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Dear Atomic gamers!
We are excited to share an interview with our game design team.
They take a deep dive into the history of the game's development, sources of inspiration, and share with you which year was the most groundbreaking and which location appeared first.
Enjoy!

► 1) Why did you decide to make the melee combat one of the core mechanics (this is unusual for an FPS)?
From the very beginning, our main aspiration was to create an unconventional FPS.
Therefore, it was a fascinating objective for us to experiment and put emphasis on the familiar mechanics differently. Thus, we decided to bring close combat to the forefront in order to make it close to the spirit of the souls-like genre, which we originally had in mind when we were thinking up the main game mechanics. And from here the idea of introducing break rooms as save points, which is also a rather unusual element for first-person games, was born as well. So, hopefully, we managed to handle this interesting task.
► 2) What games were you inspired by while working on Atomic Heart?
During the development we were inspired, as I've already mentioned, by the souls-like genre and shooters like Doom Eternal. In fact, we could go on and on, but I would also like to highlight Dead Space, for example. The approach to the sounds and music environment there is close to a genius one. We really drew a lot of inspiration from that game, particularly for the location of the Maya Plisetskaya Theater. By the way, in case you're wondering, the theater was the very first location built and tested in the game, which has remained virtually unchanged over the course of development.

► 3) Did you have to give up some types of the abilities in the development process, or did you originally settle on five of them for the final game?
Over the course of the development, we had a lot of different ideas for the glove abilities, but at some point we realized that we had to stop and focus on the most interesting and compatible of them in order to bring at least some of them to pre-release state. Then we realized that because of the combat dynamics in our game, we have a very limited number of buttons for abilities, so we decided to stop at an even number of them. But players can be sure that they will be able to see several new abilities in the upcoming first DLC!
► 4) Did you have plans to add more combinations of abilities to enhance the interaction of different polymers with each other and increase the variability of the combat system?
Not gonna lie, of course, it was planned! But we think the game is already deep enough in terms of the variation of ability combinations, so we decided to stick with the current set. After all, it's our first game, and we'll definitely expand the abilities and variability in the future, but this time we had to keep a balance between ambition, common sense and the release date :)

► 5) Great idea with the glove, which automatically "sucks" the loot. How did you come up with this idea?
The glove appeared on the P-3 arm back in 2019. It wasn't in the early concepts. In fact, 2019 was a really groundbreaking year in terms of ideas. That's when the Twins appeared in the first iterations, and the glove, and the overall plot was formulated, which was laid out completely from the beginning to the end. We wanted to give the player some kind of living tool that would always be with them and not just be something magical like in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim or something genetic like in the Bioshock series. We wanted a technological basis to be presented there – a scientific foundation. First we made a glove, then we poked a hole in it and decided that it would be in the shape of a star. Then we made a 3D model and someone in the team proposed that we make it so that the flaps could open. And eventually it occurred to us that something could come out of there, and that's how we came up with the wires that would later become the manipulators of CHAR-Les. In the end we decided that this would become a universal device in the world of Atomic Heart, which could be not only possessed by the Argentum Squad, but by all Sechenov’s combat robots as well. That's how it ended up on the Twins' forehead and also in the Thought device. In the world of the game – everything is interconnected :)
As for the mechanic of "sucking up" loot – the idea came relatively spontaneously. Evaluating the ability of telekinesis, which allows us to pull, for example, a large box, we began to ask additional questions that flowed from each other. Why doesn't telekinesis pull a small spare part? And really, why not? And then why not be able to attract 2 at once? So along such a chain, we came to the decision to allow players to safely pull all the items they want, including loot items. Not only does this save time, but it also looks super cool!

