Update #123 - Joy Division
over 8 years ago – Fri, Aug 25, 2017 at 05:25:32 PM

Hey everyone,  

Narrative Team - Alex and Lisa

Alex  

Lisa and I have also been writing new Uncle Jack episodes, both as part of our Kickstarter and as part of the increased scope of the game. My goal is to have 35-40 pages’ worth, which is the maximum we are likely to be able to shoot in a day. I try hard to have more to record than we have time for. The alternative is possibly running out. He’ll have some surprise guests on his show! Sort of.  

Lisa  

This week I’ve been writing “layered” environmental narrative that tells you both what a location is now and what it used to be, and what happened there. It’s sort of like archaeology, but with documents.  

This fall, Alex and I will be giving a talk at the Montreal International Games Summit, where we’ll discuss how we’re creating the narrative world of Wellington Wells. So if you have questions about that, let us know (though be forewarned, no spoilers!).

Art Team - Whitney, Emmanuel, Tito, Marc-André, Sarah, Guillaume, Cary and PH

By this time in production we are working very efficiently. Levels get arted up in a matter of days and we have more and more modular pieces to work with - which makes things easier. With tight deadlines and a lot of existing levels, it becomes too easy to use and reuse the formula we already have. Making every new location fresh and unique is a challenge. But it is what makes the process creative and interesting!

Whitney  

Hey everyone!  

I wish I could share everything I've done this week, I really do... but I can't :( But one thing I DID do is design some fun mannequins for a secret locations - pose credit to Jules.

World generation was also a hot topic this week. One thing we would love to do is add land formations closer to the islands to help with general composition. Here you'll see some quick sketches exploring this idea.

And lastly, I've been sifting through ancient concepts to start organizing our art book. Here's a very old concept for the face of the male, village NPC.

Carylitz  

Hey oh! Been doing several things this week, some locations, new props, props corrections, and other stuff, a little bit of everything, trying to keep up with the crazy schedule. But the thing that took most of my time was this location so I will leave a sneak peek for you guys!

PH  

Hi guys,  

My name's Pierre-Henri (PH), I'm the new artist in the team. I'm so happy to have the chance to work on We Happy Few, the team is really awesome and I’ve got a warm welcome. First mission: trying to catch up and learn the very dense and complex workflow that a game production involves. Can't wait to start creating awesome props and stuff. See you!

Sarah  

You're either sick of reading this, or relieved to know that I'm also working on story specific content! Sadly I can't share those images with you just yet, but I can tell you they include MORE icons!! Thrilling, yes.  

This week also involved a lot of feedback combing on my part, to see what people's impressions are of the new UI, and you guys did not disappoint!! The crafting screen was by far my favourite rework, and I'm glad it got such a positive response (lil baby's growing up!). The Inventory screen needs a substantial amount of tweaking, especially where the filters are concerned, so thanks to everyone who took the time to provide feedback! My week also included designing some options for the Collector's Box (posters, stickers, and box art!) so stay tuned, and thanks for the continued support!

Design Team - David, Hayden, Antoine, Adam, Ben, Eric, Roxanne and Benji

Roxanne  

Fixed an issue with the NPCs in the quest An Awkward Courtship. They were previously leaving because of the night curfew, making them absent of the mushroom log. Now they ignore curfew (these young rascals!). Also worked on a bunch of new content. But it’s a secret! ;)  

Adam  

As you know, we’ve all been busy fixing bugs for the hot fix, and when we have some downtime from that, we work on story content. We want to thank everybody who has helped us by reporting other bugs we had missed, and sending log files for weird issues. Thank you so much!  

We would also like to thank Naila (our Community Manager) for her amazing work this week. She is a trooper.  

Hayden  

This week I focused on bugs for the hotfix and also had some time to work on a rather large story content level featuring some of our other characters and their search for resources.  

And also fire... Which is always nice, right?

Animation Team - JR, Remi, Vincent, Mike P and Jules

All of these animations can play on male or female, in a stand up or seated position. So for this week, that's twelve new animations. I'm a little proud of me ha-ha.

