Update #103 - Xbox One update is live, PC content patch released today and story inside our encounters!
almost 9 years ago – Fri, Apr 14, 2017 at 04:31:44 PM

Hi everyone  

Here are the three main events of this week before we get to the journal:  

The Maidenholm Update for Xbox One is now live! The patch notes are the same as the PC release but they also include the content patch we released today on PC.

The PC content patch contains a lot of optimization improvements and some fixes for some broken quests (Church of Simon Says). Full patch notes here.  

And finally, we released a video talking about the story inside the encounters in We Happy Few. We know that our closest players know the story is coming for 1.0, but it seems like a lot of people who haven’t played the game think our game is just a sandbox survival game with zero story. So we are on a mission to show them what the game is actually about. Here is part 1 of this series:

Narrative  

Alex  

I’ve been writing encounters for weeks. Now come the recording sessions. Last night we had a good one with our wonderful Arthur, Alex Wyndham — 261 lines in two hours — covering all of Arthur’s lines for this sprint. Coming up are two or three sessions for all the male NPC lines, and one for all the female NPC lines.

Up till now we’ve been covering recordings in a “rolling” fashion: I’ve just waited until I have an hour’s worth of work for an actor, and then I bring someone in. Now we’re attempting to do it sprint by sprint. Theoretically this should be more efficient. If the LDs build the encounters with robospeech, and then we throw some lines out, then it costs less than if I record an encounter and then we throw some lines out, or worse, I record an encounter, and then we add lines, and I either have to get the same actor back, or have another actor record both the new lines and the old lines.

I’m not completely convinced by the New Way — I’m not sure how well you can evaluate an encounter using robospeech. For one thing, we only have one robospeech male voice and one female voice. So you have the robot talking to itself. But we seem to be getting more done in this new, more orderly fashion that Sam has, uh, fashioned.

Lisa  

I’ve been writing environmental narrative that I can’t tell you about because [REDACTED]. What I CAN tell you is that it weaves together different bits of content you’ve already seen to make a story that you (hopefully) weren’t expecting. So on a future update, you may have a few moments of, “Ooooh! So THAT’s where that was leading!”  

One of our goals in Narrative is to create the sense of a richly textured world, and that means having more than just the main stories that you’ll get in 1.0. You might overhear a conversation that doesn’t seem to be connected to anything but if you keep your eyes and ears open, you’ll find it’s part of a story. Who knows, maybe even in a telephone booth. (Have I said too much?)  

We hope this tides you over until we can reveal the main story of — just a second, there’s a knock on the door. Uh oh! It’s the doctors!

Art Team  

Marc-André  

This week I’ve been working on a lot of things. Between finishing up the existing extruder machines, I created an additional one named the “intake canister”. I did the modeling/texturing/UV/baking/texturing of it and it is now ready for the animators to use. Then, with references from Whitney, I got started on the house of a new encounter. I did the complete exterior pass and have started the interior, which will be ready for shows next week. I also did a new wooden fireplace mesh.

Guillermo  

Hi everyone, this week I’ve finished my part on the underground and move on into an other that I will show probably next week. Here is a screenshot of a future combat area. Have a good weekend!

Emmanuel  

This week I did exactly what Whitney told me to do and so I did great things! They were a lot of back and forth between concepts and modelling and the final result ended up just as planned and faster than expected. The statistics conjunction of the retroactive signal estimation determined that the creation curve is strong.

Programming  

Michael  

This week my task has been to work on the inventory menu re-design. Part of the task has been to simplify the old menu system and refactor it so that more of the design work on the menus can be done in Unreal's visual editing tools. By the end of the week I should have a prototype version of the inventory screen, with elements of all the functionality, ready for the rest of the team to play with. Hopefully they can ignore my rather shocking coder placeholder art, and I can get feedback on where it's heading, and hopefully unearth some issues we hadn't thought about. Once we know it's going in the right direction, I can start tidying up the code underneath, to make sure it won't fall apart under serious use, and that it's easy to debug when it inevitably does.

Animation  

Vincent  

Story. We’re all working on the story!

Design  

Adam  

Story. We’re all working on the story!  

Eric  

Hey, new guy here. Only started a few weeks ago, and unlike most of the other LDs I am not working on the main story so I can sort of actually share what I am working on. For the last 2 weeks or so I’ve been hard at work going through some of the older encounters polishing them, finishing them, or otherwise fixing bugs that have existed there for a bit. Encounters like TV Altar, Mysterious Chest, Mystery House, Hallucinogenic Salad, and a bunch of others whose names escape me as I write this because I didn’t get enough sleep last night. Anyway, next update should have some good fixes for the older content.

Antoine aka Captain Handsome  

STORY.

Quality Assurance  

Stephanie  

Hi all! This week we finished testing around the fixes that went out in today's PC hotfix and Xbox One Maidenholm update that should address most of the major issues that the community has been reporting.  

I would also like to thank everyone who has sent us bug reports and feedback on the forums - it has really helped us track down some annoying issues :) 

Bonus dancing pixie gif: 

Happy Easter everyone! Enjoy doing nothing and playing games. 

