In development Persistent · server-authoritative · not playable yet
Atomic Tick is a persistent, server-authoritative role-playing game in which each eligible character receives at most one atomic player-directed action per scheduled Tick. You write a queue of future orders, edit it freely until the server locks the Tick, and read a report that explains exactly what resolved and why.
Not playable yet
There is no public server, no API, no accounts, no demo and nothing to sign up for. What exists is a large body of written design and a private codebase in which Tick resolution, order queues, maps, combat and the content catalogues are built and pass their tests in development.
The rule everything else is built around
Every eligible character receives at most one effective player-directed action per Tick. Not one per minute, not one per click — one per scheduled boundary, for everybody, in every Shard. Every other system in the game is built to fit around that sentence.
01
Moving, attacking, casting, healing, training, equipping, unlocking, searching, collecting, giving, gathering, repairing and reviving are separate actions, and each is its own entry in the queue. Nothing bundles a hidden chain of extras behind one instruction, and no order quietly does a second order's job.
02
An ordinary Move advances one adjacent square. A destination a hundred squares away is a hundred Move entries and a hundred Ticks — which is a hundred boundaries on which somebody else can move, arrive, or be waiting when you get there. Queue capacity changes how far ahead you may plan. It never changes how much you can do.
03
Whether an order succeeds or is consumed by failing, the next entry becomes eligible at the following Tick. A failure never pulls a queued instruction forward, so a bad Tick costs a Tick — and cannot cascade through the eight hours you queued behind it.
What the rule does not forbid
One effect may have several tightly related consequences. An attack calculates accuracy, damage, armour, status effects, durability and contribution as consequences of one attack. A fire spell can deal fire damage and apply a declared burning state. A wave can affect several eligible targets. Those are one coherent resolution, not a licence to hide unrelated activity inside a single order.
Seven laws bind the design, and a feature that violates one does not get built, however good the idea was. All seven, and what each one costs.
The queue
A queue is a list of things your character will do, in order, one per Tick. You edit it whenever you like — reorder it, cut it, extend it — at no cost and no penalty.
Only the head of it ever freezes, one minute before the boundary. Everything behind the head stays yours to change. How a Tick is resolved, step by step.
The Shard
Shards are square grids. Characters move in eight directions, diagonals included, and a diagonal step between two blocked corners is refused — you cannot squeeze through a wall joint that is not really there.
A Shard is a whole persistent world with its own map, roster, cadence, economy and history — not a theme, and not a save slot. What a Shard is, and what the Atomic Bang was.
The loop
The intended rhythm, in four beats. It repeats every Tick, in every Shard, and it is the whole game — everything else is content built on top of it.
Any time
Study the map, read the last report, check range, consider what other characters and creatures might do, and write a sequence of atomic instructions.
Until the lock
The orders are still only intent. You know exactly when the next boundary lands. You cannot know every choice made by every other actor in the meantime.
On the boundary
Initiative orders the actors, and each eligible one resolves at most a single effective action. Same instant for everyone in the Shard. Then the report arrives.
Immediately after
Keep the plan, rewrite several future entries, switch standing behaviour, pause a character, coordinate with allies — or leave it alone entirely and let it run.
THE CLOCK
Thirty minutes and one hour are the two worked profiles, and any interval that divides the day evenly is legal: 5, 10, 15 or 30 minutes, or 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 12 or 24 hours. Boundaries are computed from the UTC clock rather than from the last Tick, so they cannot drift — and a missed boundary is skipped rather than queued. Six missed boundaries produce one Tick, not six.
THE REPORT
A scheduled game asks you to accept outcomes you did not watch happen. That only works if the server can explain them, so for every Tick it records:
Randomness is derived rather than streamed: each value is a keyed hash over Shard, Tick, actor and purpose, so a retry cannot reroll a bad outcome and every draw can be quoted back to you exactly. The lock, the snapshot, the resolution order and the report, in detail.
The character
The other half of the design is what the one action per Tick is being spent on. A character here is not a level with equipment hanging off it.
NO LEVEL
No general level, no Class level, no Job level and no spell level. Nothing about a character is summarised by a single number that goes up. Their numeric proficiency is the sum of the Skill ranks they actually hold, and nothing else grows.
SKILL RANK
Each Skill runs from rank 0 to rank 100, and a character may hold 800 ranks in total across every Skill they have. There is no configuration that is good at everything, so the interesting choice is not what to train — it is what to leave at zero.
ATTRIBUTES
Attributes decide whether you can lift it, reach it or survive it. Skill decides whether you are any good with it. A shortfall of one to three degrades the attempt rather than blocking it; four or more and the action is refused outright.
Race is a body and Origin is a past — twenty-five Races across six substrates, twenty-eight Classes, thirty-two Specializations and sixteen Jobs are authored, and none of them can yet change an outcome, because no actor can own a changing Skill rank. What a character is made of.
Before you get interested
Its pace is an identity, not an inconvenience we are hoping you will not notice. It is better to say so here than to waste your evening.
