Update #113 - Future Plans
almost 9 years ago – Fri, Jun 23, 2017 at 06:32:03 PM

Hello everyone!  

We have a little update concerning future plans, more specifically our Early Access/Game Preview updates.  

Originally we were planning to release two updates before the final release of the game: the Joy related update, and an update that would have contained the Parade District (a brand new biome). We have decided to push out only one major update between now and final release. This will be the Joy update, a bit later in the schedule (it will now come out around mid August), to make it bigger and better, and keep the Parade District for the final release.  

There is, of course, a reason for this decision. Early Access is amazing, but it’s becoming very complicated to maintain both a regular update schedule and lock down the story. The Early Access build is currently separate to the story build; they share a code base, but the content is slightly different. So far, the content has been able to coexist side by side, but as we add polish and really lace everything together, but this is changing.  

The Parade District, in particular, is intertwined so heavily with the story that we don’t think we can deliver a good “Early Access” version, unlike the other biomes. By moving to only one final major update, we can merge the Early Access and the story builds earlier, so that we can concentrate all of our efforts on making the story the best it can be.  

If you have any questions about this, please let us know in the comments.

Design Team  

Roxanne  

Howdy! New designer here! Happy to be part of this great adventure. Ramping up this week, but also working on revamping a quest that never quite made it to the game: Lovebirds. Or did, briefly, but then we took it out to redo it. Hope you’ll like it! :)

Eric  

Oh yeah, working on another new huge level that Guillaume is loving. He loves it when he gets these huge levels to art up. What a guy. Such a team player. I think he really likes working with me.

Or not…  

Anyway…….Instead of a crazy roller coaster this one is centered around a big slide puzzle in the center of a big facility. It’s been fun as hell to make. Should be pretty fun to play too, so yeah, that’s been my week. Scripting this beast.

Hayden  

Hi folks.  

This week was a bit short for me, but I was still able to start on the block-out for a new Parade District encounter and it’s coming along swell. It’s one of my favorite type of encounters; another gauntlet of sorts…  

You can see your goal, just out of reach, but getting there is never as easy as it looks.

Designing this sort of encounter is more about striking the perfect scale for the area of gameplay (the game-field, if you will), timing elements, such as hazards, and creating safe locations for the player. Equally as important, is planning the routes of NPCs and the placement of loot and narrative objects that fall along paths most players would navigate - so it’s a lot like choreographing a delicate ballet of rewards, hazards, and… timing. I guess, something like that.  

Back to it!

Programming Team  

Lionel  

Not quite crop circles but the placement patterns I worked on this week might spice up the countryside areas around the Garden District. Procedurally generated but game designer controlled, they are far from complete but look promising. The goal of these things is to provide smaller, more systemic, areas for gameplay, to fill in the areas we currently have in-game and provide simple and varying challenges for obtaining different types of resources..  

Rob, Evan, and Chris (Our new friends from Snowed-In Studios in Ottawa, who are helping us ship the game)  

This week was focussed on getting UWP's XBoxLive connection to work, so we can verify that our Achievements code will work. This has been a bit of a battle, with Microsoft's Achievement Sample (outside of Unreal) successfully signing in, but our code failing to sign in even while using the TitleId from the sample.

The good news is we had a breakthrough just this afternoon, and after setting up our own XboxLive sample based directly off of Microsoft's fork of the Unreal Engine, it appears the problem was in the Live (UWP) part of the Engine itself. So, I've grabbed the most recent version of Live for UWP, and been able to sign in to Live with the same credentials.

So the next task for next week is to merge these changes back into our engine and verify that sign in works, then to switch over to the proper credentials, and turn Live services on for our game. After that, we will focus on issues from the UWP stress test, and then on to investigation/merging to start to bring in HDR rendering. Finally, Evan is jumping on to the project today. He's a programmer who'll be helping out with the UI system.

