The Atlas Problem
Alright, I’m pretty excited to talk about this so this post might get a little long or rambly, but I’ll do my best to start at the surface level and save the deep dives for some more future posts.
Today’s post is all about The Atlas Problem, the game I’m working on with one of my oldest friends, Michael Carmody. You can check out the link on the text there or visit the steam page here if you’d rather just play it than read this. If you do, you should also check out our Discord and give us feedback! There’s a button in the game itself, and on the website on the left-hand side of the footer that will give you an automatic invite. We look forward to seeing you there!
If you’re sticking around, I’m guessing that means you want to know a little more about the origin of this game, how it’s going and where it’s headed. So let’s start at the beginning.
The project really started out as a portfolio piece for Michael and I to showcase our game-dev abilities, and also serve as a low-stakes creative outlet for us to scratch that game-making itch while we both worked full time jobs in other fields of technology and entertainment. We really began the project about 6 years ago, playing off the idea that it might be fun to have a tower-defense style game that allowed the user to switch back and forth between first and third person modes to accomplish different tasks. The hope was to get the best of both ‘first person shooter’ and ‘real time strategy’ worlds. To that end, we made a bunch of little demos to get a grasp on Unreal’s camera controls and particle controls, such as this one:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XxZxuzYHzGk
We managed to then build out a pretty good number of features on the road to a ‘vertical slice’, a term used to describe a playable demo that encompasses the full game loop. The goal was to have something that people could play that demonstrated the full idea in a nice digestible package, and not require more than maybe 10-15 minutes of play time. That slowly evolved into ‘what if we just made a full demo’, more like 30+ minutes of play time, depending on player skill, and a much broader set of concepts and features that we wanted to show off. Why the scope creep? Ultimately it was because we discovered more about what we wanted the user experience to be as we went, and more things that we wanted to be able to demo. It wasn’t so much that we wanted the game to be bigger / longer, but that we wanted to show that we could do more than just make ‘another tower defense game’ that people have seen a hundred times already. We wanted it to bew fun, interesting, thought provoking, challenging, and overall - technically impressive. The hope was this could get us work - so we wanted our code to be clean, and for the visuals to be impressive enough that they weren’t distracting (while obviously not being final). And to all of these ends, we just kind of kept going and going until a few things happened.
Its important to understand again that we were just working on this in our spare time, and not very regularly at first. We’d open up the project, do some things, and then step away for days, weeks, months at a time. We would regularly come back and have a hard time getting back up to speed because we had to re-acquaint ourselves with the project, and what either of us had done since we last looked at it - which was sometimes a lot! It was very easy to fall into the cycle of opening it, getting overwhelmed by how much catch up there was to re-learn, and then just not wanting to work on it, and putting it off for longer. Our passion began to give way to fatigue, and the project began to collect more and more dust. Occasionally we’d have a lull at work, and get energized again to make another big push, but every ‘big push’ felt like it yielded less and less, until we would make a push and it seemed like nothing was really changing any more. Its really hard for me to estimate how much time we had committed over the course of those first 5 years because it was so disjointed and sporadic. Maybe the equivalent of 6 months to a year of dev time? Maybe even less? However much it was, it was enough that when we reached this next point, we were faced with a painful decision. How do we break this cycle and make working on the project fun again? What was holding us back?
Thankfully, we had both been very active in our respective careers over those 5 years and had learned a lot about Unreal, development best practices, and game design. What we realized is that we were fighting against our past-selves… or rather, code that we had laid out 5 years ago back when we knew way less about what we should be doing, and that the only real way to free ourselves of our past development sins was… a massive refactor. Basically rebuilding the game from scratch, but with the new mission-statement of laying a foundation that’s clean, modular, and scalable - such that any time we have the free time and impulse to work on the game more, there’s nothing holding us back from implementing a new feature, or some new art, or refining the user experience to be exactly what we want it to be.
You can imagine the pain that came with this decision. We were about to commit ourselves to an unknown amount of work that would yield effectively nothing, just to get ourselves back to the same point we were already at… and the benefit would barely even be visible to players, the goal wasn’t to redesign the whole game, just fix our underlying architecture. It was hard to psych ourselves up for something like that. This was the first time that we were about to make our hobby / passion project feel like… work. It kinda sucked! Both Mike and I had plenty going on in our lives as well to make focusing on the task at hand even more difficult, but ultimately we resolved ourselves to do it, and began to lay out our plan and execute it.
