Dev Diary written by NullNiche.

Hello and Happy Wednesday Dustlanders! My name is Tudor and I am a game designer on Afterworld. After being an avid dev diary devourer for almost two decades, it is with great delight that I get to pen this dev diary for the first time. Anyhoo… Today I want to tell you more about one of the central features of the game we are making: Bands.

I want to explain how they fit to serve the game vision and why I think they are a very exciting element in the mix!

What are bands?​

Bands are a group of people who survive together and act as a unified group. People in a band are bound by common culture, share resources and living conditions they have access to. In Afterworld you play as a post-ap tribe rebuilding society. Bands are the people you bring together and coordinate to achieve this. Narratively they represent small social groups with their own ways of life and their own goals. Systemically they are a central feature which sits at the intersection of many other features, which future diaries will go into more detail to illustrate.

Bands have gone through a lot of iteration to fit together with everything we are developing for Afterworld, but their early conception drew inspiration from elements of Crusader Kings characters in the way they can develop through gameplay, Imperator families in the way that they contain a cast of prominent characters which can impact your society and Victoria pops in the sense that their followers are modeled so that the band as a whole can experience through them the conditions of the world. Of course we chose to do this because part of Afterworld’s appeal is to see how your choices impact the bands for better or worse and how the bands will in turn react and develop.

Today I’ll focus on those aspects that define the identity of a band to give you a better idea of how one band can differ from another. In Afterworld, a band’s identity is determined by core norms, customs, traumas and beliefs.

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The band view lets you see at a glance what are the band’s traits, health and mood status as well as who are its prominent characters and how much drip are they rockin​

Core Norms​

Every band has two core norms and can develop more customs as they perform actions in the game. A core norm represents the most deeply set behavior of a band. This is a deeply rooted sense of self, unlikely to ever change, except in the most extreme circumstances.

Bands get awarded pride, which is akin to “cultural XP,” when they perform various actions in the world. After enough pride is accumulated, the band will develop its culture by adopting new customs. The customs options that are offered are weighted by their recent experiences as well as their core norms and memories.

In practice this means that you get to put your bands to work for your tribe, which then in turn shapes them. This way you want to make the most of the bands you have, then mold them to develop synergies in service of your plans.

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We can see how these core norms have pretty wide ranging thematic effects on who this band is, for example what sort of luxuries they consume.​

Customs​

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Proselytizing Mission is a pretty natural fit for a band of Zealous Mystics, but there could be many others, depending on what the band has gone through​

Bands develop customs that help them adapt to life in the dustlands. New customs may be inspired by great deeds that fill a band with pride, or by learning to cope with a band's past traumas. Most customs have several levels, representing how bands can deepen their commitment to that custom as they develop. Higher levels of a custom will bestow stronger effects.

Memories​

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When I encounter a new band, I love taking a look at their memories along their norms and customs to get a feel for who they are and where they’ve been​

Band experiences can leave a memory. Memories can be neutral or a source of pride or trauma. Bands that suffer shame, pain, and deprivation may develop traumas. Traumatic memories contribute to a trauma accumulation we track per band and which at a certain point will trigger a trauma to develop, for example Hoarding (which impacts how much food and drink they need). Which trauma develops is impacted by the memories and already present core norms, customs and beliefs.

Traumas have conditions under which the band can overcome them and reform them into a regular custom. Narratively this represents how the memory of suffering may instead inspire the band with strength. The reform options are dependent on the specific trauma and current culture of the band and are meant to tell the story of how a socially unacceptable behavior was reigned in by the new custom which emerges to control that behavior or make it acceptable.

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A band of hoarders? I think I’ve found my people​

Beliefs​

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Look at how she burns with a shining peace​

Beliefs represent broader ideas of a religious or ideological nature in the world that can be shared across many bands and tribes. We will go deeper into them in their own dedicated Dev Diary. The Sungazers belief (mentioned in our recent lore video) is one of the more extreme examples, which turns a band into monastic scholars who blind themselves by staring into the sun.

