Game News Soviet Fallout homage ATOM RPG now on Kickstarter

[Atomboy]

Believe it or not, we'll do everything to make this attempt at a Slavic Fallout the best there ever was. And seeing how one of you mentioned BORDERZONE of all the obscure things in existence, you of all people will KNOW whether we did our best or failed. Because you seem to know of all the previous tries made by us Eastern Europeans. Ever.

1. So this is the elephant in the room, the weight of the past fallout-clones that you might not be responsible for but will still be asked to answer. Game industry is a small world and nobody ever wants to say anything negative about anyone else, but fans want to know what it is you've learned from those past failures. What went wrong, in your view, and how will you avoid their mistakes?

2. Atom will inevitably be compared against the classics, and their successors Wasteland 2, Underrail etc. It's best to preempt that comparison now and state clearly how you are different. After all you are going for the same audience.

Honestly, we knew what we were getting ourselves into. But it felt right never the less. Sort of like baby turtles know to run for the sea. Can't say we're over-competent or even over-confident. But we see two major problems with other Slavouts: clunky, barely functioning, buggy engine, and overall half-bakedness story-wise (poor dialogues with no more than two choices most of the time seem like a particular trend nowadays). Our main programmer Dmitriy and the massive support Unity 3D's community can give us (if only we ask for it) are our solution for the first problem. The second problem is solved by me and our writers. I know how the English version looks nowadays (although I TRIED A LOT) but when we improve our translation, it's going to surpass most of our competition in the Fallout race. Quantitatively - for sure. And, hopefully, quality-wise as well. We have text for everything. Everyone has a unique dialogue, most conversations can go one of up to five ways depending on your skills, most quests have multiple solutions, and, at least in the Russian version we don't have this style of overall prose I like to call "B-Movie impersonation". Our prose does not try to look like Fallout's or Torment's. We have this highly stylized colloquial language partially based on Russian authors from the XX century we enjoy, partially inspired by art-brute. Text is the main thing, anyway. Good text. At least - the best we've got. Sure, text was important for many slavic Fallouts. But in ours, it's our everything. Role-playing in each dialogue, changing the world in every quest, getting unique stories depending on the skills and attributes you picked. Making every action matter, or at least become a rumor or a legend somewhere in the world. Little things. Stuff like that.

As for your second question, in this comparison we also like to imagine ourselves riding out on our concept and our role-playing / world changing opportunities. What I mean by saying "concept" is: What we're telling is not really the same story as in the titles you mentioned. Even if we disregard the setting itself (although it being the USSR instead of the West is also kind of original, right? Hope so!) our aim is not to show how "War Never Changes" or how people rebuild after a disaster, or how they cope in the depths of the planet they ruined. It's more along the lines of the question Torment asks. Something like "What does it take to destroy humanity?". The society in our game setting is much closer to medieval than in the titles you mentioned. And I don't mean savagery, crazy new forms of government and such. We're working to show how the psychology of the masses changes in the aftermath of everything getting blown to bits. While traveling our world, you will find that most people carry the medieval mythological thinking inside them: in our world legends, myths and gods are born. Bandits act like feudal lords, honest working people regress into peasantry, bureaucrats (not warlords) rule the biggest city on the map, stories of past tech birth mystical legends, former Communist Party Members and the KGB become boogeymen that are said to wait for lonely travelers near their hidden installations in the deep woods, magic and witchcraft are explanations many NPCs have for genetic mutations and even the war itself. Our world is as realistic as we can make it while still keeping it fun (no retro-futurism, no laser blasters, no smart robots, no AI's, no ghouls even, for now at least, even the mutants are mostly deformed animals). But it's also highly esoteric in a sense. Something along the lines of Sigil meets the NCR. Hopefully, it works out as a pro, not a con :D

 

[Desert Fish]

Sold.

A Kickstarted game actually turning out good would be a surprise, but I can afford gambling with $15.

 

[Atomboy]

Sold.

A Kickstarted game actually turning out good would be a surprise, but I can afford gambling with $15.

Thank you, man! Everything's a gamble nowadays, but at this table the game is a little bit rigged. Cuz now you're getting the game no matter the outcome :D

 

[Aenra]

It's not going too well, is it?
Would really like this to happen..

See for me, whatever the cultural differences? Ruskies/slavs/Eastern semi-EU whatever people? The ones over there anyway, lol, are the best for making a good Fallout.
A Fallout world should be one without political correctness, notions of equality, kumbaya singing and so on. Harsher, more.. brutish, cruder. And they have this, or at least, it's something easier for them to portray.