Mike  

Hey guys! So this week I kept working on character animations for a supporting character I can’t talk about, because we haven’t mentioned her yet. Super secret, mum’s the word, ya know; wink wink, nudge nudge, know what I mean! So needless to say I have nothing much to report to the community at large. But I will say that it’s been a learning experience and has been fun. So there’s that. Well that’s it for me, see you next week, same Bat time, same Bat channel!

Programming Team - Matt, Serge, Michael, Lionel, Rob, Evan, Maarten, and Guillaume (sometimes)

Thanks for tuning in!  

Compulsion Games

Update #122 - Shifting gears - A recap of the week and a thank you to all.
over 8 years ago – Fri, Aug 18, 2017 at 10:19:13 PM

Hey everyone,  

This week we finally made our big announcement on the release date (April 13th 2018!), that we’ve increased the scope of the game and we’re coming to Xbox One and PS4 retail, and our partnership with Gearbox Publishing! We also released the Life in Technicolour update, so we hope you guys are having a great time.

It was a pretty crazy week. We’ll never be able to recap this fully, so here are a ton of links that might help:  

for an introduction and summary of what’s been going on, read our blog post,  the release date trailer, the Life in Technicolour video and update notes, an article from Engadget about the announcement (although there are plenty more), an article from GamesIndustry.biz on the business side, if you’re into that sort of thing, and a really cool behind the scenes video on how the trailer audio was created. 

We’d had a huge response to this announcement. Most of it has been fantastic - the support from you guys has been amazing, and the feedback so far on the update is really really good. Seems like we’re definitely going in the right direction.

We’ve also had a lot of questions/comments about the DLC, partnering with Gearbox, etc. Many of these questions are from people who see the price increase but don’t read about the scope increase, or from people who vehemently dislike Gearbox. For the first people, if you could please read our blog post, it answers a huge number of your questions, and is very frank and open about what we’re doing. For the second, Gearbox publishing is a new initiative run by a separate group of people. They are not funding the game, but are helping us a great deal with QA, localization, ratings, user research and marketing support. They’re working very hard, doing a great job, and care very much about helping us to make We Happy Few the best it can be. They’re always open for feedback, just like us, so if you have any concerns you can let them or us know and we’ll do our best to address them.

In the meantime, we’re back to work, excited to build the rest of the game. Our weekly journals will continue, although you’ll see a lot of [story redacted]. If you’re interested in specific parts of what we’re doing, let us know and we’ll make sure to include whatever we can (without spoilers).

We’re very proud of our game, of our team, and of you guys. Thank you for being here on this ride with us.

Narrative Team  

Lisa  

I’ve always been terrible at keeping secrets. When I find a present for someone, I always really, really want to tell them. That’s what work feels like now as we head into the final stretch of We Happy Few. So many story secrets! Soooo hard to keep quiet until April 2018! Aarg! 

What I CAN tell you is that I wrote the update’s newspaper, which gives you clues to what’s happening in Wellington Wells, as well a suggestive Easter egg (English majors – this one’s for you.) 

I’ve also wrote dialog for the Odious MacLears – a family squabbling over the will of their patriarch who is still alive. (The temptation to add a Monty Python “I’m not dead yet!” joke is intense!) Plus, I started working on a new Uncle Jack show -- we wouldn’t want to play repeats, now would we? 

Art Team  

Carylitz  

Crazy update week! This last part of the update for me was more focused on story so It wasn't as crazy as for others in the office. I got to work on 2 new locations that I can't show and 1 new character with its sidekick! They are gonna be really funny. I also spent some hours reading news and watching streamers and youtubers playing the new update!

Animation Team  

Mike  

Hey party people, Mike here. Nothing crazy to report this week. Still working on some character animations that I can’t tell you about. So far so good. I think it will contribute greatly to one of the character playthroughs. So instead of a long and elaborate paragraph detailing all the things I can’t tell you about, here is a joke: “What do you call a fake noodle? An Impasta” Have a great week, see you next time same Bat time, same Bat Channel!