The major highlights of the refactor included moving all of our game logic, which was previously spread around between actors and level blueprints, into well-thought out game-modes, game instances, and new blueprint actors we call our ‘Managers’. Each manager would be responsible more a major system / feature of the game, and we would rely on blueprint communication to send our triggers back and forth as needed. So in early October of 2024, we laid out this proposal for ourselves:
Click the image to see the full thing!
With this, we had our plan of action, and were able to really begin the process of refactoring. It took us a good part of October to really feel like were getting close to where we were before, in terms of the game’s playability… but the benefits became apparent immediately. Any time we wanted to do something now there was no question of ‘what actor in controlling this behavior’ or anything like that. The structure gave us clarity, and that clarity gave us new freedom. Our game’s performance also benefited hugely, seeing major FPS increases that we previously couldn’t have imagined. All of these benefits allowed us to quickly start thinking beyond where we had been stuck before. We could start to see the road to this project being more than just a portfolio piece that we only show to recruiters and other game developers who can appreciate the behind-the-scenes aspects. It was getting to a point that we could actually see putting it in front of strangers, and getting their feedback on it as a game. A game that no longer just had to be technically impressive, but now had to be genuinely fun for other people.
It would take a few more months of re-organizing ourselves, building new internal development websites and project management systems, laying out new roadmaps for our versions, updating our source control and packaging workflows, setting up an actual studio entity and registering with Steam, but now we have the means to develop and distribute at a pace that means we can really enjoy the act of developing the game again.
Now we are able to accept playtesters through Steam via the ‘request access’ button on the game’s store page. We are very excited to have about 150 requests at the time of writing this post, and are gearing up to open the floodgates. We are setting up some back-end systems for metrics gathering that will help us when making balancing decisions such as how long are waves taking, what sort of resource gathering rates are we seeing, do things need to be harder, easier, etc. Between those and the playtest discord, we hope to enter a new chapter of refining the player experience, while we continue to come up with new features for the mid and late game phases of play.
The future is still a bit uncertain, we would love to enter the game into a Steam Next festival at some point, but we want a lot more player feedback than we have so far before that. At the moment its still largely family and friends, who we love and trust to be objective with us, but now we also really want feedback from people who would consider actually spending money on a game like this, or people who just happen across it by chance and are willing to share their thoughts, good or bad, constructive or not. We know we can make a game. Now can we make a game that YOU want to play? Please take a look and let us know what you think!
It will probably be a little while still before we consider the game ‘complete’ enough to put a price on it and really ask people to pay money for the chance to play it. There are a ton of things that we still want to do. In the spirit of our studio name, ‘Placeholder’, almost every visual and audio aspect of the game is just that… place holder. We have invested a lot of our own money, and considerably more amounts of our own time into this so far, without any intention of ever seeing a return on the investment. To that end, we have taken advantage of AI tools to generate concepts, music, and icons for the game - which we only felt OK doing because we wouldn’t be paying ourselves or other artists to do those things at this time. If we do get to the point of releasing the game with a price tag, I would like very much to have the have our first major goals be to re-invest any funds made into real artists and musicians to give the game. If we have the time and resources to replace everything before asking for money, that would be even better. I just want users to understand that we appreciate the flux and turmoil that AI tools are wreaking on the industry right now, and to not take our use of them for this project as any sort of endorsement for any data usage practices. We believe strongly in intellectual property rights, and that creative professionals should be compensated for their work. You’ll also notice that we have used content from the Unreal Marketplace (now Fab.com) for the majority of our models and vfx, and haven’t even replaced the default epic mannequin character model.
We consider the game only about half finished, with version 0.5 coming soon to the playtest build on Steam. If you are interested in helping us out, the best way is to apply as a playtester and join the playtest Discord, and to check out what’s changed from build to build as we keep working on things. Find an issue / not having fun? Let us know, and check back when there’s an update! There’s a very good chance that we will address your feedback directly. Once we have enough playtesters that multiple people are flagging the same issues, we’ll start to consolidate feedback and prioritize things a bit more, but at this phase you could literally be our most valuable tester, so stop on by! We look forward to your feedback!
If you made it this far, thanks for reading! I plan to write more about individual systems and our workflows in the future. If you’re interested in any of those things, or anything else, please let us know on Discord!