Nu-age Kwanzanian brothers and sisters of mine do not. Not anymore
On the other hand, we do have everything else, lol, but i don't give a fuck about graphics or voice-overs.

Atomboy assuming this becomes a thing, please refrain from adding contemporary/pop jokes. Just.. don't.

 

[Atomboy]

And now for the people I've missed while posting this huge blanket of text yesterday:

I think this thread is much more important than the one I made on the forums, so feel free to ask me anything about the game. ATOM managed to keep me exited about it for three years or so, so I'm happy to talk about it all the freaking time!

Love you guys!

If this is supposed to be like Fallout 2, can you fix the camera in one position and use transparency when you are behind walls like Fallout did? You can still make camera rotation optional, but it'd be great if rotating the camera was not necessary.

Speaking of the camera: Some on the team wanted it exactly this way - fixed and with transparancy. We even added the option to make the camera fixed, it's still there. But we postponed the work on transparency right after we played around and saw that most of the locations weren't really done with this kind of camera in mind... You know, like the opposite of Britannia. There people never build houses with doors facing a certain direction, because they know they're in a fixed-camera 2D game with an odd perspective. But our builders didn't know that, and now the results of their labors look freakish when you don't get the option to rotate the camera around

I won't lie, this option is not planned right now. But maybe, if we do everything we are working on and still have time, we'll add it as a highly optional way to play. Kinda like it is now, but with smarter transparency.

Great, another such thread that eventually ends with nothing.

Believe it or not, we'll do everything to make this attempt at a Slavic Fallout the best there ever was. And seeing how one of you mentioned BORDERZONE of all the obscure things in existence, you of all people will KNOW whether we did our best or failed. Because you seem to know of all the previous tries made by us Eastern Europeans. Ever.

1. So this is the elephant in the room, the weight of the past fallout-clones that you might not be responsible for but will still be asked to answer. Game industry is a small world and nobody ever wants to say anything negative about anyone else, but fans want to know what it is you've learned from those past failures. What went wrong, in your view, and how will you avoid their mistakes?

2. Atom will inevitably be compared against the classics, and their successors Wasteland 2, Underrail etc. It's best to preempt that comparison now and state clearly how you are different. After all you are going for the same audience.

You know the answer. This guy is a young potato who thinks he can become a game developer with a few friends from university, 15,000$ and iron will. Most of all he doesnt know what you already know, that you can't make successful games in such environment.

When I was this person, I was making roguelikes and RPG maker games about Russian Spetsnaz and fecal matter! We actually have some experience in the subject nowadays. Our mod, artist and programmer worked on WoT/WoW(arplanes, not arcraft) and good old Sherlock Holmes and Slender Watson, while our writers helped out with some of the text/ideas/menial tasks, and I spellchecked some translations. It's all on the Kickstarter page! As for the humble goal, well, we're not asking for money to make the game. We're asking for money to make it bigger, and finish it quicker. ATOM is coming out no matter what. The price we ask will just quicken it's freakish birth into this world and give it some extra shine. We'll share proper numbers and ways we're gonna use money in one of the next updates on KS.

 

[Atomboy]

Ugly sweaters modeled in 3d, yup it's definitely Russian.

Have you noticed the deer? :---D


oasis789, I went to sleep right after that one post, and I had nightmares about the Codex thinking I inject myself with the marijuana or something, because what I wrote was too vague. But re-reading it now I see that in my sleep-deprived state I managed to express my true thoughts on the topic, and people even liked that. Thanks a lot, man! Answering stuff like that makes me happy.

It's not going too well, is it?
Would really like this to happen..

See for me, whatever the cultural differences? Ruskies/slavs/Eastern semi-EU whatever people? The ones over there anyway, lol, are the best for making a good Fallout.
A Fallout world should be one without political correctness, notions of equality, kumbaya singing and so on. Harsher, more.. brutish, cruder. And they have this, or at least, it's something easier for them to portray.

Nu-age Kwanzanian brothers and sisters of mine do not. Not anymore
On the other hand, we do have everything else, lol, but i don't give a fuck about graphics or voice-overs.

Atomboy assuming this becomes a thing, please refrain from adding contemporary/pop jokes. Just.. don't.