Vincent  

Ahoy! An update week is always a special week! If only because I can take a bit of time to play the game… which is not something I often get to do, what with all the work we have on the story’s secret cinematics and gameplay animations! Well I must say… that game is getting pretty big and pretty cool to roam about in.  

Hope you’re all enjoying the update, and I’m back in my secret cinematics lair.

Jules  

Hi! This week I have finished the animation of our new weapon the famous "BeeCannon"! You can see here the "Suck bee" sequence:  

So that's how you reload your weapon. Find some Bee and just inhale them for having some ammo. Now the most important part, the "Shoot Bee" sequence:

As you can see, the bee cannon is hard to control :). But so powerful with its long range and its area of effect !  

Ed note: A bee swarm is VFX created separately to the cannon, so you’ll need use your imagination for now...  

During the next part of the week, I made a few variation animations for our NPCs. Before when they detected you, they would just point at you with their right hand. For more flavor we gave them few different gestures. I hope you like the update of the game, we worked hard on it!

Programming Team  

Rob  

This week was spent bug fixing and making improvements to the between level loadscreen video code, especially fixing issues related to loadscreens that would sometimes not complete. Also, much of this week was spent ramping up on HDR tech for all platforms which Chris is handing over to me to take over.  

Serge  

Hello world, I hope that you are enjoying our last update! This week has been pretty intense, mainly bug fixing related to NPC behaviors for me. You might notice in the update that we iterated on their perception of the player, making it more clear why they are suspicious of you. The system will continue to evolve but that rework of our core AI logic will help us to achieve our ambition for the final product. General game performance and streaming strategy was also top priority for that milestone, and we are proud of the progress we made in the last few weeks.  

Lionel  

If you look at those images, you'll see both the future and my current work. The dynamics of procedurally placed encounters and something, a little something we would like to add. Time will tell.

First image:

 Second image:

I should say that with the procedural system, there is a lot of trial and error. Some of these more theoretical things might get into the final game if they turn out not to work in practice. But we’re very excited to see what we can do.

Design Team  

Adam, Eric, Antoine, Hayden, Ben, Roxanne and Benji  

The entire design team has been wrapping up bugs and hot fix issues since we released the update. Aside from that, we are all currently back onto creating Story Content. Ed note: as we approach release, I’m going to have to apologise to the level designers because we will not be able to share their level design work. Everything at this point contains significant spoilers. We’ll do our best to fill you in on the general nature of what we are doing, but [story redacted] now applies to the whole level design team, and not just Antoine and Adam (who have been on story on and off for a long time).  

Thanks for tuning in!  

Compulsion Games

Update #121 - We are coming to Xbox One, PC and PS4 on April 13 2018!
over 8 years ago – Wed, Aug 16, 2017 at 08:57:46 PM

Hi everyone,  

We are thrilled to finally announce that We Happy Few will be launching worldwide both digitally and at retail on April 13, 2018, for Xbox One, PC, and PlayStation 4! Mac and Linux will be arriving on or shortly after that date.

What does this mean for you as a backer? Not much other than it is thanks to you all that we will be able to launch a bigger, better game on retail.

We wrote a full blog post here about what all of this means, but please take a look at the next bit as it concerns all of you.

• Everybody who pledged to the Beer Tier (Tier 1) will receive a digital code of the game for free.
• Everybody who has pledged above the Beer Tier (Tier 2 and up) will receive the Season Pass for free.  
• Everybody who has pledged to the Boxer Tier (Tier 9 and up) will receive the Collector's box on top of their pledge for free.

We want to truly thank you all for believing in us. 

Life In Technicolour  

Today has a bunch of major announcements, and last but not least is that the Life in Technicolour update is now live! This is our last major update in Early Access, and contains a major overhaul to AI, UI, Joy mechanics, and much more. You can check out the update video here:

As usual, if you have any questions, we are here to answer them!