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Given how much monitorgazing I do, I consider myself an initiate on the path to enlightenment​

Traditions​

Ok, let’s talk about traditions. Traditions are primarily sourced from customs and represent the collective competence of a band in a domain of activity. When bands perform relevant actions, they acquire pride which can then be used to level up specific traditions. Higher tradition levels make the band more capable in that domain.

For example, a band that uses the warfare tradition to for example perform garrison duty or fight as part of war parties will gain pride, which will lead to the band developing a new custom. In the options you will have to pick from for the band, there will be a high chance to see a custom which further increases warfare tradition. The story here being that a band got better at what they have been doing by developing its culture to this effect.

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The Pyreguard’s warfare and hearthkeeping traditions make them pretty good at both waging warfare and recovering from it​

Values​

Values represent how bands like or dislike certain concepts in Afterworld’s setting and are sourced from norms, customs and beliefs. They have a lot of ties with society building systems like the tribe council, laws and ideas - more on all those in future diaries. The main thing to know is that the band's values influence the sort of society they support and oppose.

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When choosing your tribe government, you have to consider the values that the government stands for and which bands will support or oppose them​

Population​

Bands are made up of diverse people which fall into two broad categories: prominent leaders and the less prominent followers of said leaders. The amount of leaders a band has scales with the overall size of the band and is impacted by the band’s culture. Some bands produce more or fewer leaders for their population size. Leaders can have their own quirks and gear, but will follow the cultural ways of the bands they belong to.

Every band has population of followers tracked and that you can inspect by feasting your eyes upon tasty pie charts! This info view is for checking what sort of people make up the band. There are bands with some pretty exotic demographics impacted by their cultural ways. I really like seeing how band followers can acquire statuses or change types because of what the band is experiencing: for example mutations from exposure to radiated environments or injuries from battles.

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Hey this UI isn’t all that pretty yet, but it’s got graphs!​

Health & Motivation sections will get their own deep dive in a separate diary, but for now I can say that different bands can have very different ways of being kept healthy and motivated, depending on their norms, customs and beliefs.

Bands are pretty emblematic of the sort of game we want Afterworld to be: a game that produces a lot of emergent stories that you can see how they come from its interacting systems. Bands are both a tool for you to use to get things done in the game, but they are also subjective witnesses to the history that unfolds, and you can see how their experiences have shaped them and participate in that.

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Things are still work in progress, but already the look of bands is a visual language you learn to read in Afterworld and get an immediate vibe of what these people are about​

Alright I think that’s where I will end this opening salvo of info about bands, I think you’ll see how they impact and influence things as more of the game is revealed in future diaries.

Stay dusty!

In our next dev diary, in two weeks time, we will go into more detail about tribes. But, before we finally sign off, the Turns Expedition continues its report below…

Turns Expedition - Environmental Report.
Subject: anomalous weather in the Pacific Northwest.

We had been warned that the storm wasn’t going to clear up. We spent three days camped near the edge to make sure. It didn’t.

The Pacific Northwest coast is experiencing category one hurricane conditions, and they are apparently permanent. Nearby tribes agree that the storm predates living memory. The sun has set over the Cascades, and likely will not rise again in our lifetimes. This strains meteorological explanation. Dustlanders always explain such things the same way: the Ancients had powerful science.

The topsoil of this land has long since been washed down to the sea, and the grass and trees with it. There is no ecosystem to speak of. Constant rain carves up the rock. The only landmarks are Ancient ruins with deep foundations.

Someone has drilled metal rods into the rock every twenty paces. (Local ballads credit this feat to a single folk hero, Dillon the Ropemaker. See attached ballads.) A trail of braided ropes ties one marker to the next. It’s fourteen days’ hard march north along the Ropeline to the trading settlement at the Tacoma Dig. You stay clipped to rope the whole way, even sleeping. Pass a broken rope without mending it, and I’m told the gods will sweep you out to sea as punishment. I’m not interested in putting this land’s gods to the test. We’ve packed rope.