Art Team  

Carylitz  

Secret props for me again so I can't show, but I can say that I spent most the week sculpting, doing retopo and fighting with Maya to work with my decimated mesh and the retopo tool, but almost there!  

Narrative Team  

Alex  

I have been off in the wilds of the Hamptons, but nothing stops progress! On Monday and Tuesday, we spent three and a half hours with the fabulous Samantha Lee, Woman of 1000 Voices. She is at least one of the voices of our Posh Wellette now, and she is at least one of the witches you’ll meet on a rocky crag.

I notice I’m recording a lot more lines per hour than when we started. At the beginning, I was getting something like 60-80 an hour. Now we’re up to 120-150 an hour. What’s happening?  

Mostly, we’re working with better actors. Over the years, we have found truly superb voice actors, who work fast and can do multiple voices. They’ve also learned our quirks. For example, typical voice directors seem to want the actor to repeat each line a bunch of times. I want the actor to put everything into the line once, and then tell him how it should change, if it’s not what I want. I find that when an actor does two takes in a row, often neither is right. There is a sort of quantum interference. They’re not deciding what delivery they most believe, they’re just trying to create a range of deliveries.  

We’ve also learned a lot about working with British studios and British agents. When we started, I didn’t know how to get a casting breakdown out. In the US, you can put a casting breakdown up on Breakdown Services and get a bazillion submissions. You can do that in the UK, too, through something called Spotlight.  

I would imagine we’re also benefitting from the game getting a bit of attention. We get submissions from actors who might not have given us the time of day some years ago.  

And now, I’m writing encounter dialog. That’s always fun. It’s also surprisingly hard. It is very easy to write “oh look at that I should do this” sort of lines, but creating surprising and compelling characters and offbeat encounters requires more thinking than writing.  

Thanks for tuning in!

The Compulsion Team

N.B: We also wanted to share this cute story from a member of the Reddit community.

"So I've played this game a lot over the last eleven-ish months. My boyfriend has watched me play it a bit and I'm sure he's picked up on a lot of the game by hearing it in the background so often.

So this weekend he proposed (yay!) and said some stuff about how he wants to spend the rest of our lives together and such. then he goes, "And I promise I will help you find peachy so you can get your ephemeral linen!" :)

So, thanks we happy few for being a part of a huge moment in my life. this game is awesome."

Update #112 - Story, UI and more story
almost 9 years ago – Fri, Jun 16, 2017 at 05:25:16 PM

Hello everyone!  

Another packed week for the team. While we’re still working on the core mechanics of the game itself, a significant part of the team spends their time creating and polishing the story. That means that they can’t always showcase here what they’ve been working on. That also means that the game is shaping really nicely, and we can’t wait to share the results with you. But we have to (wait), I’m afraid.  

What that means is that animators have been working on cinematics, Alex has been recording even more lines (both story-related and NPC barks), designers have been working on the story quests, artists have been polishing new environments… while the rest of the team keeps working on refining the AI, fixing or improving existing encounters and mixing audio. Thankfully, nobody in the team keeps having crazy ideas to make the game even better and bigger. Wait… they what?  

Anyway, let’s move to the actual weekly, but before that, let me remind you of the video we posted about our work on the UI of the game, in case you missed it:  

Production

Sam

Hi folks! This week I went off to E3, for a bunch of meetings about the project. It’s really important for at least one of us to attend the major shows each year, so that we understand what’s going on in the industry. This year’s E3 felt like the beginning of a return to the “glory days” of E3, and it was so packed that I could see a bigger E3 next year as a result.

I’m really happy with how the week went, and there are some pretty huge surprises coming up within the next two months, but as we have a lot to prepare I’m not yet ready to talk about it. Sadly I was so busy with meetings that I didn’t get a chance to play many games. Instead, here is a picture of my favourite booth of the show, which was a tiny little alley inside the SEGA booth:  

Yeah, SEGA! Who would have thought?

Design

Antoine

Hi there!