Compulsion Team

Update #120 - The deep breath before the plunge
over 8 years ago – Fri, Aug 11, 2017 at 09:16:48 PM

Hey all,  

As you know by now, we will be releasing the Life in Technicolour update on August 16! This is really exciting because it is the last major update before the final release of the game.  

Last week we posted our first message that the Early Access discount price was reaching its full price on the 16th. We saw a lot of misinformation going around, and wanted to make sure we cleared things up:

• The full game is not releasing on the 16th. We are releasing the last major update on the 16th, and then we’ll be working full time on the story and the 1.0 release. It will still be some time away. As we’ve said before, maintaining the Early Access build and the story build as separate entities is difficult, and becoming unworkable. We can now concentrate all of our efforts on making the story the best it can be. 
• We wanted to let you know about the price in advance because it is the right thing to do. We’ll explain more next week, but for now the main reason we announced the price was to make sure no one felt like they were being snuck up on. 
• The final game will contain the full story we have been working on for the past 3 years. A lot of gamers who haven’t played the game think it is currently just a survival sandbox, completely unaware that it contain around 90 fully voiced over encounters or that you can remove the survival settings. The game has changed a great deal since the Early Access release, so if you see people around talking about “just another survival game”, we’d appreciate if you pointed them in the direction of recent changes :) 
• The new price has ruffled some feathers. It might not have been obvious how much we have been growing as a studio and how much the scope of the game has changed. But the game has evolved in alignment with the public’s expectations. We cannot always show what is going on behind closed doors studio and the game has become so much bigger since we first announced the project. We will now be able to make the best game that we can, and we’re very excited about what’s coming.

Narrative Team  

Alex  

Yesterday Sam, with a little help from yours truly, but mostly Sam, fitted subtitles to our lines of dialog. As you work on a game, you discover the mistakes you made earlier in the game when they come and haunt you. In this case, we did never built a system to automagically take the dialog text from the massive dialog spreadsheet and put it in the subtitle field in the game software. The last time we updated, some poor bastard (Clement) entered all the subtitles by hand. This time, we had 4784 lines of dialog lacking subtitle text.  

Fortunately, Sam’s Excel fu is strong, so he built a spreadsheet to grab the subtitle text from my spreadsheets and put it in the game linked to the sound file. Unfortunately, we discovered that some clever clogs had, in some cases, changed the name of the sound file as it was going into the game, without changing the corresponding name in my spreadsheet. Who knew that mattered?  

So now we are developing a better system.  

Today all the francophones on the team get to translate the subtitles into French. I am in the lucky position of a daddy whose wife is breastfeeding: love to help, but I just don’t have the equipment.  

In other news, I have been writing new Uncle Jack episodes (Kickstarter stretch goal!). I wrote about 80 pages of Uncle Jack last time, for a two day shoot; so I have about 40 pages to write for our new one day shoot on September 4, including a climactic scene in which Things will be Revealed. I’ve got about half of that written, so if there is something that you would like Uncle Jack to talk about, let me know; bearing in mind who Uncle Jack is. He is not going to tell you what’s in V-meat. I doubt he even knows. He is not going to dwell in the sadness of the past. But yes, he may tell you how to decorate and improve your home, thank you, @meganhoins!  

And, of course, I continue to plow ahead writing dialog for the Miss Thigh Highs and The Mad Scotsman.

Lisa  

Ever wonder what the Doctors do when they’re not forcing Joy into your veins? Turns out, they’re rather madcap in their spare time, doing hilarious things with cadaver bits and playing darts with syringes. This week I wrote environmental narrative for their headquarters, where you will find Important Clues along with hints of Bertie Wooster-style hijinx.  

In other fun news, I “curated” the Wellington Wells “House of the Future” exhibition, where Wellies imagine what everyday life will be like 20 years in the future...which just so happens to be 1984. (Don’t worry -- there won’t be any Duran Duran. We’re not monsters.)  

I also wrote environmental narrative for a private club devoted to Uncle Jack fandom. Don’t you wish YOU could join? Of course you do! Now, you might be thinking, “Doesn’t EVERYONE in Wellington Wells love Uncle Jack?” Well, no, not everyone. There’s a story there, but you’ll have to play 1.0 to find out. I fear the Wrath of Sam if I say too much.  