I wouldn't say that... yet! 34% in just a few days is pretty awesome, to me at least, because I know our advert budget is zero :D Yeah, 5K we have now isn't our goal, and if stuff stops at this number we're gonna fail the Kickstarter. But god damn it, it's 5K sent to us by the people who got to know us through word of mouth and the kindness of strangers. And the Codex. You know. It's humbling and amazing. It's a show of trust and belief we weren't really hoping for. And who knows, maybe we'll get it all in the end! A month is ahead of us.
I can also say that you thought correctly. As Eastern Europeans and people from obscure Baltic countries, we have warped morals and no shame, so I don't think political correctness is to be expected.
As for the jokes... there are references. But they're pretty obscure. We don't really know what them young people like nowadays, we just reference the stuff we like / find funny. It's mainly old. There's a Shrek reference somewhere near a swamp, though. And the village doctor is modeled after DeForest Kelley in a certain role he played. Today, I was working on a quest which shares it's plot with Jungfrukällan. One Easter Egg is based on the Nutcracker. I could go on forever. TL;DR - no funny stuff.[/QUOTE][/QUOTE][/QUOTE]

 

[Feyd Rautha]

Atomboyplease refrain from adding contemporary/pop jokes. Just.. don't.

what? the pop cultural references are the best thing Fallout 2 has to offer. I laugh at them every time

please add some

 

[Aenra]

the pop cultural references are the best thing Fallout 2 has to offer. I laugh at them every time

Just because one monkey did it.. and then another.. and then another.. don't mean they all should. Sure, it's fun the first time you come across one, the second maybe, but by now?
/decline

 

[Burning Bridges]

When I was this person, I was making roguelikes and RPG maker games about Russian Spetsnaz and fecal matter! We actually have some experience in the subject nowadays. Our mod, artist and programmer worked on WoT/WoW(arplanes, not arcraft) and good old Sherlock Holmes and Slender Watson, while our writers helped out with some of the text/ideas/menial tasks, and I spellchecked some translations. It's all on the Kickstarter page! As for the humble goal, well, we're not asking for money to make the game. We're asking for money to make it bigger, and finish it quicker. ATOM is coming out no matter what. The price we ask will just quicken it's freakish birth into this world and give it some extra shine. We'll share proper numbers and ways we're gonna use money in one of the next updates on KS.

I have seen this pattern for 30 years. You people are all the same. You tend to promise the moon but then only give a cheap hand job in a dirty back alley. And then dissappear and come back with another big idea, that is guaranteed to be perfectly thought out this time.

When kickstarter came up in 2012 we predicted that the games would never materialize and people said we could never know if we didn't try. We tried and the games didnt materialize just as we predicted. In reality there is 99% chance that a game on kickstarter will be dropped. And if it does not get dropped 99% chance that it sucks.

Anyway good luck.

 

[SausageInYourFace]

Slavouts

Decided to give you guys the benefit of the doubt and backed after that extensive answer. Also, cause I really loved the term Slavout.

 

[Atomboy]

When I was this person, I was making roguelikes and RPG maker games about Russian Spetsnaz and fecal matter! We actually have some experience in the subject nowadays. Our mod, artist and programmer worked on WoT/WoW(arplanes, not arcraft) and good old Sherlock Holmes and Slender Watson, while our writers helped out with some of the text/ideas/menial tasks, and I spellchecked some translations. It's all on the Kickstarter page! As for the humble goal, well, we're not asking for money to make the game. We're asking for money to make it bigger, and finish it quicker. ATOM is coming out no matter what. The price we ask will just quicken it's freakish birth into this world and give it some extra shine. We'll share proper numbers and ways we're gonna use money in one of the next updates on KS.

I have seen this pattern for 30 years. You people are all the same. You tend to promise the moon but then only give a cheap hand job in a dirty back alley. And then dissappear and come back with another big idea, that is guaranteed to be perfectly thought out this time.

When kickstarter came up in 2012 we predicted that the games would never materialize and people said we could never know if we didn't try. We tried and the games didnt materialize just as we predicted. In reality there is 99% chance that a game on kickstarter will be dropped. And if it does not get dropped 99% chance that it sucks.

Anyway good luck.

With all due respect, I can't agree with these numbers! Especially the 99% ones. As you can see in our risks section, we don't really promise the moon to begin with. But it's gonna be one hell of a hand job!..
Oh.
I just realized what I said.
I'm so sorry.

 

[Atomboy]

Slavouts

Decided to give you guys the benefit of the doubt and backed after that extensive answer. Also, cause I really loved the term Slavout.

Thank you for your trust! An update based on that answer is coming soon, too! :D We really appreciate it!

 

[Wonderdog]

I really hope this actually gets made somehow. Looks fantastic and that is the reason I registered, just to say this. Good luck guys.

 

[Atomboy]

I really hope this actually gets made somehow. Looks fantastic and that is the reason I registered, just to say this. Good luck guys.