The fiction
The setting exists to justify the mechanic rather than to decorate it. This is the rare case where "why does the world only change on a schedule?" has an answer inside the world.
Atomic describes one indivisible authoritative action. Tick describes the scheduled causal boundary. Atomic Bang names the setting event that bound reality to this rhythm.
The Atomic Bang is the umbrella causality fracture after which reality persists as Shards and consequential change occurs on discrete Ticks. It is a lore event rather than a product subtitle, and not necessarily a nuclear detonation. Whether it had an agent, an accident, a natural cause or several at once — and whether anyone correctly remembers the time before it — is deliberately unresolved, and no answer is allowed to let anyone bypass one action per Tick.
SHARD FAMILY
Overt Magic and Mana, medieval or preindustrial societies, fantasy Races and Classes, monsters, dungeons, kingdoms, NPC Guilds, alchemy, enchanting, craft, wilderness and estates. Firearms, cybernetics and spaceflight appear only in declared variants.
SHARD FAMILY
Advanced technology, alien or synthetic Races, robotics, energy systems, fabrication, settlements, stations and planetary exploration, with a possible later ship layer. Cyberpunk and hard science are declared variants of it rather than families of their own.
SHARD FAMILY
Ruins, salvage, mutation, damaged infrastructure, scarcity, item condition, hazards, local settlements and rebuilding. Nuclear, magical, ecological, machine, alien and temporal collapses are distinct templates: the cause decides what technology, Magic and creatures survived it.
FIRST FOCUS
One curated world that takes selected parts of all three families and gives them a single history, geography, economy and counter system. It is the first concentrated design focus because it exercises the broadest reusable systems. Curated — never an unrestricted mixing bowl.
Shards never exchange characters, items, currency, mastery or property, so no Shard can be farmed to win another. The Shard Atlas lets related Shards share a coordinate lineage without sharing anything mechanical: one location might be a castle settlement in a Fantasy Shard, an arcology in a Science Fiction Shard, and a ruined salvage site in an Apocalypse Shard. The world, in full.
Honest status
Written design and working code are tracked as two different things, because a roadmap that cannot be checked against reality is an advertisement. Everything marked built runs in development, in a private codebase, with tests. None of it is deployed.
Built in code
UTC-aligned boundaries, the one-minute lock, the intent snapshot, deterministic resolution with derived replay-stable randomness, an append-only ledger and Tick reports. Independent Shards resolve concurrently, each on its own cadence.
Built in code
Move, Hold, Attack, Engage, Collect and Equip — Equip toggles off as well. Automatic Return Strikes answer incoming damage from a small per-Tick pool without touching the queue, and NPCs act through the same queue and the same resolver as players do.
Built in code
Authored atlases, painted regions and gradual spawning, connectivity-validated generation, eight-direction movement with the strict diagonal corner rule, combat, equipment on universal slots, Stamina, loot rolls with cadence-derived protection, and server-served catalogues of Races, Classes, Jobs, Skills, spells, creatures and items.
In development
Sign-in, Shard and character selection, map, queue and Tick reports, then character, Skills, inventory and settings. This is the current focus and the thing that makes the rest playable. Missing actions are to be shown honestly rather than simulated in the client.
Designed, not built
Per-character Skill ranks and practice, Train, Rest, Revive, Drop, Use Item, player-directed Guard, and the whole Magic module. Documented in detail; none of it can run yet. Crafting, markets, property, quests, Clans and companions sit behind those.
Not started
Nothing is deployed. There is no public API, no accounts, no demo and no waiting list. An Android client is considered only after the browser game is complete and operating reliably, and is deliberately not a full-parity client — the browser is the complete game and the accessibility-complete surface.
The main risk is no longer architectural uncertainty. It is depth mismatch: several broad catalogues and design chapters sit above a narrower implemented action set. From the project's own risk register
The honest status page takes it item by item, including what each unbuilt thing is blocked on.
Fairness
These are binding design decisions rather than launch promises. Nothing is on sale today and no store exists, so all of it is stated as what will and will not be allowed to happen.
ACCESS
Core characters, Shards, Races, Classes, Jobs, Skills, Abilities, Clans, Guilds, quests, markets, property, companions and ordinary progression remain accessible without purchase. No advertising on any surface, and no in-application purchases in a first Google Play release.
POWER
Not more actions, faster Ticks, longer queues, better standing behaviour, faster training, higher initiative, superior loot odds, lighter defeat, stronger companions, better land, legal privilege or resolution priority. If optional support is ever offered it is cosmetic or voluntary recognition, and nothing else.
TIME
Someone watching every boundary receives the same one action per character, per Tick. Queue capacity is equal for everyone in a Shard and is never for sale. What presence buys is information and coordination — and you can close that gap by planning well, or by having friends.
Nothing to sign up for
Atomic Tick is in development, and there is no account to create and no list to join. The Discord is where progress gets posted and where the design arguments actually happen — and a design argument is far more useful now than after everything is locked.