The Studio | Building two multiplayer games as one person

Why tick-based

The genre chose the constraint as much as I did

A twitch-based multiplayer game is a specialist problem. Keeping thousands of players in perfect agreement, millisecond by millisecond, while none of them trust each other, is a team's worth of work before you have made a single interesting decision about the game itself.

A tick-based game does not have that problem. The galaxy changes at a scheduled moment. Between those moments there is nothing to keep in sync, because nothing is happening yet — there is only intent, waiting. That is why one person can run a persistent shared world at all.

It also happens to produce the kind of game I want to play. Nobody wins by clicking faster. Nobody loses because they were asleep. Everyone gets the same number of decisions, and the game is about which of them were the right ones.

Nothing changes the galaxy except the tick. Not me at three in the morning with a good idea, and not anybody else at any hour either.

— Rule one, in both games

The challenges

Every missing colleague had to be replaced by something

A studio is not just labour, it is a set of checks. Remove the people and the checks vanish quietly — you do not notice the reviewer is gone until a player finds the bug. Each of these is a role I do not have, and the thing that stands in for it.

The missing reviewer

You cannot proofread your own writing, and you cannot review your own work. The mistakes you make are precisely the ones your own mental model cannot see — which is why a second person catches them and you never do. Alone, that check simply is not there.

Replaced by: a project that argues back

The rules a change has to satisfy are written down and then enforced automatically, so skipping a step is not a judgement call I get to make at midnight. Work that cuts a corner fails before it ever reaches a player. It is a poor substitute for a colleague, but it never gets tired and it is never polite.

The missing testers

Testers find the thing you would never think to try, and they play for hours, which is the only way pacing and balance problems surface. One developer playing their own game finds neither — you only ever play it the way you designed it.

Replaced by: opponents who don't know they're testing

Astral Sovereignty's NPC empires are not scenery. They hold colonies, expand, build, run supply routes, defend themselves and fight each other, using exactly the same orders and rules a player uses, with no special privileges. When one of them gets stuck, it has found a real problem in a real system — and they do it around the clock, in a galaxy that never stops.

The missing night shift

A live galaxy is a live service. It has to keep resolving ticks whether or not anyone is watching it, and there is exactly one person who could be watching. That person sleeps.

Replaced by: failures that stay small

The galaxy is built on the assumption that I will be unavailable at the worst possible moment, because sooner or later I will be. What can go wrong is kept small enough that it does not take the tick with it.

The missing institutional memory

Two games are more than one person's working memory holds. The version of me from six months ago is a colleague who left, took all the context with them, and cannot be emailed.

Replaced by: writing that is load-bearing

Everything that matters is written down at the time, and decisions are recorded as decisions — including the ones still unresolved, which are the ones you most want to find later. Documentation that only exists out of good intentions rots. Documentation the project actually depends on does not.

The missing art department

Art is the one thing a solo developer cannot fix by trying harder. Animation, cinematics and bespoke illustration are simply out of reach at the quality bar players rightly expect.

Replaced by: art direction that does not need one

Both games commit to composed still imagery and an interface that reads like instrumentation — dense, legible, and honest about what it is. Nothing animates because nothing needs to. That is a decision made once and written down, not a temporary state, so neither game carries a visual debt it can never pay off.

The missing person who says no

Nobody here tells me an idea is out of scope. Two games is arguably already one too many, and every new idea arrives with a persuasive case for doing it immediately. Left unchecked, a solo project becomes a permanent pile of half-finished systems.

Replaced by: written rules that outrank my mood

The browser is the platform and a phone app is explicitly a later phase, not a parallel one. A new system is not finished until the NPC empires can use it too — which makes every feature honestly expensive at exactly the moment I am tempted by it. Gaps and unresolved questions get logged rather than quietly forgotten.

Not solved

The parts that are still genuinely hard

Everything above is a problem with an answer. These do not have one yet, and pretending otherwise would make the rest of this page worth less.

A galaxy needs people, and new galaxies start quiet

NPC empires genuinely make a galaxy feel inhabited — they arrive with history, they fight each other, they take worlds you wanted. What they cannot be is a rival you remember, an ally who surprises you, or someone arguing with you in the Discord afterwards. That only comes from people.