First some good news: Adam has had his baby! He’s out for 5 weeks on paternity, and Eric is away in Las Vegas for a wedding, so let’s just say that Ben and I felt pretty lonely this week *cue sad violin music*.  

Aside from the sadness *snif snif* this week was a bit unusual. I often spend my time solely in the editor vigorously building levels and making scripts, but not this week! Last week I finished the first cycle of quests of the second character and couldn’t really see the progression of the playthrough at a glance. I took the description of each encounter and started to arrange them in logical order from the start of the playthrough to the very end. This makes scripting and building levels very fast since you are never really going to have to stop and think about how this quest ties into the other one both from a gameplay and narrative perspective. It also makes it so we can weed out any flow problems in the golden path early on. So why I said this week was unusual is because I spent it practically entirely in Google Docs and going back and forth between Alex and David to make sure narrative sticks well with the gameplay. Lots of tough questions were asked and it came out as a hopefully cohesive playthrough for all of you nice people!  

Art

Carylitz

Hi guys! This week I made small changes to the new shelter and adjusted some props from that location, alongside new and secret props that I can’t show. I spent most the week doing research, talking with Remi for the rig and David to know the functionality and purpose of the asset. So far I think it is one of the most complicated props in terms of technical complexity, so lots of thinking on how to make it work. 

Marc-André

I started by making a few assets, such as the fake doctor's head mirror, a mousetrap and flowers with stems for an upcoming VFX. I went through my bug list to fix what I could. I also fixed bugs I noticed myself, such as ground materials in all Village houses (they stopped working due to an mesh optimisation pass we did a while back). I have also been integrating new posters from Sarah in the Village parks and modifying a story level to meet the animators needs. I did a brief art pass to the fine cuisine encounter, which now has a before/after state. After you free the cook, he'll transform his prison into a restaurant! The menu's always stew, but some fancy meals are "coming soon"! 

For the second part of the week, I started working on the lobby of a new story location, which will be an encounter set in a new upcoming biome. So far the whole encounter is very early work in progress, and I can’t share it, but I have done some excellent work on... toilet stalls! Everyone’s favourite gameplay location. 

Engineering

Chris and Rob 

 Hi all! Rob and I have been focusing on efforts on the UWP build this week. We managed to get a UWP build packaged and running really early this week, so that's great! We had to stub out some of the Xbox Live features and then spent the remainder of the week tracking down various problems. The good news is that the build seems to be as stable as the Steam build now. Is there bad news? Yeah, I think our Xbox Live changes may be causing a problem with the Live services in the Xbox One build. So first order of business next week: Fix the Xbox Live services on UWP and Xbox One. For those of you playing the game on Xbox One, don't worry! We're currently working in a separate branch and our QA will make sure everything is working again before we bring our changes over to the main code branch :). 

Have a good weekend! 

Michael 

This week I’ve been adding sound effects and voice lines for the inventory screen, quick slots, and fast travel. 

Audio can add so much to the experience. Games are an interactive medium, and so the feedback we give for any action you perform is important, and audio can be a big part of that.

It’s pretty common that audio gets left until the end of the process of creating game elements, but when it goes in it’s very exciting because it adds a new level of responsiveness to what you’re playing.

With the new inventory screen, the elements are a lot more animated and dynamic, and with the audio on top of that, it’s very fun to just click and mess around with it, which feels like a success. 

Narrative 

Lisa 

In a world awash in “fake news,” aren’t you glad you have the O’ Courant to tell you what’s really happening in Wellington Wells? This week I wrote a newspaper that you’ll see in the next update. I’ve also been writing environmental narrative for a schmancy design/fashion center in the posh part of Wellington Wells. (This is when having seen BLOW-UP 20 times comes in handy.) I think cosplayers will jump for Joy when they see this location. If you read the fashion tips in the signs and memos, you’ll know what’s in and what’s out. (Hint: tweed is VERY controversial this season.) 

Thanks for tuning in! 

Compulsion Team

Update #111 - Glonal effects and UWP
almost 9 years ago – Fri, Jun 09, 2017 at 08:39:46 PM

Hello everyone!  