Sam edit: I like Duran Duran :(

Design Team  

Roxanne  

You know the gag where you run around the corner, being chased by nefarious characters, only to sit down on a bench, pull out your newspaper, and watch them pass by? This week I worked on debugging chairs so when you sit down and pick up the newspaper, you can sort of hide in plain sight.  

On the side, I’m gathering a list of activities for our Wellies and Wastrels to give them some more things to do and increase the feeling of a living city. Expect some improvements on that soon.

Eric  

Other than making Roxanne sad because I found out some of the chairs she thought she fixed weren’t fixed and it made no sense why they weren’t fixed, I was blocking in new encounters. Was nice to move on from pure bug fixing to do some new work. Think I blocked in about 4 or 5 of these small encounters this week. Plus some other random bits, and some last minute update bug fixes. Overall this week felt pretty good. Felt like I got through a bunch of schtuff. So that’s cooooooooool.

Animation Team  

Jules  

This week I made few animations for one of our new weapons. The amazing “Bee Cannon”! A funny and powerful weapon I hope you’ll enjoy. And you know what? It has a long range! So finally you can protect yourself from your assailant before they will be able to hit you. And let me tell you something, he will regret crossing you.

This cannon sucks up bees and blows them out at your opponent. It causes area of effect damage, but it is hard to control. Have you seen Ghostbusters? Imagine the same thing with bees.. (I know that’s cool). These animations are a work in progress I will show you a sneak peak of it next week.

Mike  

Sup folks! So this week I’ve been fleshing out some new idles for one of the narrative characters and started polishing them. I mean that’s pretty much been it. I wish that I had more to report, I really do! But I don’t. Can you please forgive me WHF weekly update readers!? Can you? I’ll try my hardest to have more news next week. So tune in same Bat time same Bat channel!

Remi  

Hello people! This week was a VERY busy week. The kind of week where sleep isn’t a priority… The pressure was there, but in end I do like working under pressure, it adds a little bit of spice to everyday life. It is in these moments that you know if you like what you are doing or not, and fortunately for me, I love my job and wouldn’t change it for anything else. So why so busy, you ask me? Well, it’s a surprise soon to be revealed. Oh and I also worked on french localization. And no, it’s not always easy to translate english expressions in french.  

For example, try and translate this in french, let us know if you have any clue in the comments (google translate won’t help you) :  

“Right as rain, sir. Right as rain!”  

or  

“Bloody hell!”  

Have a good weekend!

J.R.  

Hey guys, I’m doubling down on Remi. My eyes are getting sore from the long nights this week, but was it worth it? Abso-freaking-lutely. And it’s a good feeling to do overtime for something you love doing. I can’t wait until we reveal what we have in store for you!  

And also, localization, where my french expertise is put to the test with every expression such as “I’m in a bit of a pickle”, which I assure you, shouldn’t translate into: “Je suis un peu dans un cornichon”.  

Enjoy!

Programming Team  

Michael  

A lot of bugs still to fix, and it’s getting frantic. This is the exciting times of game development, working late, frustrating issues and bad (but really good) food, counterbalanced with the joys of seeing bug counts drop and the victories of finally removing the ugliest of the bunch.

Lionel  

I was watching a frankenstein movie yesterday night and I thought “eh, that's sort of what I am doing”, so let’s continue the mad scientist theme. The creature is stable ( the heart and most of the organs works) but is still a bit ungainly. So, I replace arms or tune the articulations and pull down the lever, let electricity do its wonder and look at the first step of the homonculus. Rinse. Repeat.  

Replace “creature” by “new city layout” and you get the right idea : the new city layout is now stable and is getting new improvements ( non-square building blocks and smaller blocks ) as well as a another pass of testing.