There is no clever fix for this. It is the actual reason this website exists.

Two games at once is a real risk, not a flex

Astral Sovereignty is open and being played. Atomic Tick has a very large design library and a game that is partly built. Attention spent on one is attention not spent on the other, and no amount of shared thinking makes that arithmetic disappear.

The plan is sequencing rather than parallelism: the live galaxy and its players come first, and Atomic Tick advances in the gaps and on the parts that are pure design. Whether that holds is a fair thing to be sceptical about, and you are welcome to hold me to it.

I am the single point of failure, and design cannot fix that

Careful habits and failures that stay small reduce how badly a bad day goes. None of them address the case where the developer is unavailable for a month. A studio has redundancy. A person does not.

What can be done is being done, and it stops well short of a solution. I would rather write that here than let it be a surprise.

Support and community are development time

Every bug report, question and balance argument is time not spent building the next thing. That is a trade I would make every time and I am not complaining about it — but it is real, and it grows with success, which is the awkward part of hoping this works.

Alpha means the rules can change while you are playing

Astral Sovereignty is open and it is an alpha, in that order, every time. Systems are still being added and rules can change underneath you. When they do, the change is announced inside the game rather than left for you to discover.

It is not finished and there is no date when it will be. An alpha can also still need a reset, so nothing here promises that a particular empire survives forever.

Atomic Tick's own notes list what is not built yet

Its planning documents track what is designed but incomplete — character progression, several recovery and inventory actions, and the browser game itself. It would be easy to leave all that off a marketing site.

Leaving it on is the point: a roadmap that cannot be checked against reality is an advertisement, not a plan.

How a change lands

The same route every time, deliberately

A repeatable path is what makes it possible to work in short sessions without losing the thread between them. It is also what stops a good idea at midnight from becoming a bad tick at dawn.

01 Design

Write it down before building it

What the system is, which existing systems it touches, and what it deliberately does not do. If it cannot be described clearly in plain prose, it is not ready to be built — and that prose becomes the thing I get held to later.

02 Rules

Define the orders and how they can fail

Every player action is an order with requirements and clear failure messages. Getting that right once means the browser game, the Discord surface and the NPC empires all understand the new system the same way.

03 Resolution

Decide where it belongs in the tick

Everything resolves in a fixed order, every tick, so a new system has to say where it fits. And any outcome has to be repeatable — the same tick resolved twice must reach the same answer — because a result nobody can reproduce is a result nobody can dispute.

04 Teach the opponents

The NPC empires learn it too

A system players can use and the resident empires cannot is a system that makes the galaxy less alive. This step is required rather than optional, and it is the one that makes new features honestly expensive — which is exactly the discipline a solo developer needs at the moment of temptation.

05 Ship

Announce it, release it, then watch

Changes are announced to players inside the game, so nobody has to guess what moved. Then I watch the next few ticks land, and wait for someone in the Discord to find the thing I did not think of. They usually do.

What I will and won't do

The commitments worth writing down

Not a manifesto. Just the handful of things I want to be held to, stated plainly enough that you can tell if I break them.

Fair to every timezone: Orders resolve together on a schedule. Being asleep at the wrong moment never costs you a decision.
Fair to people with jobs: Automation exists so a busy week does not undo a month. Presence is not a stat.
Nothing to out-click: Every outcome is decided by the game itself, under identical rules for everyone. Reflexes are not part of the game.
The NPCs play by your rules: No special privileges, no hidden bonuses, no cheating opponents. The same orders and the same costs.
You can always find out why: Every tick produces a report explaining what resolved and what changed. A result you cannot understand is a bug in the design.
Changes get announced: When the rules move mid-alpha, you are told inside the game rather than left to discover it.
Honest status, always: Astral Sovereignty is open and it is an alpha. Both halves of that sentence, every time, including when it would be more flattering to drop one.

The feedback loop

Tell me what is wrong with it

Everything on this page exists to compensate for not having colleagues. Players are the one thing none of it substitutes for. If something is confusing, unfair, slow or broken, the Discord is where that turns into a fix — and criticism is genuinely more useful to me than praise.

Join the Discord Play the alpha first

Two multiplayer games. One person. No safety net.