Atomfall boss Jason Kingsley REVEALS cut content and development challenges

I think about games sometimes. Some games are brittle—once you start losing you realize you've got no chance of recovering and therefore you might as well start again, you might as well reload. The big one for me was really the value of the metal detector. You have a metal detector in this game and it's really fun—it's almost a sub-game all of its own. You don't have to use it but you can find secret caches. They might be watching somebody, you know, somebody—some streamer doing something—might be watching one of my YouTube videos, they might be watching your podcast, and they don't have much time. We're all basically competing for those moments of people's attention.

Well, making computer games is difficult. It's more dangerous than you can possibly imagine.

Reading early English, British sci-fi—so like John Christopher, Tripods, or The Death of Grass. The Tripods, some of the John Wyndam work. I mean the obvious one's Day of the Triffids. I think I probably encountered Day of the Triffids first as a TV show, but then I went back to read the books. And The Kraken Wakes, and then TV shows like the original Survivors—the sort of cozy apocalypse, cozy British apocalypse, which is very different from the sort of US-style one. So that's where the sort of origins come from, and also my interest in—I always find if you're travelling on a train and you come into the back end of London or Birmingham or Manchester, you go through a very industrial landscape and I always find myself looking out at it and thinking, 'This is really interesting.' There's a sort of—it's not exactly industrial decay, but it's a landscape that wasn't designed for looking at. It's a very practical, working landscape and it always fascinates me. The sort of built environment has always appealed to me. Exploring and—I love the natural landscape but I also find the built landscape equally compelling.

Decades ago, because I always quite liked the idea of switch points in history—this happened in our real world, but what if it was really worse, or what if it was different? And that gives you a springboard for your imagination, for me. And I do the same with history—I look back in history on my YouTube channel, Modern History TV, and I kind of wonder what it was like to live there and how it would be. And it's sort of the same with science fiction—even though it's completely fictional as opposed to historical, you also have this sort of 'what if, what would I do, what would it be really like.' And I think we're all probably—well, some of us anyway—are fascinated by the idea of a zombie apocalypse. I think the reality would be utterly dreadful, beyond any kind of dreadful thing, but we always sort of wonder whether we could survive and what we would do. And that, I think, works well for a computer game because computer games are about wish fulfilment and about exploring yourself to a certain extent. So that's really the origins of Atomfall—let's make something in Britain somewhere that's beautiful but also potentially quite grim and industrial in places.

And until I looked at the map I hadn't realised that the beautiful Lake District is really close to the Windscale plant, bizarrely—across this sort of flat landscape up to the coast. And I went with my partner, we had a good drive and explored around that area. I was taking lots of photographs and I suddenly realised this is probably quite a high-security area and I'm taking photographs—I'm probably on a list, I'm probably being watched now. And that sort of fed back into the whole storytelling side of it as well. It just struck me as a really interesting point in history—the whole, the rocket race, the race for nuclear weapons, nuclear power coming just after the horrible period of the Second World War, rebuilding and all of that, the sort of race for science. I found it really, really stimulating as a place of the imagination.

It's quite six or seven years ago probably, the original idea. It's always difficult isn't it—why does one idea bubble to the surface creatively? I think perhaps because it fitted in a little bit with what we do. The Sniper Elite series is a big one, the Zombie Army series is a big one, but we wanted to do something a bit more narrative-driven, a bit more story-driven, a little less in-your-face combat. There is lots of combat in Atomfall but it's part of the game—you don't have to play it as a fighting game. It's more about exploring and uncovering the truth—a bit of detective work going on there. Open landscapes to explore, you know, puzzles to solve in your own way. And I thought it was a companion piece in some ways to the other games—it fitted in quite nicely. Obviously we're good at real-world technology—we've got our own engine, unlike many independent developers. We don't use somebody else's engine. We have our own Asura engine which runs all of our games, and that's quite good at open-world, semi-open-world landscapes and that kind of thing. So it always makes sense to build your game on a technology that you already have. Obviously the engine gets improved every game we release. We extended the technology a bit because of what we needed for the storytelling, but underlying it all is our 3D engine.

