Atomic Picnic News

Creative Director Edu here! Now that we've released the game in Early Access and fixed some of the most urgent issues via hotfixes, we can start doing more meaty updates!

This first one addresses some of the pain points you've been sending us via our Steam Forums and Discord! So, let's do a quick rundown:

• Glossary on Level-Up Screen: A handy new glossary is now available on the level-up screen, helping you easily understand game vocabulary.
  • We've received a ton of feedback regarding how specific mechanics work, and while this isn't the final solution, we wanted to do something fast to help players better understand the game! You can expect us to improve on this later on 🙂
    

[h2]Visual Improvements
[/h2]

• Revamped Discovery Screen: The Discovery screen has been polished with new visuals.
  • This is a first pass. We will keep improving this screen so you know what to expect from discoveries!

• New Discovery Unlock Animation: Discoveries now include a fresh unlock animation paired with a detailed textual description.
  

• Explosive Area Hold VFX: Experience the power with dazzling new effects.
  
  • We're listening! We heard you loud and clear how the Explosive Area Hold main objective wasn't clear and needed better communication, so we did something about it!
• Updated Loadout Buttons: Fresh button sprites have been added to the character loadout screen for a cleaner, more intuitive interface.
  

[h2]Quality of Life Enhancements[/h2]

• Camille’s Laser Anticipation VFX Improvement: The Laser Anticipation VFX now accurately stops when it encounters the Goop Slime, giving better gameplay clarity.
  
  • After watching you guys play and reading your comments, we realized we needed to do a better job explaining how Camille's fight works. This improvement addresses the fight's biggest pain point: The Laser attack. We'll keep working to make this a better fight with your feedback

[h2]Changes[/h2]

• Audio Adjustments:
  • Skill SFX volume increased for better audio balance.
    
  • Critical hit SFX and Hani Handyman Charge SFX also have volume boosts.
• Icon Updates: Some discovery icons have been replaced with updated versions.
  
• Discovery Rewards Tweak: Pebble rewards no longer trigger a fanfare.
  
• Level-Up Screen Simplification: Stats for regular curios are no longer shown, focusing only on Cursed Curios.
  
  • The reason we're hiding this information for now is because the way we had it displayed was causing a lot of confusion for players. When players read that a Curio Level Up gained +2% Probability, they thought that this stat applied to their entire character and not to that Curio only. So, we decided to remove these stats change display for now while we think of a better way of communicating that. This is a temporary change while we find better solutions! So thank you for your understanding 🙏
    
• Balancing Adjustments:
  
  • Slight buffs and tweaks for upgrades with underwhelming evolutions.
    
  • Sniper now shoots faster for a smoother experience.
    
  • Gold Goblin drops an XP Vacuum reward when escaping with low health.
    
  • Players can now be revived from greater heights.
    
  • Chest rewards now vary in probability, with a smaller chance for one-reward chests and better odds for three-reward chests.
    
  • Night mode bosses got a health boost and only drop cores now, no regular XP.
    

[h2]Fixes[/h2]

• Gameplay:
  • Gold Goblin now only drops Pebbles after activation.
    
  • Ghost Story curio (levels 3 and 4) and Explosive Area Hold objective no longer show decimal values.
    
• End Game Screen:
  
  • "Send Us Feedback" can now be closed with the gamepad.(Sorry about that gamepad people!)
    
  • Holding "Continue" no longer affects the "Send Us Feedback" button.
    
  • Corrected level display issues.
• Tutorial: Fixed "Skip Tutorial" button for clients after completion or skipping.
  
• Camp Display: Text now properly displays after players hold CTRL to ready.
  

[h2]Known Issues[/h2]

• Some discovery trackers (e.g., deposits, devices) are not working as expected.
  
• Certain enemies might get stuck during Peace Time.
  
• Unit spawns and movement are glitchy on Train Plateau.
  
• Dead allies may appear invisible to teammates.
  
• Inviting friends through Steam may result in joining random lobbies.
  
• Players with Safeguard, while downed, may encounter gameplay blockage.
  
• Taka-chan is unresponsive if opened simultaneously with a Mini-Boss spawn.
  

[h2]Snacks Combat Behavior
[/h2]As I've said before, we've been reading all comments, and this is BY FAR the biggest pain point still in the game. Unfortunately, we haven't addressed it in this update. Still, we are working on improving the Snacks combat so it doesn't feel cheap and frustrating, especially their Teleporting near you and Shooting behind you. We're prototyping some solutions and iterating, this takes a bit more time to do and we want to do it properly, but at the same time I feel we should address this directly so you know what to expect. Again, thank you all for your patience regarding this! 🙏

We're super excited to be receiving so much feedback from the community, and we want to make Atomic the best game we can, so please keep sending your comments, suggestions, bug reports, and more! And if you want to reach me, you can do so in the Forums or Discord, which is where I hang out the most
Stay tuned for our following updates because we're cooking!