It sure will, my friend! Thanks for the support and your kind words! Surprising and helpful You're gonna see us rise! But don't leave too quickly :D The Codex is an awesome place to be even after your wish to contact us was fulfilled! Have you ever heard of Cleve Blakemore? Just kidding, sure you have! And that's just the top of this awesome iceberg. Seriously though, I mean now we're looking for support from ANYWHERE, so I'm shitposting EVERYWHERE, all major RPG forums out there. But nowhere feels like the Codex. God damn it! It's home.

 

[DeepOcean]

Believe it or not, we'll do everything to make this attempt at a Slavic Fallout the best there ever was. And seeing how one of you mentioned BORDERZONE of all the obscure things in existence, you of all people will KNOW whether we did our best or failed. Because you seem to know of all the previous tries made by us Eastern Europeans. Ever.

1. So this is the elephant in the room, the weight of the past fallout-clones that you might not be responsible for but will still be asked to answer. Game industry is a small world and nobody ever wants to say anything negative about anyone else, but fans want to know what it is you've learned from those past failures. What went wrong, in your view, and how will you avoid their mistakes?

2. Atom will inevitably be compared against the classics, and their successors Wasteland 2, Underrail etc. It's best to preempt that comparison now and state clearly how you are different. After all you are going for the same audience.

Honestly, we knew what we were getting ourselves into. But it felt right never the less. Sort of like baby turtles know to run for the sea. Can't say we're over-competent or even over-confident. But we see two major problems with other Slavouts: clunky, barely functioning, buggy engine, and overall half-bakedness story-wise (poor dialogues with no more than two choices most of the time seem like a particular trend nowadays). Our main programmer Dmitriy and the massive support Unity 3D's community can give us (if only we ask for it) are our solution for the first problem. The second problem is solved by me and our writers. I know how the English version looks nowadays (although I TRIED A LOT) but when we improve our translation, it's going to surpass most of our competition in the Fallout race. Quantitatively - for sure. And, hopefully, quality-wise as well. We have text for everything. Everyone has a unique dialogue, most conversations can go one of up to five ways depending on your skills, most quests have multiple solutions, and, at least in the Russian version we don't have this style of overall prose I like to call "B-Movie impersonation". Our prose does not try to look like Fallout's or Torment's. We have this highly stylized colloquial language partially based on Russian authors from the XX century we enjoy, partially inspired by art-brute. Text is the main thing, anyway. Good text. At least - the best we've got. Sure, text was important for many slavic Fallouts. But in ours, it's our everything. Role-playing in each dialogue, changing the world in every quest, getting unique stories depending on the skills and attributes you picked. Making every action matter, or at least become a rumor or a legend somewhere in the world. Little things. Stuff like that.

As for your second question, in this comparison we also like to imagine ourselves riding out on our concept and our role-playing / world changing opportunities. What I mean by saying "concept" is: What we're telling is not really the same story as in the titles you mentioned. Even if we disregard the setting itself (although it being the USSR instead of the West is also kind of original, right? Hope so!) our aim is not to show how "War Never Changes" or how people rebuild after a disaster, or how they cope in the depths of the planet they ruined. It's more along the lines of the question Torment asks. Something like "What does it take to destroy humanity?". The society in our game setting is much closer to medieval than in the titles you mentioned. And I don't mean savagery, crazy new forms of government and such. We're working to show how the psychology of the masses changes in the aftermath of everything getting blown to bits. While traveling our world, you will find that most people carry the medieval mythological thinking inside them: in our world legends, myths and gods are born. Bandits act like feudal lords, honest working people regress into peasantry, bureaucrats (not warlords) rule the biggest city on the map, stories of past tech birth mystical legends, former Communist Party Members and the KGB become boogeymen that are said to wait for lonely travelers near their hidden installations in the deep woods, magic and witchcraft are explanations many NPCs have for genetic mutations and even the war itself. Our world is as realistic as we can make it while still keeping it fun (no retro-futurism, no laser blasters, no smart robots, no AI's, no ghouls even, for now at least, even the mutants are mostly deformed animals). But it's also highly esoteric in a sense. Something along the lines of Sigil meets the NCR. Hopefully, it works out as a pro, not a con :D

A rebirth of religion after massive destruction brought by rationalist hubris, the refusal of people to go back on the old path and try to create something new. You ruskies don't seem to be awful politically correct and are willing to treat religion as more than convenient punch bag for human inadequacies. It could be interesting. There is a great book from a brazilian author, Rebellion in the Backlands. There was a religious fanatic that lead a group of miserable people on the middle of nowhere on the brazilian semi-arid on a revolt against the positivist, rationalist brazilian state. It is an story of madness, of how the wasteland destroys the false claims of rationality of "civilized" man and force them to see the Devil on themselves their reason hide them from. There is a reason why Jesus faced the Devil on the desert.