It’s E3 next week, and I hope you are all looking forward to what the rest of the industry has to offer. We’re only going for Very Important Business Meetings this time around, and we’re looking forward to having a bit of time to see what everyone else is doing.  

In development this week, we’ve spent a fair whack of time nailing down issues with our new AI system. It’s progressing well, along with work polishing up the new weight-based UI and a new streaming system that we had hoped to write about this week, but it’s still not quite in. We’ve also started work on encounters for the next + 1 update, while we lock this one down.  

Also, in case you missed it, we published a new video. This time this is Emmanuel - whose birthday is today! HBD! - from the art department about the work on effects and their impact on the environments. You can watch it here:  

Art Team  

Guillaume  

Hi everyone, I’ve been busy this week arting up our systemic system that will spawn challenges randomly across the map such as bombs and ruins. And making some tree variants, but this is still very much WIP.  

Have a good weekend!

Marc-André  

This week, with a concept from Whitney, I have started the exterior blocking for one of the biggest encounters to pop up on a new island. I have also been doing an "urgent picture frame swap" across multiple encounters, so that these are not as overwhelming when they don't need to be - and properly showcase Sarah’s paintings. I did some fixes to the Pub and Mystery House, which needed some love on the exterior art pass. I did an oh-so-beautiful flower for Weili, which replaces something else when you’re on Joy! I also did a fire extinguisher that will be used with the player (I’ll let you imagine the possibilities). Then at the end to fill the remaining time, I tweaked Garden District materials.  

Emmanuel  

This week was all about a really special secret bridge! Also finalising and implementing some more features and bug fixes for the Joy update!  

Carylitz  

Last week was all about finding the right size and general space of the building I have been working on, so that I could work on the interior design this week. It has been a lot of back and forth with Whitney to get the right feeling in every space, and make the rooms to have the right idea. I think now everything is going in a better direction and I hope I will have something close to be done for the next week, so I can start with the lighting and get all the details! 

Narrative  

Alex  

Last week I recorded the last of the audio for the revised Miss Thigh Highs playthrough. This week I’m re-editing pretty much all the scenes, so the animators can get going on them.  

It’s funny. These are scenes I first recorded at least two years ago, but here and there I still find a line I can cut. Of course, I have to be careful to watch out for artifacts of prior versions – things that made sense but don’t make sense, or are redundant, now.  

Lisa and I spent some time this week “plussing” the Parade Barks. I’d written up barks for the Parade people – “poshies” – but they weren’t different enough from Wellies. Of course they’ll have posh RP accents, but we are trying to make their barks not only reveal their mindset, but reveal stuff about their lives. We’ll start recording them next week, Lord willin’ and the creek don’t rise.  

As we move into the Miss Thigh Highs playthrough, I’ve got a whack more recording lined up. I’ll actually be in the States for family reasons, but that’s no reason I can’t run recording sessions. After all, our actors aren’t here anyway. It is sort of amazing that we can run a recording session in London from a studio in Montreal and a desk in East Hampton, but I’m sure by next year we’ll just be frustrated that it isn’t more seamless. “Why can’t I do in 2 minutes the thing that was impossible 5 years ago???”

Design Team  

Adam  

Today I’ll talk about process. As you know, we have more than 1 playable character in WHF. A number of existing encounters and locations are used again for other characters, but with a very different style mission. That said, we have been working on tools to load/unload what we need on a per character basis. We also have the ability to branch flow in blueprint depending on character, so you retain parts of a mission while deviating to plan a different outcome. It’s really cool.  

Animation Team  

Vincent  

Now that the big push to finish the content for the next update is behind us, we’re back on cinematics! So expect us to be quite silent for the next month or so, as most of what we’ll be working on is even more secret than the not-on-YouTube Comey hearings. Our off site animators are on some of the scripted events and encounters for the main playthrough of The Mad Scotsman.  