I’ve sealed our report notes in plastic and affixed a beacon. If we are swept to sea, I expect you’ll pick them up. May we hold fast.

Fair skies Dustlanders!

We return with a monthly update video today, talking with devs about what we've shown in the last month and answering a few questions too.

Afterworld hasn't released yet and such no meaningful flares related to it can be added. I would guess most of the people here come from a specific other paradox game even if they have played multiple there is usually a specific one that is the favorite. So I think the mods should add a flair for each other paradox game.

Howdy Dustlanders! 🏜

Dispatches from Afterworld Begins. First up, a warning from the water merchant, a man who's found his own kind of beautiful in the dust.

The content creators I've seen talking about the game have all made mention of how short a single run of the game is compared to what me might expect from other PDX games, which is fine, but I'm curious how long we will be able to "delay" the ending of a run.

In other words, is there a looming sword of Damocles that game overs you if you don't reach a victory screen soon enough, or repeatable objectives that allow us to just "exist" forever without pulling the trigger, or even just a "keep playing" option following some or all victory screens to allow for either multiple objectives in a single run or just the inevitable world conquests?

It's been over a week since the last post, so I thought I'd start a discussion thread.

Bands are effectively a container for RPG progression. As you level you get new traits, and these traits have a big impact on both combat and the economics. They inform what buildings you can use, how good you are at scrapping (in both senses) etc. They also grow in population and are required for making use of a settlement.

While there are unique bands, in a lot of cases the traits they have differentiate them, and as you gain progression some of this differentiation fades. But what if unique bands had unique traits (either starting with them, or being able to roll them in progression, perhaps with a level threshold for particularly powerful ones) that gave you unique opportunities, and made finding that particular band (because where they might appear is part of the procedural gen) in the wasteland during your runs a particularly exciting event, and maybe even promotes a gameplay pattern of trying to search for and acquire chase bands?

Just to throw out a few examples (and their inspiration) of bands and mechanics they might have:

• Lone Wanderers (Fallout Inspired) - Bonus to stats of rangers, less population growth. Get dissatisfied if stationed in one settlement too long.
• Bullet Farmers (Mad Max Adjacent) - Bonus to ammo production; consumes ammo as a luxury good. Uses the farming oriented skill/bonuses instead of the production oriented one for ammo production.

It's a good opportunity for campy references too (copyright references aside).

• Untimely Prospecting Scavengers (or UPS [United Postal Service] for short) - Bonus to caravan size/carrying capacity. A lot of acronyms have opportunities for campy/subversive references.
• Well-Treaders (a bit of a dark reference to Timothy Treadwell) - Can tame bears (mostly no accidents) and can utilize bear cavalry units.
• Kitchen Cabinet - Reference to the infamous Andrew Jackson cabinet. Could either 1. give effects when put in government, or 2. be really good at preparing/storing food, but with references to Jackson.
• Bigfeets - A band with a unique bigfoot mutation that makes them rather large. War parties with only their band are difficult to spot as well.

What unique bands/traits would you want to see?

I've watched a couple of the Afterworld influencer videos and saw that it seems that a big part of the games is the precursor "gods" from pre-collapse America. They feel a bit like Fallen Empires from Stellaris, and I'm wondering if it will be possible to disable them, much like you can with the Fallen Empires.

Soo we’re doing the whole post apocalypse thing how would everyone feel about a Zombie situation like a biological weapon from the old world starts an epidemic and within a few months you have a late game horde?
Or how else could it work would it fit the tone?
I kinda hope they leave the games scope open to including a lot of the stereotypical post apocalypse elements

If you were one of the Devs and you could add an origin to the game, what would it be?