 

[thesheeep]

Stretch goal: Crafting.




Honestly, I don't think there ever was a game - that didn't have its focus on crafting, like Minecraft - where crafting was not shit and the game wouldn't have been better if the dev's resources would have been spent on other areas of the game.

 

[Wonderdog]

arcanum

 

[Chris Avelltwo]

It's even got an exact release date - February 16, 2018

This is really bad timing because that's about the same time POE2 will release, and this game will be vastly overshadowed by that.

 

[thesheeep]

arcanum

Meh. Certainly less shit than others, but still.
I never liked that, either. Too bothersome. That's actually the main failure of crafting usually. It is extremely bothersome, forcing you to rummage through everything like a hobo in hopes of finding that one specific thing. And in addition to that, it's just not worth it as you tend to find much better stuff (or at least sufficient stuff) anyway.
I mean, what am I playing here? An RPG or hobo simulator 2000?
It is better in Arcanum, because there you actually have to do it and won't get by without, not as a tech character anyway. Not an afterthought as in other games.
So if they take some inspiration, better pick Arcanum.

Anyway, I'd rather have more locations/skills/any kind of content than crafting. That sounds like a stretch goal doomed to become an afterthought.

 

[Wonderdog]

arcanum

Meh. Certainly less shit than others, but still.
I never liked that, either. Too bothersome. That's actually the main failure of crafting usually. It is extremely bothersome, forcing you to rummage through everything like a hobo in hopes of finding that one specific thing. And in addition to that, it's just not worth it as you tend to find much better stuff (or at least sufficient stuff) anyway.
I mean, what am I playing here? A fantasy RPG or hobo simulator 2000?
It is better in Arcanum, because there you actually have to do it and won't get by without, not as a tech character anyway. Not an afterthought as in other games.
So if they take some inspiration, better pick Arcanum.

Anyway, I'd rather have more locations/skills/any kind of content than crafting. That sounds like a stretch goal doomed to become an afterthought.

It sounds like you just don't like crafting. It should not take away from locations though as crafting just relies on programming time not art budget.

 

[thesheeep]

It sounds like you just don't like crafting.

I certainly don't. It is completely immersion breaking in almost every game.

But the bigger problem is that it is also just a very obviously "tacked on" feature in almost every game.
Like "Oh, right, we gotta have crafting in this!". And that's never a good thing, no matter if you generally like a feature or not.
And stretch goal is the very definition of "tacked on" when it comes to completely new features. If it is a stretch goal, it means it is not part of the core gameplay.

It's just a better idea to not even attempt a crafting system if it is not the main focus and spend that attention elsewhere.

 

[Baron Dupek]

Lmaoing at people who go full hobo looking for ingredients in Arcanum. These people are fucking cashuals spoiled by modern trash games with crafting.
I played fighter, thief, engineer and mage on higher difficulty and never dig in the trash cans.
Digging for parts in the game where money is not an issue, srsly?

 

[Wonderdog]

I certainly don't. It is completely immersion breaking in almost every game.

But the bigger problem is that it is also just a very obviously "tacked on" feature in almost every game.
Like "Oh, right, we gotta have crafting in this!". And that's never a good thing, no matter if you generally like a feature or not.
And stretch goal is the very definition of "tacked on" when it comes to completely new features. If it is a stretch goal, it means it is not part of the core gameplay.

It's just a better idea to not even attempt a crafting system if it is not the main focus and spend that attention elsewhere.

Crafting was also great in JA 2.

Anyway, I don't agree, but I am sure there's bad games with crafting I didn't play. I doubt that the crafting was the main issue though. POE for example, I think it just sounds like a shit game, crafting or no crafting.

 

[Wonderdog]

Lmaoing at people who go full hobo looking for ingredients in Arcanum. These people are fucking cashuals spoiled by modern trash games with crafting.
I played fighter, thief, engineer and mage on higher difficulty and never dig in the trash cans.
Digging for parts in the game where money is not an issue, srsly?

Money is a huge issue in arcanum, or no issue at all. It depends entirely on what character build you make obviously. The tech characters have no reason to exist at all except to do crafting

 

[Chris Avelltwo]

Part of the problem with crafting is it is very tough to balance the amount of resources to where it doesn't make the game too easy, but on the other hand still have enough for it to be a relevant mechanic. I'd say its better to leave it out because the point of these games is that you're an adventurer, and the crafting and such is the role of NPCs that do that sort of thing as a living. For the most part crafted goods should be purchased from the NPCs, and whatever raw materials you might find in your adventures should be traded to them for the finished products. If you're out adventuring you wouldn't really have the time or focus to dick around with manufacturing shit.