On the not secret side of things, I worked with Antoine, Valentino and Michael to make sure our Fast Travel system looks, feels and sounds great!  

Engineering Team  

Chris  

This week has been a mixture of highs and lows. The Unreal engine is massive and adapting it to support a new platform (even with a sample to work from) is a ton of work. The bulk of the work is in the engine though, since the game has been developed using the engine's platform-independent interfaces. This is my third big project using the Unreal engine and I'm really glad I had that previous experience to help me understand and debug the build process. Overall, we finally managed to get the game compiling and linking on UWP and are now tracking down our first runtime issues. This might not sound that exciting to non-programmer folk but from a technical perspective (or at least from my perspective!), it's pretty awesome. It's still a bit too early to be able to see the light at the end of the tunnel, but overall, I'm very happy with the progress we've done this week!  

Thanks for tuning in!  

Compulsion Team

Update #110 - It's an arms race
almost 9 years ago – Fri, Jun 02, 2017 at 05:35:57 PM

Hello everyone! 

As we approach summer, the team is becoming more and more aware of how much work we still have to do to ship this game, and our looming deadlines. It’s going to be a tumultuous few months, with us bringing on multiple new people (we’ll explain that next week!) across all departments (except art) to help us improve the quality and scope of the game. 

In general, the content for our next update is looking great (and is now done), and we’re finding that our AI overhaul has been very successful but needs more attention to get it ready for prime time. We’ve also got some very exciting features coming in next week, which will dramatically change how the game is actually rendered. We might even get Guillaume (our CEO/creative director) to write about them! Watch this space next week. All this to say, we’re still looking good on late June/early July for the update, but we’ll keep you updated as we lock down the AI. 

Here’s what the team has been up to this week. 

Programming 

Michael 

This week has been continuing to bounce between inventory makeover and fast travel. 

We’ve ended up redesigning our inventory redesign (hah) to try and reduce information overload, and give more space to show off each of the items in there.

It’s been fun trying to test the inventory stuff recently because a bug has caused the shopkeepers to be very aggressive. You really need to get in there and check that stuff is working before Stewart Adams starts trying to cleave you to pieces.  

 

Clara 

Unreal is fun. Unreal is fun. Unreal is fun. Repeat. (Clara makes Eric question his life choices.) A lot of touch-ups on the UI design this week. I adjusted the animations for the toggles, played around with a still-ugly-but-about-to-get-better Error Box, finishing up the highlight animation for the quickslots… slowly getting there. 

Oh, also, the sleeping interface has changed a bit! This is going to give you much more feedback about what sleep will do for you. Looks disgusting for now, but we’re gonna clean that up eventually. 

 

 

 

Chris 

Hi all! Rob and I have joined the programming team this week and are excited to work on this game! We've been hard at work getting a UWP version of the game running for the Windows 10 store. We got Microsoft's branch of the Unreal engine with UWP support working on our machines and have brought over the changes into our version of the engine. There's still lots of work to be done, but it's been a productive week. Cheers! 

Level Design 

Antoine 

Hello there ! Lots of work is being done on the story. I finished the blocking (rough event scripting pass) of the intro for our second character, and it’s looking really great! Very different from Arthur’s. 

I also worked with Vincent and Michael to create feedback for the fast travel doors. When the player selects a location to travel to, Arthur will open the big metal door, walk down some steps and the screen will fade out. Arthur is basically using the maintenance corridors of Wellington Wells to travel from one shelter to the other.  

Eric 

Finally, I’m basically done with these underground jubilator shenanigans. Hope you guys like FX, explosions, and pressing buttons, ‘cause there will be some of that in here. Plus corpse throwing. That’s always fun. (Like Unreal) 

Animation Team 

Rémi 

Hello! This week was a debugging week. I fixed multiple issues for the game encounters as well as some rigging tweaks and fixes. I also got to skin and integrate two more arm variants - Arthur finally has a wardrobe! I got to test the wonderful work that Matt has done to allow us to swap the arms in real-time when we equip different suits. Testing these out and seeing the switch in-game is amazing and adds a lot to the immersion/believability to the game. Here’s a little something for you to enjoy it as well: 

 

Have a good week! 