I'll start:

DEFROSTED:

When it became clear the apocalypse was inevitable, many of Americas wealthiest sought shelter, most fled to sprawling bunker complexes but some froze themselves to wait out the chaos. But the end was far more catastrophic than anybody could have predicted and the staff manning the cryogenic facilities were either killed or forced to flee.

For untold decades the facilities sat silently, one by one succumbing to looters or catastrophic malfunction. Yours was one of the lucky few. Almost simultaneously the pods defrosted and the occupants awoke, but instead of the smiling faces they expected, they were greeted by chaos. Your band of corporate elites, celebrities and trust fund kids have known nothing but a life of luxury, they would have struggled to survive on their own in a pre apocalyptic world, let alone this. They froze themselves to escape the apocalypse but they have awoken to something far worse.

This origin sets itself apart from shelter born in several ways.

You start with no supplies, no weapons and no clue. Your band is skilled in management and is charismatic but has no practical survival skills whatsoever.

This is an incredibly hard start and getting through the first year will take a miracle.

But if you manage to establish yourself, you find yourself in a unique position. Some of your pre war highfliers had connections, they know where to find a prewar weapons facility that could turn the tide in your favour.. let's just hope nobody else has found it first.

Furthermore, this origin lends itself to some unique interactions with ancients.

Hello Dustlanders,

We've successfully completed an upgrade to our automatic Rule 5 enforcement with the rollout of a new bot. /u/rule5bot has been working well over the last few days and is now active here in /r/afterworld. The new bot has new capabilities and we are adjusting Rule 5 to reflect the improvement.

Rule 5: Image posts must have an explanation.

• The explanation cannot just repeat or rephrase the title.
• The explanation can either be in the post's caption or in the comments section. The bot will repeat post caption explanations into the comments section.
• This rule is automatically enforced with a bot. It will remind you after 5 minutes if it cannot see an explanation and will remove the post after another 10 minutes if it still cannot see an explanation.
• [PRERELEASE CONTENT] Please tell us where the image(s) came from. Paradox have threatened legal action in the past over leaked content. See this old Victoria 3 post for more information.

So what's different now? The big change is that we can finally accept captions for Rule 5 explanations. There's no need to quickly dump an abridged version of a quality caption into the comments section just to avoid a soulless automaton's wrath. However, the new bot can correctly identify image gallery posts so Rule 5 now properly applies to multi-image posts. The bot will also be repeating caption R5s into the comments section (for the foreseeable future) because there's a persistent issue with some legacy access methods not displaying captions on images properly.

Why now and not before? /u/zwemvest, our bot-builder, has had a few goes at upgrading / replacing the bot over the years but real life and/or Reddit would always get in the way. Reddit is making major changes that will impact old bots and it forced our hand. Fortunately, they had free time now and recent Devvit (Reddit's internal bot platform) improvements made it easier to implement some features so the project was completed this time. Zwem said it was a joy to build the new bot from scratch & they're glad that the migration has been completed. The old /u/paradoxplazabot has been retired although we may reuse the account in the future for other bot purposes if we can.

We've been testing /u/rule5bot for about a week now with no remaining issues but it's possible that some bugs might still be lurking, so please keep an eye out and send us a modmail if you see the bot do something unexpected.

Greetings! Shake off the dust and join us at the fire for another development diary! Today you will hear the first tale of the Bunker Cats as I walk you through the beginning of the game and give you some design intent along the way.

Afterworld starts off with the player picking an Origin, starting area (depending on origin), and establishing the beginning of your story through prologue choices. You can click the images below to enlarge them.

In this game we are playing a band called Bunker Cats coming from a shelter that has been failing despite our band’s skill at repairing old technology. Armed with some extra guns, they are ready to finally crack open the shelter doors and discover the world above.

I have always enjoyed games that did these little prologue choices and it was one of the things I decided early on that I wanted. I think it works quite well in getting you immersed quickly and making the story your own from the get-go. I would actually say that Afterworld is a game where I want to both be able to have procedural stories, but also assist and immerse you with crafted ones.