Well, yeah, that's a real problem. We're very busy—we've got a lot of games in development. We're well over 500 full-time members of staff and quite regionally distributed. We're based in Oxford, Warwick, Ranskill, and up north near Wakefield, so we're not based in London, which is fairly unusual for some of the creative industries—but the games industry is not very London-based at all. I was very keen on using regional accents as well, so I told the audio team I don't want any Southern or London accents unless we really have to for the character. I wanted to really push into lesser-heard regional accents—they can be Cornish accents, you know, they can be up in the Lake District, I'm fine with that. But I really wanted to sample voice actors that could use their own kind of regional accent. So that was always really fun—listening to them and finding voice actors with regional accents and making them stay in their own accent. It's quite funny because they're so used to speaking in RP or Cockney or whatever it might be, whatever the sort of most famous English accent is.

So what you do is you start with a tiny number of people, you sit around and talk about the idea and you compare it to other games. So for example, a favourite game series of mine is Fallout—the Fallout series. You can see the influences of that, you can see the sort of elements of that. Also Skyrim—the Skyrim series is brilliant. But other games as well—there are lots of other games in alternate realities, so for example Metro Exodus or Stalker. And I just felt there was an opportunity to do something very British. And then you have a tiny team and you do prototypes—you come up with some ideas, you test out, you know, for example how big can we get the landscape, how dense can the landscape be. If we want lots of—what kind of style of artwork do we want to go for? And I was very keen on moving away from the kind of burnt, deserty future—very North American, Californian kind of desert thing. I wanted to go for a lush, overgrown, quite wild place. And part of the idea behind that was it can be beautiful and then strange. So you're walking through a beautiful British landscape of the Lake District and you come across a crashed helicopter and an armoured car, and the juxtaposition of that makes you sort of take notice and go, 'Oh, that's really pretty, but that's also quite worrying—what's going on?' So that was the idea, to sort of balance the two.

Yes, we sort of want to do our own version of the phone box because this is an alternate reality. So we've sort of got a nod to the classic red phone box but it's actually quite different—it's got little spikes on it. In this world there's a different kind of nuclear battery technology being developed which wasn't developed in the real world, and so that's become retrofitted to a lot of reused material. So you've got effectively late Second World War, just post-war armoured vehicles painted blue with 'Police' on the side, and the engine's been replaced with this sort of very early atomic battery engine. So we're sort of playing around with what-ifs and what might happen. And then we've got giant robots—we've got big robots but they're kind of clunky, they're sort of odd, inefficient, very industrial-looking. And very simplistic—their AI is literally, in the game, their AI is meant to be very simple and quite easy to spoof as part of the gameplay.

So we then start playing around with the atmosphere—can we get fog in there, how dense do we want the trees, how far does a player need to walk to get the next encounter, how does the AI work. You build it up. You start with a prototype, you do what we call pre-production, which is where you have a smaller team doing beautiful corners or a piece of example—what kind of water tech can we get in. So if the water tech is looking great, well maybe we want to do more. But if you've got water, can you swim through it or do you just wade through it? How do we make the water—Is the water dangerous? Do we have to have creatures in the water? That kind of thing. How does—if an entity in this world hears you shoot a gun, what does it do? Because not everybody wants to have a fight in this game. Some people just want to be allowed to get on with things. But some people will come and try and rob you because they're baddies, they're bandits. So you play around with all of those areas and then eventually you get a core vision for the game and then you expand it from there. Then you start putting 100-plus people on the project and expanding it. So it's an iterative process. And then some of the things you come up with, if you have an idea, you look at it and everybody sits around the table and says, 'We thought it was a good idea but it's not fitting into this game,' so we have to abandon it. You have to—it's a bit like writing a book. You have to realise a chapter's not working and then maybe just get rid of it.

