To go with the launch of the Kickstarter campaign for their new title, Swordhaven: Iron Conspiracy, the ATOM Team development team has been kind enough to answer some of our questions regarding their latest game. If you are into Swordhaven, don’t hesitate in checking its Kickstarter page! We also have a French-translated version of the interview right here.

Hello, and thank you! Could you introduce yourself?
I’m Alexander Chernyavskiy, one of the writers and game developers for Atom Team, a small indie crew of 10 guys spread across Europe, making video games. Our previous projects were the two post-apocalyptic titles: ATOM RPG and its stand-alone sequel/expansion—Trudograd. Right now we’re working on our third game— Swordhaven : Iron Conspiracy.

How did you get the idea for Swordhaven: Iron Conspiracy?
Almost every developer has a backlog of projects they want to work on. Talking about ATOM, the idea of creating a Fallout-inspired RPG has been with us since 2008, simply because we’re fans of the series 🙂
The idea for Swordhaven came from different sources that I’ll avoid naming so as not to spoil some parts of the game, but mainly we wanted to try and develop something new and fantastical.

What are your influences for the development of the game?
I’d say our main role models are Baldur’s Gate 1 (as well as other Infinity Engine titles), Neverwinter Nights, and a mostly forgotten Black Isle project called Lionheart. That’s not all, of course. But to list every game that possibly influenced us in creating Swordhaven seems like a futile undertaking.

Since when have you been working on Swordhaven?
We discussed its concepts and mechanics on and off for a year and a half now, but the really intense part during which we created most of what’s going to become the Kickstarter demo took us less than a year.

What are your plans for Swordhaven?
If we get the Kickstarter support we require, late 2025 will be the time we’ll introduce our biggest and most complex game yet to the world 🙂 Before then there will be a period of early access, when we’ll collaborate with our players to improve the game before launch.

How many people are working on the game? What tools do you use?
There’s ten of us—give or take—and our main tool is Unity. It’s a comfortable engine, flexible and highly personalised for our needs, and our way of developing stuff. I’m not really a programmer, but I implemented the whole battle system into the game thanks to the custom action creation interface my colleagues coded for me inside Unity.

How is the development process going with all the people implied?
It’s quite smooth, actually. Despite being spread all over Europe—Ukraine, Latvia, Poland, etc. we constantly sync via github. Any one of us can always check up on a colleague, see what they’re doing, and avoid messing it up for them 🙂

What are the features and specificities of Swordhaven? What length are you aiming for?
Swordhaven will take our old formula of making completely open worlds where you can travel anywhere at any time, paired with zero level scaling. The NPC dialogues will feature even more skill checks, because now we have a whole three kinds of conversation skills: Intimidation, Persuasion and Bluff.

The combat system will see a significant update from ATOM RPG. This time, we’ll have two combat modes: turn-based and real time with pause. Winning will depend on how you combine various weapon techniques—whether it’s throwing spears, using protective stances, or juggling enemies in a hardcore hand-to-hand fight. Many new possibilities will be available! While it’s not perfect at the moment, it will be truly dynamic. I mean, really dynamic!

We’re also working with player feedback. The user interface this time will be almost tailor-made from the suggestions we received from those who didn’t enjoy ATOM’s interface. Everything will be easy to find, self-explanatory really. The optional isometric camera mode also never looked better, if you ask me!

All in all, Swordhaven will still have our in-house style, but it will be an improvement on the previous games in almost every way possible. Once we’re done it’ll hopefully be somewhere between the length of the original ATOM RPG and Trudograd.

What is your ideal replay value?
We won’t have a class system, everyone can become anyone in the game. However, different backgrounds will give your character very different goals. Since every background you choose makes the game differ slightly—giving you new quests, dialogue options, and such, and choosing different weapon styles changes the combat a lot—I believe replaying it will be pretty fun, at least a couple of times.

What is the story of the game? How did you develop its lore?

We made the lore up from scratch. It’s an ongoing process, really. While we had the general idea for the world and its biggest events from the start, we’re making details as we go, using the rules we created.

As for the story, I won’t go into too much detail, but it starts innocently enough with you sailing to Nova Drakonia, a land that was colonised only around 100 years ago. One of your fellow passengers dies just a few knots from the shore, but on his deathbed manages to hand you a mysterious talisman, and asks for a small favour…

How did you create its universe? What were your influences for it?
The sources are endless: history, fables, classic adventure literature from the XIX and XX centuries, the stuff they published in pulp magazines… The usual suspects, at least for us.

For me personally, a lot of inspiration comes from my favourite works by Howard, Lovecraft and Chambers, meaning there will be a hard to find cosmic horror subplot, just like in our previous games. This time however, it will be less Cthulhu and much more King in Yellow, and maybe some of Arthur Machen’s “Shining Pyramid”.

It always amazes me when a piece of media has obscure stories within stories, things the reader—or in our case player—may only guess at but never confronts head-on.

Why did you change universes?
Who said we did…? … I’m just joshing you! Or am I…? No, but seriously: we wanted to try something new, and since fantasy and medieval-esque fiction in general have always appealed to us, it was a no-brainer what setting we wanted to use for our next game.

Is another sequel to the “ATOM-universe” on the table, or are you done with it?
I’m pretty sure there will be an ATOM 2 eventually. But it won’t be soon 🙂

Do you have a particular anecdote, a funny story to tell us, something you’d like to share?
Something fun happens with this game almost every week, I tell you what! Like just recently one of our programmers was streaming to us as he experimented with horse riding mechanics for one of the cutscenes in the game. Eventually he finished and started demonstrating to us what he came up with, but alas, it turned out that for all this time he worked on the horse asset instead of the rider asset, so when he booted up the demo, the horse jumped up on her master and began riding him instead!

It was hilarious, especially when the horse began whipping her owner’s sides. I remember begging them to keep this in… But we fixed it in the end. Another time one of our artists, Yaroslav, moved a piece of terrain under some village children and accidentally transported them into the bottom of the river. So you’d go across a bridge minding your own business and there would be these two kids playing catch on the bottom… It looked positively bizarre!

Do you plan on localizing Swordhaven in French for our players?
We really hope it’ll come to this!

Do you have a final word for our readers? Something about future projects?
I just want to say thank you for reading, and if you like our games be sure to follow us on Kickstarter, as the Demo will be linked there. Try it out! And if you like it, you can follow us on Steam and our socials for news about updates and more.

Best of luck! Thanks a lot for your time!

A French version of the interview is available here.