See you in the Picnic,
- Edu

[h2]Hey everyone, Edu here, Creative Director of Atomic Picnic![/h2]

First of all, thank you so much for the amazing support you've been giving us during our Early Access launch!

The Team and I have been down in the trenches answering our community on the Forums (yes, it's really me there), reading your reviews, watching Twitch streams and YouTube videos, and collecting every single piece of feedback you've given us. There's a lot of stuff to talk about, so let's do it!

[h3]Priority Fixes[/h3]
Here's a list of most pressing fixes that we've identified and are working to fix ASAP (or have already fixed by the time you read this heheh):

• Networking issues
  • We've already released a Hotfix addressing the most pressing Networking issues we found, but there are more fixes to come to improve stability even further.
• Crashes
  • We've already identified and fixed some crashing issues and we'll be working with you guys to fix even more!
• Improved AI behavior
  • Some enemies were behaving poorly and we already released a hotfix to address that, but we've received a lot of feedback in regards to enemies like Little Mac and Snacks and we'll be exploring ways to make their AI Behavior better (and fairer).
• Balancing
  • There are some balancing issues currently in the game that we want to resolve. Unfortunately that means Hani is in our sights. Although our internal philosophy is to balance everything upwards and OP, we fear that we might have gone a bit too far with him. We'll also be taking a look at weapons, curios and other abilities that might be feeling a bit underpowered right now.
• UI
  • There's a lot of things we can improve in our current UI so we're exploring some options here, especially to make our Discovery Screen a lot more readable and understandable. We'll be doing a bit more to explain how some mechanics work.

[h3]Features we hear you want[/h3]
You've been telling us all your wishes, so we're compiling here what has been most requested from you guys. We're listening!

• Matchmaking / Server Browser / Quickplay*
• More Build Diversity
• More ways to Customize your Playstyle
• More Characters
• Better and more interesting Discoveries

* This feature is something that we can't confirm will come to the game. We're investigating options in regards to forms of matching players so they play together inside the game itself.

Check out the full roadmap of future content at the bottom of this post!

Oh, if you want to help shape the future development of the game, you can reach us on our Discord server.

[h3]Christmas is Coming![/h3]
Atomic will be celebrating with a new update! It will have a new night map, a couple new curios and snow!

We’ve issued a new hotfixe for Atomic Picnic today. We hear your feedback and are working hard to fix issues and improve your gameplay experience.

[h3]Here’s every change in Hotfix #2 to Atomic Picnic v0.52:[/h3]

Changes:

• Mementos machine moved to inside the bus, so that players can find it more easily
  
• Characters discoveries all rebalanced, so that it's faster to unlock them
  • JD: 1000 > 200 active reload
  • Hani: 12.000 > 6.000 receive damage
  • Bonnie: 80 > 50 dodges

Fixes:

• Partial fix for connectivity issues, we addressed as many as we could
  
• We added a new analytics to track the crashes and give us more information so that we can target the problem better
  
• Crashes should no longer be happening on enemy despawn
  
• Issues with boss core drops have been fixed
  
• Players should have all the cores acquired during a picnic available for use at the camp
  

[h3]AI Improvements[/h3]

• Fix enemies losing target on certain occasions
  
• Fix ranged enemy attack line of sight, especially when the player is above the enemy
  
• Fix enemies spawning and standing still on idle
  
• Fix enemies spawning on player's position
  
• Greatly reduced the frequency of enemies spawning inside structures
  
• Fix enemies despawning when the player is unreachable
  
• Fix enemies not spawning when the player is unreachable
  

Known Issues:

• Melee enemies small shaking when reaches player's closest position on NavMesh
  
• Sometimes enemies keep jumping on the same place, without getting closer to the player
  
• Little Mac's AI toggle between player targets too much
  

We'll be working to improve these known issues on future updates!


Thank you again to everyone playing Atomic Picnic - your feedback is as important now more than ever. Keep it coming!

Watch this replay of our Atomic Picnic stream with Edu and Daniel from BitCake, and Mason and Andrew from Mad Mushroom!

Fixes:

• Fixed a crash that happened for some players on AMD GPUs (RX 5000 and RX 6000 series)
  
• Downed players can no longer be healed and targeted by enemies
  
• Players should no longer get permanently stuck while performing ledge climbs under certain circumstances
  
• Cores and Moon Cores should no longer be affected by negative currency gain Cursed Curios
  
• Taka-chan UI should no longer be stuck when a level-up happens at the same time the reward happens
  

A big shoutout to all of you for your awesome support and feedback! We're thrilled that you're diving into this Early Access build of Atomic Picnic! We're going to keep pushing hard on the game, and your feedback is like gold to us.

Don't forget to hit the "Send Feedback" button at the end of your picnic or hop into our Discord to share your thoughts. We can't wait to hear what you think!