No, we were—we did, well, I'm more than happy to talk about it. There was one in particular, it was to do with swimming. So, you know, how does swimming work in the game? We felt it didn't really work. You know, because we've got a lake, there's several lakes in it, and if you can swim, you can swim across, and then can you dive down? And then you've got swimming underwater, and then if you can swim underwater can you explore underwater? Then you have a need to have a mechanism for holding your breath. What do you do? It's not very realistic because you're going to be soaking wet when you come out. Do we just ignore that, like most games, or is it more realistic to then have other effects over the top? So we abandoned all of that because it was a sort of side-track. It was quite a good idea in writing but then when we came to play the game it just wasn't worth doing all the hard work.

But having AI that responds to you and having a way of communicating with them—one of the areas I was keen on is when you communicate, you choose the tone of your communication, not the actual words. So be aggressive and then you'll say something aggressive, or be kind and you'll say something kind. So you don't have to read through the options and work out in your head, 'Oh, that one's the aggressive phrase and that one's the peaceful phrase.' You just say, 'I want to be peaceful here,' 'I want to be aggressive,' 'I want to be assertive,' and we give people approaches to the dialogue. But it doesn't mean they have to read through each dialogue option and go, 'Oh, that's the non-aggressive one, I'll say that.' So I think that was quite an interesting innovation.

And then the big one for me was really the value of the metal detector. You have a metal detector in this game and it's really fun—it's almost a sub-game all of its own. You don't have to use it but you can find secret caches of things that people have stashed throughout the world which will help you. But you don't have to use it at all. And it was a really fun thing to implement in a game. Everybody saw it and went, 'This is weird but good.'

We try to avoid copying other people's games because I just think that way is pointless. But you can see other games doing something well and you go, 'That works really well—how do we make something similar but different to that mechanism?' And other people might say, 'Oh, we could have this in the game,' and then you look at it and go, 'We could, and it works really well in the other game, but in this game it somehow doesn't fit in.' So obviously we're quite famous for the Sniper Elite series, and the long shots and stealth and stalking—I mean there is stealth and stalking in this game, but we have dialed back, for example, the focus on long-range sniping in this game because it's not a sniping game, it's not a war game. It's more exploring, talking to people, solving problems, having fights. There's a little bit of light survival in there. You know, how do you approach it?

Another key thing for me is how do we accommodate people's different skill levels and time constraints. Lots of gamers have free time, but also lots of gamers that don't have much free time. How do we entertain all of them? So we've got what we call story modes in there. You can play the game in a sort of peaceful, easy way—there will be conflict but we tone everything down in terms of how dangerous it is—all the way up to sort of expert combat specialist, which is, you know, the combat is very difficult and it's going to be very challenging for people. And everything in between. So you've sort of got—right at the very beginning you're asked what kind of game experience do you want to have, because I think we've probably all played games where we can't get past a part of it because we're just not quite good enough, or maybe we've missed something in the game or we haven't quite done it the way the designer expected. So we always want to make our games accessible in the broadest sense—I don't mean obviously for people with disabilities, but accessible for people who might be time-poor, or might only be able to play the game in half-hour sessions, or quite frankly aren't very good with the controller but still want to have fun and feel like they're uncovering an interesting story. So for me that's also quite important. We look at accessibility from a disability perspective but also think of accessibility from a lifestyle perspective, which I think is really important.

The team found it quite funny when I talked about—imagine watching a movie and halfway through the movie it stops and you have to do a questionnaire, and it asks you whether you've understood the subtext that the director intended for this movie. And if you didn't get the question right, you can't watch the rest of it. And we sometimes do that for game players—we sometimes require them to be really good to complete our games. And I think in a way, you want a game to be challenging if you want it to be challenging, but some of us don't necessarily—we just want the experience. And so that's what we've tried to do. We've tried to lean into this as a game where you can play it as a very strong story but you can also play it as a combat game.

