A persistent role-playing game in which every eligible character receives at most one action per scheduled tick. One move crosses one square. One attack is one attack. You write a queue of what comes next, edit it freely until the tick locks, and the world explains what happened.
A world for people who would rather plan than click rapidly, where every square, every attack, every hour of training has visible cost — because a character only ever gets one action at a time.
— What this game is for
Play-by-mail games had something modern games threw away: orders you had to commit to, consequences you could not undo, and a genuine wait to find out. They also had something worth throwing away — an early mistake could destroy a two-week paid turn, and you would not even know for a fortnight.
Atomic Tick keeps the first half and deletes the second. Ticks are scheduled continuously instead of posted fortnightly. Future orders can be edited until the moment they lock. Failure has explicit handling instead of silently ruining the rest of your plan. And every result comes with an explanation of why it happened.
It is not an energy bar. It is not action points you can save up and spend in one burst. Queue capacity changes how far ahead you can plan; it never changes how much you can do. A destination a hundred squares away is a hundred Move orders and a hundred action opportunities, for you and for everyone else.
These are written down as laws rather than preferences, which means a feature that violates one does not get built — however good the idea was.
Moving, attacking, casting, healing, training, equipping, unlocking, searching, collecting, giving, repairing and reviving are all separate actions. A single effect may have several tightly related consequences — a fire spell can burn as well as damage — but that is one coherent resolution, not a licence to hide unrelated activity inside one order.
An ordinary Move advances to one adjacent legal square. There is no compressed travel and no automated adventure. Distance is real, range matters, and getting somewhere is a decision you make repeatedly rather than a loading screen.
Whether an order succeeds or is consumed by failing, the next entry becomes eligible at the following tick. A failure never causes a queued instruction to fire early — so a bad tick costs you a tick, and never cascades into something worse.
The game should not demand constant presence. Queues, standing behaviour, warnings, notifications, recoverable defeat, protected loot and readable reports let you participate around ordinary life — without turning your character into an unbounded bot that plays itself.
For every tick you can learn which intent was locked, which action became effective, what resolved before yours, which statistics and statuses applied, what the random result was, why the outcome happened, what changed, and what became of your queue.
Cadence, genre, economy, death rules, competition and roster can all differ between Shards. Characters, statistics, mastery, items, currency and property never transfer between independently balanced ones — so no Shard can be farmed to dominate another.
Core access and progression stay free. Optional support, if it is ever offered, is cosmetic or voluntary recognition — never extra actions, faster ticks, better outcomes, superior land, exclusive systems or additional mechanical capacity.
The setting exists to justify the mechanic rather than decorate it. This is the rare case where "why does the world only change on a schedule?" has an in-world answer.
The Atomic Bang was a causality fracture that ended continuous universal time. What remains are Shards: stabilised fragments of possible history, in which consequential change happens only at discrete ticks.
So a Shard is not a theme or a save slot. It is one running persistent world with its own map, roster, cadence, economy, history, ruleset and content. A thirty-minute Shard and a one-hour Shard are two different stabilised temporal rhythms, not two difficulty settings. Ambient life may look continuous, but only a tick changes anything that matters.
The cause of the Bang, who or what was responsible, and which account of it is oldest are deliberately unresolved. It was a fracture in causality rather than necessarily an explosion — and cultures in different Shards understand it as magic, as science, as catastrophe, as myth, or some argument between all four.
Overt magic and mana, medieval and preindustrial societies, fantasy races, monsters, dungeons, kingdoms, guilds, alchemy, enchanting, craft, wilderness and estates. Firearms and spaceflight appear only in declared variants.
Alien and synthetic races, advanced medicine, energy systems, robotics, fabrication, settlements, stations and planetary exploration. Cyberpunk, near-future, hard-science and space-opera exist as declared variants that select different capabilities.
Ruins, salvage, scarcity, item condition, hazards, claims, dangerous travel and altered communities. Nuclear, magical, ecological, machine, alien and temporal collapses are distinct templates — the cause decides what technology, magic and creatures survived.
One curated world that takes selected pieces of all three families and gives them a single history, geography and economy to share. It is the first concentrated design focus precisely because it forces magic, technology and survival onto common ground. Curated, never an unrestricted mixing bowl.
The Shard Atlas. Shards can share a logical map — the same coordinates, the same region topology, the same historical relationships. One location might be a castle in a Fantasy Shard, an arcology in a Science Fiction Shard, a ruined salvage site in an Apocalypse Shard, and a phase-overlap district where they meet. Same bones, different world, and a place you know in one Shard is a place you half-know in another.
There is no general character level. What you can do is what you have actually practised, which means two characters of the same age can be completely different people.
The social vocabulary is fixed so that words mean one thing. This matters more than it sounds: most games use "guild" for four different concepts.
The intended emotional rhythm, in four beats. It repeats every tick, and it is the whole game.
Read the map and your reports, check range, consider what other characters and creatures might do, and write a sequence of atomic instructions. Add, remove, copy, reorder and revise as much as you like.
You know exactly when the next tick lands. You do not know what every other actor decided in the meantime. That gap is the tension, and it is deliberate.
Initiative orders the actors, and each eligible one resolves at most a single effective action. Then the report arrives: order selection, initiative, execution, failure, rewards, damage, movement and what became of your queue.
Keep the plan, rewrite several future entries, switch your standing behaviour, pause a character, coordinate with allies — or leave it alone entirely and let it run.
This is a game in development and it is not playable yet. The distinction between "designed" and "built" is tracked deliberately, because a roadmap that cannot be checked against reality is an advertisement.
There is far more designed than there is playable — a great deal of written design and content sitting above a small set of actions that actually work.
— The project's own assessment of itself
Atomic Tick is in development and there is nothing to sign up for. The Discord is where progress gets posted and where design arguments actually happen — and design arguments are much more useful now than after everything is locked.
