trophy" building, also allows you to raise a family and pick 1-3 spouses (depending on your preference). Same-sex spouses will be allowed if you've legalised homosexuality.
This is mostly just for fun, but it also adds a goal to the game, and creates fun stories as you see your spouse and/or children getting up to all kinds of bad behaviour around town, and meeting with cruel fates. We may expand its functions later.
You can obviously procreate and raise a brood of kids, and you can choose whether or not your spouse(s) should work. You can even choose to make your family immune to prosecution, but this will make it harder to convert citizens as they'll see you as being hypocritical.
This features is almost finished now, and we're just at the final testing phase.
The UI elements you can see in the picture below are still placeholder elements at the moment.
Other Upcoming Changes
Apart from these two big features (which have taken up most of our time so far) we're also continuing to monitor the bug situation, so thanks to anybody who's contacted me with a bug report lately. We investigate all the serious ones, if we can reproduce at our end.
We're also continuing to make little tweaks to the UI and other parts of the game, as needed.
There could be another morale-related building in the works as well, but we'll see how time goes as we want to get this update out as soon as possible.
All being well, and that's a big "if" these days, I'm hoping the next version should be ready by early May.
Slow But Steady
It should be no surprise to anybody who's been following our game that the big updates can take us a quite a while to produce, which I'm really sorry about, but it's just the pace we can work at while juggling full-time jobs and various health issues that never seem to go away. Thanks to everybody who has patiently supported us so far and left feedback.
Ideally, I would like to get the game out of Early Access this year and move onto the polish phase of the project as we'll need to find new work soon. Unfortunately the coronavirus is already having its effect, which I didn't expect to be writing a few weeks ago. One team member has already lost their day job due and another is now having to care for an elderly relative, but everybody remains focused on getting this next update out and smoothing off the rough edges to the game. We're not going anywhere until we've done all we can.
I'll be back in the coming weeks (if the world still exists) to post the full patch notes for this version and let you know how the release is going.
Thanks for reading and supporting our little indie game.