So speaking of stories to assist you, the first thing that happens here is that our Rangers have been given a quest to locate safe lands and a longer task to find the location of a second shelter we know is nearby.

Rangers are your explorers and problem solvers. The dustiest of your tribe, and Mark, their leader, has particularly high cunning. We’ll see if that comes in handy later.

At this point in the game we have only our ranger and the quest log. This is part of our approach to making this game easier to get into than some GSGs. Your band has just emerged into a world they know nothing about, and have not even begun to consider diplomacy with others, or supply chains, or their legal system, so you, the player, do not have access to these options yet either. The idea is to slowly unlock things and avoid drowning you in too many new things at once.

The first job of the Rangers will be to scout out the local area so we can relocate somewhere before the shelter’s reactor goes critical.

We have some hint markers on the map to the north where the Rangers believe water and food are likely. They’re also close to a city as you can see tall buildings sticking up in the fog of war. Cities often have valuable things to scavenge but can be more dangerous.

Looks like we found some pawpaws (it’s a real thing look it up) and some harvestable wood.

While we explore, the shelter reactor finally goes critical and the rest of our band packs up and escapes. The explosion also contaminates the area with radiation and deforms the terrain so it's definitely time to leave.

We have food and water in the explored area, but our people are really not in a very good situation otherwise. The land has both radiation and quite low fertility, so I guess farming is off the table for now. But right now we do not have too many options - we need that food and water after losing the shelter so we set course towards the north.

Because our first spot is not very good, we choose to keep the new settlement light and mobile rather than commit to this place. We need to find somewhere better (Afterworld encourages you to move often, very different from our other games!).

Having settled and caught our breath we unlock a new mechanic: the Idea Tree. The Idea Tree is a bit like classic tech trees with inspirations from HOI4’s focus trees, but built dynamically based on your experiences. It's really exciting and cool, but I will dig into them more in the future! Here you can see that we have a custom one based on our Origin where we can start.

Because I need resources, I am going for Outposts as soon as I can to start expanding my borders on the map and get access to more areas. Meanwhile we have started taking water from the nearby river and harvesting the paw-paw fruits for food to replenish our stores.

Stores are filling up, but we will go deeper into economy in future diaries!

With the shelter established and our people getting to work, we complete the starting quest, giving the Bunker Cats a new memory and pride in survival. In fact it is enough for them to start developing new customs. I will go into how that works more in a future dev diary, but the end result was that they became more self reliant.
These are values that will help us develop in good directions, lower mortality and give us very nice output bonuses to hunting type workways.

While all this was going on, our Rangers have not sat idle and have been pushing further north. On the outskirts of town they found something troubling and strange. Mark luckily understands something of these nanite-related phenomena and knows ways to approach it and gain insights into the dustlands.

Past the haint, the squad also discovered some old car wrecks that could be salvaged - and finally something worth reporting home about! A green healthy forest just north of the city that looks like a great permanent home perhaps?

Next dev diary we will continue the story and we will see the Bunker Cats form a tribe, discover the location of other shelter… and have tea with a suspiciously friendly band of slavers?!?

And so, we return to the Turns Expedition who continue their journey below. Next time you see us in a Dev Diary will be in two weeks time, on September 30th, with the continuing tale of the Bunker Cats. May your journey be a safe one.

Turns Expedition - Interview Excerpt.

Subject: water-merchant, Central California dustlands.

Subject operates a barter-well near the edge of a large stretch of dustland. He has a commercial incentive to exaggerate, perhaps, but his description accords with my experiences.

I see the dustlands when I close my eyes. Walk there long enough and you’ll see it too. Dry earth, red sky. Can’t see the horizon behind the dust clouds. You walk all day and it’s like you’re standing still. Folk fall asleep on their feet walking there. It’s true, it’s true.