► 6) There are so many types of resources in the game. Doesn't this degrade their worth? That is, doesn't it create situations where the player instead of a meaningful search just routinely vacuums everything up?
Of course, this also happens, but we didn't want to make completely empty corridors without loot or, for example, a huge card index, where there will be only 1 bullet. So the number of loot began to gradually grow. I cannot say that its number devalues the overall value, because in fact, many players faced a lack of resources, in case of not looting every nook.
► 7) The protagonist regularly comments ironically on the necessity of finding keys and other items to move around the location, as if voicing the player's thoughts. What problem did you solve with this mechanic?
When we played the game ourselves, we used to mumble all the time, and sometimes it was so funny that at some point we wanted to transfer some of the jokes into the game. We wanted to test the reactions of people with fresh minds who hadn't tried the game before, and got the unexpected feedback that it turned out to be really fun! So later on, we decided to scale this mechanic to the entire game. In fact, it's not even a mechanic at all, just a narrative approach. By the way, while watching the various streams, we noticed that, for example, AlinaRinRin laughed a lot and said that the developers took away her bread, because P-3 managed to make a joke a second before her, literally reading her mind :)

► 8) What pitfalls have you encountered in implementing these mechanics?
Speaking particularly about this narrative aspect, the problem is that any joke, even the best one, is only funny once. When you hear it for the hundredth time, checking the functioning of certain systems, it already seems irrelevant and silly. This is the problem faced by comedy directors. At a certain point they become not only bored with their work, but even a little sad, but that's what professionalism is all about – confidence in yourself and in the final result.
► 9) Are you satisfied with its final execution?
Yes, in general. It's really cool to see players or streamers react to such phrases with words like, "you read my mind, P-3"!

► 12) I think I'll give you the "grief" of many players - where's the fight with Burav? Was it even planned?
We think the fight with Burav seems to fit more to Limbo than to the real world of the game. After all, it's a mining robot, you know! And as we don't have any fights in Limbo yet, so we didn't see a fight with Burav as well.
► 13) Why did the game put so much emphasis on the respawning of enemies, especially since you can almost always just run away from them?
First of all, it's not always possible to escape, and secondly, it's justified from the perspective of the lore. Reading the notes is one thing, but when the game is literally lore-consistent everywhere, even with this mechanic of the enemy respawn, you get a completely different level of immersion into the world. In the vast majority of games, enemies appear somewhere behind the back, behind the door or even behind the camera, i.e. where the player does not see them, but here they just naturally arrive in a crate from the car factory. From the one that the player flies by in the car at the beginning of the game.

► 14) Isn't there a feeling that some players perceive open locations as runs between story sections because of this?
To be honest, I don't know if this is good or bad, but you can speculate what it would look like without this mechanic. It would turn out that while there is happening a failure of the Kollectiv Neural Network alongside the massive human casualties, Major freely walks in the fields and meadows, sniffing flowers and doing side quests. Probably, if we did so, there would still be players who do not like this contradiction of the lore, even though on the other hand this is actually the point of the open world. So, answering the question, I would say that yes, there is such a feeling, but it is a subjective one and justified by lore. Is it bad or good – that is the question that should be asked here. But in any case, it seems that we would not be able to pull in the first Atomic Heart open world like the one from the Horizon or The Witcher game series.
And, again, we deliberately wanted to introduce souls-like mechanics, players used to which tend to just run past the ordinary mobs from boss to boss. For those players who choose to stick around, this is a great way to farm polymer to upgrade abilities and resources to create consumables, cartridge guns, and weapon upgrades. And for those who don't need it, even just walking by, they are able to see the world around them being alive. That is also achieved by the enemies who notice your actions, and, for example, react very promptly to the wrecking of someone nearby.
We'll see what happens in the sequel – we're very excited ourselves, and we scrupulously read absolutely all the feedback from the players' comments, so we're going to improve what the players liked and fix the things that, on the other hand, they didn't like.

► 15) Is there a feeling that this, among other things, might have had a negative effect on the motivation of some players to explore the world of the game?
As mentioned before, we believe that the world and the game's lore are deep and consistent enough as it is. So we didn't set ourselves the task of motivating players to crawl into literally every corner of the open world, so not all such places can have something valuable hidden. We wanted players to determine their own needs.
► 16) How difficult was it to get the different polymers to interact correctly with the enemies and the environment?
In fact, it was a very interesting task both technically and in terms of design, and since we love interesting tasks, we found the process not very difficult, although we must admit that each additional level of interaction was more and more complex to work with.