Art Team 

Carilitz 

I got caught with some small tasks and fixing layout so I have not much to show but just one prop, made for the new shelter I'm working on! It's a little bit different from all the really creepy gory stuff I was making before but it was super fun to do it.  

 

Marc-André 

This week I finished tweaking last week's buildings. I fixed holes in the meshes and integrated them to the world spawner, so they now spawn in the Garden District. I also added a building with red bricks. In the next update, hopefully the Garden District will have more variety and feel more like a real place. I also integrated multiple of Sarah's signs for the butcher's house as well as the pub, where a blueprint randomizer allows for different names and illustrations. I did a broken version of the Joy mask to be used in the TV Altar encounter. I did a butterfly net and foxglove flowers (before and after loot versions). I took multiple screenshots of our world with the new Joy. I fixed a few bugs. So basically, I did a lot of small things here and there!  

 

Thanks for tuning in! 

Compulsion Team

Update #109 - Animation… animation everywhere
almost 9 years ago – Fri, May 26, 2017 at 04:48:51 PM

Hello everyone!  

Today marks the end of the content sprint for the next update, which means our level design, animation and art teams can move on to new stuff. We still have a bunch of technical features to finish up - eg AI, UI and at least one major technical overhaul (which Guillaume has secretly been working on for weeks) - but the core content is done. The team has created some, frankly, ridiculous encounters for you guys to experience, and we’re looking forward to showing you all.  

Next week, the content teams move on to stuff for our final update, along with the ever ongoing story work. So the levels you see from now on won’t be in the next update, but will be in the next + one (and final) Early Access update.  

Narrative  

Alex  

Last night at the bar, one of the company founders, Cord, asked me to name one of the things I like most about the game. One of the things that came to mind is how we are telling the story of the world.  

Most video games use “push” narrative: any time you need to know something, a character stands in your path and tells you what you will soon need to know. Da kine: “I am the protector of the ancient stones, which are past this gate; to get them you must fight me,” or “I have come to search for the ancient stones, which are past this gate; if you, complete stranger, will kindly get them for me, I will give you a magic hat.” (It’s amazing how trusting NPCs are in most games.)  

The reaction I have to this is, “Get out of my way, I’m trying to kill some dudes!”  

What we try to do in We Happy Few is “pull” narrative: we try to provoke the question in the player before we present the answer. I call it “pull” because the question pulls the player into interrogating his or her environment to find the answer.  

Most video game lore is “clean”: the only lore is what directly relates to your player character’s story. In Zelda: Breath of the Wild, almost every bit of lore is about Ganon and his takeover of Hyrule, which it is your mission to stop.  

Our narrative is “dirty.” Most of the stories we tell through lore and through encounters have relate at most tangentially with the player character’s overall goal. NPCs aren’t there to serve your story. They’re there to serve their stories; it’s only an accident that their story intersects with yours. 

When you meet them, they’re in the middle of something important to them, and they have somewhere else to be after meeting you.  

To me, this feels more like real life. No one is on Earth to serve your life story. They are there to serve their own life story. Even your Mom, who loves you, is living her own story. It may be her goal to see that your life is a good one, but that is still her goal, not your (related) goal.  

To add to this notion, quite a few of our NPC stories intersect with each other. You are not the nexus of all that is interesting. Some NPCs hate each other. Some love each other. Some love and hate each other. Such is life.  

I think this works better, because this is how our brains interpret the world. We never have all the information we need. We only have anecdata. We overinterpret the information we get. This goes back to hunter gatherer times: the guy that thinks the wind in the grass is a tiger doesn’t lose much by going in the other direction, the guy who ignores the wind in the grass the one time it actually is a tiger, doesn’t reproduce.  