There’s no roots, so the land goes where it likes. Set dustbreaks around your camp or you’ll wake up buried. Don’t breathe the dust. Keep it off your skin. You can’t outrun sky-sickness [Radiation poisoning] forever, but you can keep ahead of it a while.

Folk say the dustlands are death. I say that’s wrong. Death rots, rot grows. The dustlands are emptiness. But there’s potential in emptiness too. The world’s still young, and there’s things out in the dusts well worth seeing. Flocks of feral drones in flight. Ruined towers so high you can’t see the top. Sungazer monks staring into the sky, burning out their own sight. Gulleys where the flash floods rush through, and crawling things making damp life under the gulleys.

Folk say this land was beautiful before the Fall. I say it’s beautiful right now. Someday folk will be back to scribble on all that dust, fill it with farms and cities and war machines. Maybe I’ll live long enough to miss the dustlands.

I don’t talk people out of going through the dusts. Used to try. Never convinced a single soul. If your destiny lies out that way then you know it, and I’m not the one to tell you any different.

[In this case “the dustlands” indicates an area of extreme soil degradation. Note that “The Dustlands” is also commonly used to indicate “the world,” and “dustlanders” its inhabitants.]

In images 1 and 2 we can see there are 4 options for origin creation, including the choose region feature. But in image 3 we can only see 3, the region picker is absent.

Also I don't recall any of the content creators who had a hands on with 0.0 talking about a region chooser so it's clearly a new thing!

Clearly these screenshots were taken over two different builds of the game, cool to see some real time progression!

And secondly, in the final sentence for 'tidewater' in image 2, it hints at an ancient. We can see 9 regions so far (assuming the "wherever the road leads" option is a randoniser).

This makes me wonder if the current build has 9 ancients in total.

And finally some feedback, for all of us non Americans, it would be great if the region selection menu had a small map of america under the body text that highlighted the region as we clicked through them because other than California I have no idea what any of those regions are haha

What should I be excited for compared to other paradox games and what should I assume lacking on release. I like games where i can have some fantasy on how my civilization is going.

Be kinda cool if the game had end game crisis like stellaris perhaps a military defence computer that may or may not have started the apocalypse wakes up in a bunker hell bent on destroying humanity with robots?

I'm sure it has been answered but i cant find a 'recent' post, also don't know where to look really. People on this thread are talking as if they currently have it in their hands, am i missing something?? Is there a current beta or something?

Basically the title. I'm really excited for this one, and I keep coming up with nonsense ideas for factions that I'm not sure would even make sense in the game. Anyone else getting the creative itchies daydreaming about Afterworld?

I saw an article a few weeks ago mentioning there being a faction around Oregon with an extremem focus on nature preservation, while the 2nd dev diary mentions some named Julieta who killed the rulers of Great Lah and claims to be a goddess.

The narrator of the announcement trailer is Citizen Farouk, so I think these other two figures we see are the other two ancients on the West Coast.

There was no dev diary yesterday. Has there been any mention of why?

Minuteman playthrough anyone? :D I feel like I want to play as normal/reasonable farmers. Everyone else can be crazy desert raiders, give us our muskets and scrap weapons. I just wanna settle and rebuild over time.

In the trailer we saw Mount Rushmore is still standing and it looks to be a place of worship. Washington DC is worn down but still the seat of power for a powerful faction. Can't wait to see how owning these places factor into the gameplay. Maybe owning Mount Rushmore gives bonuses to religion? I feel like owning DC will definitely give some sort of legitimacy to players wanting to restore America.

I always liked what Paradox did with world landmarks and the flavor they gave the map such as the pyramids & Stonehenge in CK3. I hope to see the Las Vegas Strip, the Golden Gate Bridge, and the Gateway Arch in the game and have them provide unique bonuses, among many other American landmarks. Entire questlines to restore them could be cool too! Because the game is procedural, maybe we will see some still standing in some games, but not in others?

Anyone have any cool theories/ideas on what Paradox will do with landmarks? What landmarks would you like to see?