Yes, it definitely does. Yes, because you've got to have a game's design and technology that allows you to play the game by running and gunning with a machine gun. We've also got to have a game's design that also rewards you having conversations and not fighting. Because obviously if you go up to a stranger and you start taking pot shots at them, well they're going to shoot you—or they might run away actually in this game, but they might turn around, or their friends might turn up and shoot you. But also we want you to be able to go up to people and talk to them and have a conversation. That conversation might go off the rails and it might end up in combat, but we also have this thing where people tell you to go away in rude terms—they literally say 'piss off.' And if you do, they're fine, they go back to what they're doing, you know, as works in real life. People can be rude to you and you decide to back away. And sometimes if you challenge them, they then go away because you've called their bluff. So it's a little bit of that kind of thing. But yes, it does make the game much more complex to actually code, and it makes it more complex for testing—because your QA team has to play it in a passive way and in an aggressive way all the way through, just to see, and possibly swap over. You might decide you want to start the game in a passive way and then you decide you've got a good gun and you're going to start shooting people a lot.

Yeah, it was very consciously that. We didn't want to put a marker on the map, 'Go here and find the thing which will tell you where the next thing is.' We wanted to try to promote exploring and wandering around the map and finding a tunnel and going, 'You know what, I'm going to go in there—I don't know what's in there.' And you might find something which may link back to another story, because you then may go and talk to somebody and they say, 'There's a—you know, there's a sewer entrance over in the north,' and then you'll say, 'Yeah, yeah, I found that one—is that the one that was locked?' And they go, 'Yeah, and here's the key.' And you go, 'Oh, okay, cool, right, go back there.' But they will also—if you haven't found it before—they might say, 'I need you to go and get this thing from the sewer entrance.' I'm simplifying, but that kind of thing. So the game design needs to be flexible enough to allow people to have discovered things before they're meant to have discovered them, but also to encourage that, because we want people to do that. So for example, there are quite a lot of nooks and crannies in the game that you can explore, and I was very keen on the team putting things—small rewards—in those nooks and crannies, especially the early ones, so that you, the player, go, 'Oh, it's worth exploring ruins, houses, or that car crash over there, because I might find something.' There's no story attached to it other than visual storytelling, there's no kind of narrative of the game that's exposed by that, but it just rewards you for exploring and going off the beaten track. And that's part of the game—part of the game is exploring and finding hidden things. But of course we then put challenges in some of those off-the-beaten-track places—dangerous plants and wildlife that's been mutated, bandits and feral humans that have been mutated by the big threat. So all of it's layered up. I mean, you can just sort of follow the main plot very strictly, but with games like this—and my favourite games—it's you're thrown into this landscape and you explore and uncover at your own pace.

Oh yeah. If you build a game which is very linear—A to B to C to D—it's much more constrained. That's very different to creating an open-world game where every bit of landscape you come across can be approached from north, south, east, or west—from totally different angles at a different place in the game story. So the player might be more powerful, might know more about the landscape, and then visit somewhere arguably earlier in the game that they just happened to miss. And they get a different experience when they visit it than they would have done if they'd found it very early on in their game experience. So yeah, the game needs to have these emergent properties which reward people for exploring and discovering things. All of these different sides—the world being very open, the story being very open, the gameplay itself being quite open to different interpretations.

Well, making computer games is difficult. And there will always be edge cases and bugs. There'll always be somebody who does something in a way you hadn't expected—in a way that nobody in your QA team for two years has ever done before. Especially when a game goes live—when a game suddenly is played by, in the case of Sniper Elite Resistance for example, millions of people. A tiny subset of that will do things that none of us have ever done in the game, and you'll find things and go, 'Ah, all right, we better fix that.' So you've got this process of patching and fixing after release as well. And some players complain about that because they say, 'Well, the game should be perfected before it's released.' And I partly agree and I sympathise with that opinion. But games these days are so incredibly complicated. They have thousands and thousands—tens of thousands—of hours of testing before they're released, but they don't have millions of hours of testing which they will have once they're released to the public. So there will be bits and pieces you find. People will have strange setups on their PCs, for example, or somebody will have a rare graphics card that only one in a thousand people has got installed and you happen to not have one and nobody else has one, but it doesn't work on that particular specific setup in that particular way. So yeah, it's quite frankly fascinating, but making games is hard. It's very hard.