In other words: we are hardwired to turn our experiences into story. Which means that, by giving the player chunks of narrative content that could add up to a story, we allow him or her to tell themselves their own story.  

To my mind, the Holy Grail of game storytelling is: get the player to tell the story, rather than telling the player the story.  

The individual chunks of narrative need to be linear in order to bear meaning – Arthur’s story isn’t choose-your-own adventure. But I aim to give you spaces in between the cutscenes which you can fill in. I’m only showing you the peaks; you fill in the rest of the mountain.  

That’s my goal, anyway: to let the narrative breathe. Next dev diary: why, in spite of all of this, branching narrative is vastly overrated.  

Art Team

Carylitz  

First location block out done! I spend most of the week working on this; a new shelter for the Parade District. For this building I did some new modular pieces for the outside and played with the layout of the inside. I have been moving everything around trying to find the best composition for it. I still have a lot of work to do on this one but so far so good. I have also been doing some small task, like fixing things here and there and creating some props for encounters.  

El equipo de Animación  

Vincent  

This week I’ve been touching up some stuff here and there to wrap up all my encounters, I hope you’ll enjoy them in the next update! There was some time for finishing touches on the giant robot thing as well. It now has complex state machines and several animations playing at the same time to fit its different behaviours! It’s makes for quite a complex animation script, but I had a lot of fun doing it.  

We also welcomed in our imaginary ranks two contracting animators, Mark and Diego, who are going to help us finish up the TON of stuff we still have left to do! One is in Vancouver, the other in Melbourne… So with Maarten in Belgium who joined us recently on the programming team, I guess it’s safe to say that there is ALWAYS someone working on We Happy Few. Yes, that’s terrifying.  

Rémi  

¡Hola! (pretty much all I know in spanish) 

This week, like Vincent, I have been finishing work on my encounters. That means I have worked on conversations and a few custom animations. I still had a few things to do on the butcher quest, but I don’t want to spoil too much. So even though I can’t wait to show you how awesome this encounter is, I’ll try and keep a few things for you to discover by yourself. That being said, here’s a little tease. This is a small section of the conversation you will have with the butcher:

On the more technical side, I have tweaked the scavenger extractor animations to be used on multiple surface angles. So instead of being completely animation driven, (full body AND camera controlled by animation) it is now possible to keep the aim of the player as the initial camera position. Here’s a little prototype testing where I can move the camera around while using the scavenger extractor:

That’s all folks! Have a good weekend.  

J.R.  

I’ll keep it short and simple this week guys, as it was another week of work on encounters. Most of it was spent on the underground encounters, specifically this one scene where some guy is running away from something and trying to climb to safety. So, without revealing what’s going on--you’ll have to tune in on the update for that--let me show you a little preview. Hope you enjoy!  

Programming Team  

Lionel  

¡Hola! (let’s make it a spanish theme weekly)  

This week I was hunting for a problem in the way we are generating cities : sometimes we had two identical buildings next to each other. It was not quite a bug but it was really damaging the suspension of disbelief. After a bit of hair pulling (it was ok most of the time), the culprit was found. It was a random generator, which was …wait for it... too random. Duplicates may still happen but they should be much more rare. Long story short, the streets will look more diverse now.  

Level Design Team  

Adam  

Hello all, I have been stitching together a few encounters for one of the main character. I can’t mention much about the content… but you can rest assured that there will be more explosions, sex, drugs, and rock n roll. These are a few of my favorite things. I also lost 16 lbs so far, so that’s something. 

 ALSO… I will be taking a break for a few weeks as my son is about to be born!  

Eric  

Woo. Finally through the looking glass on this strange playable sequence I’ve been working on. All the hard annoying stuff’s been fixed. Now it’s just animation hookups, FX hookups, toggles, some falling debris gameplay, and a few other polishy shenanigans to go. Special thanks this week to JR, Vincent, and Ben for some help on this stuff, which you guys will see in the next update.  

Thanks for tuning in!  

Compulsion Games