“A survival-action game inspired by real-life events, Atomfall is set five years after the Windscale nuclear disaster in Northern England.”
Atomfall is made by Rebellion Developments Limited. I was one of the many Gameplay Programmers who worked on it over it’s many years of development. Sharing aspects with games such as Fallout 4 and Stalker 2, the exact genre description was acually one of the harder things for us to pin do down. I personally have been refering to it as an ‘Investigation-Shooter’.
‘Investigation-Shooter’ is still not a perfect genre name though as shooting is not the only form of conflict resolution the game allows. Players can also use Melee weapons and Stealth to resolve combat encounters. Additionally, you can resolve some encounter semi-peacefully, by holding enemies at gunpoint. Many of them will hold their arms up in surrender and slowly back away, allowing the player to pass without a fight. Just try not to spook them while doing so.
The Bartering system was one of my main responsibilities, both debugging it and making sure the exchanging was of items was smooth and fair. This did require a couple of rewrites in places as the design changed. At one point the item grid was actually a list much more similar to that of Pneumatic Distribution Tubes (Atomfall's Bank system). I think if we had had more bandwidth we may have switch the PDTs over to a similar grid view, but our UI designers needing to prioritise other aspect, so the reuse of the Container Transfer Screen was kept.