Yes, yeah, there's always that. The games industry has sometimes been challenged by how it presents and positions games. I mean, we've all watched really expensive trailers for games and the game is not quite like that. And I think that's wrong. So we always try to build our games' trailers based on footage that's actually grabbed from the game—because we want people to be looking at the game itself. But yeah, how you position a game, how you explain it to people in a simple way so that they get it, because everybody's really busy. People won't spend ten minutes trying to understand your message. They might be watching a streamer doing something, they might be watching one of my YouTube videos, they might be watching your podcast, and they don't have much time. We're all basically competing for those moments of people's attention. If you can grab people's attention quickly, then you've got a better chance of them watching more of your stuff. So you've got to communicate quickly and easily, but you've also got to slightly tease and build up the experience. You've got to pique their interest. Curiosity is one of the most important kind of emotions I think for people buying anything creative. It might be a movie—it's like, 'Oh, is this movie any good? I wonder what happens.' Reading a book—'Oh, that sounds like a really interesting book, I wonder what happens.' And playing a game—'That looks interesting, I'd like to play that, I wonder what happens.' So trying to generate curiosity in the potential audience is important. And spreading the word as well—it's a big and complicated world of communication out there and there's a lot of information being thrown at people all the time. So how do you get discovered, especially as a—we're a big independent games developer. We self-fund our games and we design them ourselves and we're privately owned. So how do we compete with multinational corporations that can spend hundreds of millions of pounds making a game and hundreds of millions marketing it? The answer is we've got to be clever. We can't afford to spend hundreds of millions in marketing. We can spend millions making a game, and that's what we do, but we're not up there with the biggest, most expensive games by a long way. But we sell nearly as well as some of them. So I guess we're doing something right.

Yeah, because my brother and I are materially involved in every game we do—we're games directors, if you like, that's what we do. And so yes, I think my first emotional reaction to a game being finished and released is relief that it's actually got published. Because many games get started and not all of them get finished. I think somebody once gave me a statistic that only one in ten games ever gets released that gets started. Now, I have no idea how they work that out, but I can believe it's at least one in three—two out of three don't get actually released at all. So just to get to the end of anything—it's a bit like being a writer, basically. Getting to the end of your novel is just like, 'Phew, okay, I've got to the end now, I better start rewriting it and having another go.' Or any endeavour where you get it finished and you get it released—there's a certain level of relief that you've actually done it. And then it's really exciting to see all the positive comments. I think we're all a bit guilty of reading the negative ones and possibly being a bit over-concerned about negative reactions. Perhaps if somebody says they don't like your game, well, it's their right to not like your game—it's a free world and they should be able to state that, especially if they're constructive and they say, 'I didn't like the way you handle this,' because then you can learn something from it. But yeah, I shouldn't but I do read the comments, and I find it really interesting to see what people say. Any big successful game starts to attract a broad spread of comments from really great ones to really negative ones. But by and large it's exciting to see people going, 'I really like this aspect of the game and I enjoyed this and this was cool.' And then you sometimes pick up common threads of criticism—usually constructive as well—'This could have been a bit better,' and that can inform what you do next. And I think if we take that in the right light, I think it's very, very useful. But it's sometimes hard—sometimes hard when somebody criticises something and they're overly critical about something that's not that important really, or you knew but you didn't have time to fix it, or whatever it might be. But by and large the audience has the right to tell you whatever they want about the game.