Art Team

Carylitz  

This week I worked in a new location! Can’t tell much about what’s going to happen here but I can show some parts of the encounter (:

Guillaume  

Hi guys, it’s been a while since I posted something here. I’ve been mostly working on story locations and I didn’t want to spoil it for you. But this week I felt like sharing a little bit of what I am working on without showing too much. I still want you guys to have the surprise when the full game will be released.

Thanks for tuning in!  

Compulsion Games

Update # 119 - August update date and price heads up
over 8 years ago – Fri, Aug 04, 2017 at 04:50:37 PM

Hey everyone,  

We are finally (already?!) in August! As previously announced, we will be releasing our last public update for We Happy Few before its final release. The Life in Technicolour update will drop on August 16th! The update features new Joy effects as well as a brand new UI (still WIP), AI rework and much more. Look forward to the update video on the 16th!  

But today, we wanted to give you a heads-up on some important information…  

Since we launched our Kickstarter and released the game on Early Access, We Happy Few has been priced at US$29.99. We have never put it on sale because we believe it isn’t fair for someone to get the game at a lower price than a Kickstarter backer or an Early Access backer while the game is still in development. Since 2015, we have made clear that the price would increase as we approach the final release, and that time has - finally - come. On August 16, the price for the game will become US$50.99.  

We will explain everything in more detail on the 16th. As you can imagine, there is more to the story, and we are looking forward to sharing all the juicy details with you. We always do our best to be transparent with you guys, so we felt it was important to provide this pricing information with ample time for you to make a decision. And, just to be clear, if you are a Kickstarter backer or Early Access player, this change does not affect you.  

In the meantime, here is what the team has been up to this week!

Narrative Team  

Alex  

One of my ongoing efforts is to make quest givers not feel like quest givers.  

Your typical quest giver is a guy standing around outside a dungeon waiting for an adventurer such as yourself. He can tell you all about a great treasure in the dungeon! Or he will give you a nice sword if you obtain some item from within, like his wallet, or maybe his car keys.  

Leading me to wonder why he didn’t go himself. And how long he’s been standing around. Does he sleep? Does he ever go for a pee? Is there a sandwich cart that comes around?  

In real life, of course, people rarely offer you jobs out of the blue. (And then it’s in Malmö or Singapore or something.) Generally it works the other way around: you find out that someone has a sword for sale, and you go and ask what they want for it.  

The Witcher finessed this nicely. People in that world post “Witcher Wanted” ads near pubs. They are waiting for someone to come to their home to offer them Witcher services, for which they’re prepared to pay.  

Fortunately, we have something rare in video games: our characters did not just wake up with full blown amnesia, living in a populated world, where they grew up. They know their fellow Wellies and their fellow Wellies know them.  

So we can take the curse off quest giving.  

For example, in the Miss Thigh Highs playthrough, you need to learn something about, let us say, washing machines. You know the washing machine repairman, Alfonso Maytag; he has fixed your washing machine, after all. At the pub they say he’s out by the Tor, a local hill.  

In a regular video game, you’d meet him out by the Tor, and he’d say, “My friend Freddie has been captured by cultists. Please rescue him and I shall give you this book on Washing Machine Maintenance!”  

In our game, he’d say, “My friend Freddie has been captured by cultists!” and your player character, who was in primary school with Freddie, will say, “Oh, my God! Can I help?” Obviously you’re not going to waste time chatting about washing machines while poor Freddie is in danger. After you complete the quest, though, equally obviously, Mr. Maytag will happily let you xerox the manual to your Hi-Capacity 27” Front Load Washer.  

From a gameplay point of view, these two setups are exactly the same. Find the quest giver. Learn of the adventure. Complete the quest. Get the payoff.  

But from a narrative point of view, one feels more natural and human. That’s important to me. The more real our people feel, the more the player engages with them emotionally.  

Video game worlds contain a tiny number of salient objects. Stories are what allow our minds to weave a whole world in the spaces between them.  

Figuring out what makes the quest feel natural instead of gamey is a lot of the effort I put into writing encounters. By comparison, character dialog is easy once I know what relationship the characters have to each other.