Yeah, I mean it isn't, but I can see why people might think that. With any creative endeavour, ask filmmakers what are their influences—they'll cite all sorts of different movies. They're not copying any of those movies by and large, but they've been influenced by that movie. And I'm influenced by other people's games, I'm influenced by movies, TV shows, and books—trying not to copy things but trying to learn from the creativity of others and put our own spin on it and our own twist. So yeah, it's a kind of shorthand isn't it—everybody uses, 'This book is a bit like this and this combined,' or 'This movie is a bit like this' or 'This TV show' or 'This podcast is a bit this and that.' And it's a summary. So I'm flattered because I think the games we're being compared to are brilliant games. But our game isn't just a version of Game X set in the Lake District—is it? That's not what it is at all.

Yeah, that's very much what we tried to do with the game. We tried to create a series of mini sandboxes that enable you to explore and experience the story at your own pace and your own way. And I'm hoping that when people do YouTube playthroughs, they'll have a different story than the next person. It won't be, 'Here's level one, here's level two, here's level three'—it'll be, 'Oh, I didn't meet that guy. Oh, I didn't encounter that monster. I didn't find that abandoned mine. I better go back and play the game again.' Because replayability, for me, is a really important component—value for money, replayability, and getting people to finish the game and feel like they need to go back in and start again and have another go.

Yeah, there aren't really tips and tricks. So I would suggest that you don't expect to just grab a gun and shoot people. Try to approach it a bit more in an immersive way. You can do it how you like, quite frankly, but I think you'll get a surprisingly different experience depending on your play style. So people can do what they want in the game, and that's the whole basis of it. But I think a more steady approach to it, a more studied exploration—not necessarily running up to somebody and having a fight—can probably get you further more quickly than combat. Combat is quite dangerous in the game. We've deliberately pitched combat to be not something you would be encouraged to do. You can do it, and especially if you're a good player used to that kind of thing, you can do it, sure. But the game is not all about the combat. There is combat, but it can be quite dangerous. I've played the game quite a lot and I've got into situations where it's like, 'Okay, now I need to run away. I need to run away fast.'

Yeah, well, I don't like games—I think about games sometimes. Some games are brittle—once you start losing you realise you've got no chance of recovering and therefore you might as well start again, you might as well reload. And I understand people needing to load and save and wanting to explore options there. But I quite like playing games where if you make a mistake, if something goes horribly wrong, you don't have to think, 'Well, I'll just rage quit and come back to it tomorrow.' You can recover. You can keep going. So you may have made a mistake but it isn't necessarily lethal to the game. So I think of that as the opposite of brittle, basically. It means you've got a pliable game's design where if you do make a mistake you can keep going. And that's an important part of the game as well—to get that feeling that you're in that real world, that in the real world we make mistakes and we learn from them. So okay, cool, let's try and get that going in this game too.

Wicker Man—yeah, absolutely, Wicker Man's part of it. But there's a whole bunch of other stuff. Some of the John Wyndam—you know, Day of the Triffids. Even War of the Worlds, for example, has got a sort of flavour of this disaster in the background and you surviving in the landscape. The original Survivors series on TV—I thought that was very good. That's definitely worth getting on DVD if you can get it. I don't know whether you can get it these days or whether it's on any of the streaming services, but for me that was a really interesting TV show, quite harrowing. Threads—there's a terrible and brilliant show called Threads which is terrifying. It's about a nuclear disaster—we're not specifically a nuclear disaster in the way a bomb going off or anything like that, this is something different that's happened, and that's part of the puzzle. But the landscape has been changed and walled off in our alternate Windscale setup. What else would I recommend? Well, there's some really interesting urban exploring videos on YouTube—those are kind of interesting. You can fall down a rabbit hole with urban exploring as well if you're interested, and that's its whole other—even something like bushcraft videos, those can sort of prepare you for this landscape as well. So there's lots of my personal interests that are sort of squeezed into this game. The team have done a great job—a lot of people worked on this for many years and they've done a brilliant job. And it's really interesting, and even though I've been there from the very beginning, I keep going around corners and finding new things, which I think is a testament to the team and what they built. It's great. It's really entertaining.