Programming Team  

Lionel  

(It is hard to explain procedural generation in a few lines so I won’t be literal) I am in a cave, in a lab worthy of a mad doctor, glass tubes and all. I am creating cities. In a new way. A new technique that mostly works but sometimes the result is ugly or misshapen so I revise, refine my protocol, again and again. We are getting slowly getting there, as the many failed virtual creations pile up on the floor.  

Michael  

Still a tiny bit more time before the update, to cram in new-ness before we get our bug hammers out, and start fixing as many problems as we can, new and old. I have added a new item to the HUD, a waypoint which shows on top of your currently tracked objective. It is possible to turn it off if it’s bugging you, via the Game & HUD section of the Options menu. It was quite an interesting task, because if the objective isn’t on the same island as you, we want the waypoint to take you to the bridge you need to cross. So I got to write a little baby search algorithm to look through the bridges and find a route to island which has the objective. Super fun!  

I also added an icon for the NPCs to let you know if they are bleeding and losing health that way. Sometimes it was confusing why people would suddenly collapse without being hit, and hopefully this will clear up the mystery.

Rob  

This week I put in code to play a looping movie during level load. I switched from using the DefaultMoviePlayer to the FullscreenMoviePresenter for this, and I added an interface for playing the video to a texture. This solved my previous crash issues, but there is more work to do on the video framerate during parts of the load. I also switched the game to be mostly using the vpxMedia player (webm) and very soon I'll remove the wmfMedia (mp4) system fully which should help with overall memory, especially on the Xbox.

Animation Team  

Mike (starting to not be the new guy anymore, relatively speaking of course…)  

Sup! Hey folks, so this week I polished up a cinematic animation and started developing a whole new set of a character’s idles and movement bank. It’s going to be pretty cool and I’ll get to have fun with it. Let my hair down… well.. if I had any that is.  

See you next week same bat time, same bat channel.  

Jules  

Hi! This week I worked on a few “ambient” animations. Characters playing board games, hopscotch, reading books... or painting on the wall like a vandal (looks like some folks don’t take their daily Joy).  

If we have a lot of activities for our NPCs, it will make our environment much more alive and reinforce the immersion for the player.

Design Team  

Roxanne  

I’ve been fixing and polishing An Awkward Courtship quest most of the week. Mostly adjusted the dialogs offsets, animations and detection gameplay. Still has a few issues. I’m getting help from our engineers on that.  

I also did a good pass of polish on The Lovebirds quest coming up soon.

Adam  

I’ve been fixing bugs this week, lots and lots of bugs in:  

Mystery House - no more getting teleported to death!, also changed the hostility and patrol paths.  

Hallucinogenic Salad - a better suicide jump from the woman upstairs, and changed hostility of the people inside.  

Everybody Gets Stoned - Fixed the bell so more NPCs will show up to attack you.  

If you Give a Pig a Pancake - Fixed some bugs involving stealing breads too fast (which could break the quest).  

The Great Stink - Lots of Jubilator tweaks and navmesh fixes to make sure it follows you around the map.  

Church of Simon Says - These teslas are a bit more punishing for you now. They won’t target the crowd anymore.. Only you!  

Intro Shelter - New cinematic when Arthur leaves his shelter, to put him in the mood and give him some clues about how to start.  

On the story side, I’ve been working with Mike (starting to not be the new guy anymore, relatively speaking of course…) to showcase some of his animation work.  

On the writing side, I’ve been working closely with Alex to flesh out details of our 3rd character’s main story. It’s shaping up quite nicely.

Eric the Viking  

This week was all bug fixing for me too. Maps like I Sing Body Electric, TV Altar, Get the Dolly, Treehouse, and a bunch of save load bugs. Also, don’t eat dodgy food. If it don’t taste right, or look right you might regret it and become great friends with a toilet. That reminds me of an amusing anecdote on my honeymoon…. But that’s another story for another time.

Art Team  

Carylitz  

Did a bunch of awesome props this week! But only one matters.

Thanks for tuning in!  

Compulsion Games