Compulsion Games 

Update #102 - We Happy Few Roadmap, Xbox One update and movie adaptation news.
almost 9 years ago – Fri, Apr 07, 2017 at 05:20:52 PM

Hey all,  

We hope that you have been enjoying the Maidenholm Update! We’ve had some great feedback so far, which we’re looking forward to working on.  

This week’s journal is a little lighter on the development side as most of the team is either on story content or fixing bugs, but it is heavier on the production side!  

Xbox players, we have just completed a couch test on the Xbox build (one where we sit down to figure out what else needs to be done on performance), and we may finally have a date in sight. We are hoping to release the Xbox One update next Friday, but we will confirm this early next week. This date may change, but we wanted to give you something. Likewise, the bug fixes, changes and optimizations we have made for the Xbox build will be converted over to a content fix for the PC Maidenholm players around the same time!  

We would usually have a video for you guys today, but are working on a 3 part series, 1 and 2 of which should be available next week. In the meantime, a few months ago Autodesk passed by our office to film some interviews, and we received the first out of a three part series about the studio and We Happy Few earlier this week. So, if you are not too tired of hearing us ramble about the game and want to see more of the studio, you can check the interview here.

Movie Adaptation  

In other news, you may have heard but last Friday we posted the news that a We Happy Few movie is in the works! We’ve partnered with dj2 Entertainment and Gold Circle to produce the movie (DJ2 are also working on the Life is Strange and Sleeping Dogs adaptations). This is of course very exciting news, and you can read the full article here.  

But, we want to clear up a few things. This in no way affects the development of We Happy Few. Movies take years to make and by the time we release the game, there might not have been any further news about the project. In fact, a lot can happen to a movie from this point onward. That being said, we’re still really excited, and we’ll be doing our best to help this project succeed.

Production Roadmap  

Sam  

As we near 9 months spent so far in Early Access, we’d like to give you a short roadmap for when and how We Happy Few is likely to be finished. I’m not going to mention dates today, because as you know these always change, but I can give you a rough snapshot of what we plan to do as we approach launch.  

We are planning two more major updates (like the Clockwork and Maidenholm updates) before 1.0:

- Next update: major theme is Joy and conformity, with an AI rework, UI overhaul, and some fantastic encounters in the pipe.  

- Next + 1 update: this will bring the Parade District, the final island in Wellington Wells, improved world generation, and more encounters.  

- 1.0: this will bring the stories of our three characters, plus a bunch of other surprises.

As I mentioned last week, these updates are on a roughly 3 month cycle, and we’re currently part way through one. I would expect the time to finalise 1.0 to take longer than a three months period.  

You may be wondering “what happened to the 6-12 months in Early Access!” Well, release happened, you guys happened, and our plans had to change. The early feedback we received was overwhelmingly convincing - we needed to spend more time on the systems underlying the game, particularly the ones that dealt with encounter stability and storytelling, to get the game where it needed to be. This culminated in the Clockwork Update in December, which meant that those first 6 months were spent on work we hadn’t anticipated. While we hope you agree that the Clockwork Update was time well spent, that added roughly 6 months to our plans.  

As you can see, this is one reason why developers are reluctant to share dates. Things never go as planned in development. That being said, we hope this helps give you an indication of where we’re going, but please do remember that this roadmap is not a promise. While we’re confident enough to put this out there, it is very likely to be revised and will change over time. We’ll keep you updated as we go.

Animation Team  

Remi  

Most of the animation team is on story cinematics this week, and it’s going quite well. Some cinematics are finally getting their last polish phase!

Fortunately for you guys, I still had a day early this week for some rigging work. I got to do the final tweaks on Arthur arms and did some RnD for twist bones. For those who don’t know what twist bones are, they help with the deformation of the mesh around articulations. It’s quite common to have them in games nowadays, but we didn’t have them on the first person arms until now. Why? Simply because I wasn’t there when they were first made! So since I was already working on the arms, might as well spend some time on twist bones! Now, the issue is that we already have tons of animations. We had to be careful and do some tests before implementing them. We need to make sure we’re not breaking anything. And this is where I ended up finding a very useful node in our animation blueprint that does exactly what we need! This node procedurally adds rotation values onto a specific bone (the twist bone) relative to another (in this case: the wrist bone). That means we get to have this nice deformation on all our upcoming AND previous animations. It is a big relief for us in the animation team, since we were constantly constrained by the maximum rotation we can apply on the wrist without breaking the mesh. We always had to find creative ways of twisting the arms, hands and shoulders to prevent the issue. We can now animate in peace without having to worry about it.

Here’s a little gif to illustrate the difference between twist bones and no twist bones:

Narrative Squad  

Alex 

After several weeks of feverishly writing encounter dialog for the current sprint, this was my week to sit with the level designers and make sure the dialog I wrote has something to do with the levels they’ve built. Fortunately, it mostly did. Thanks to folks’ reaction to the rat piñata, we will have a really amazing, possibly quite alarming, encounter with Reg Cutty, our Butcher. You’ll also have a chance to hear what Doctors say when they think no one’s listening. And we’re starting to work up a carnival ride through the Doctor headquarters in the Parade District (although you won’t see this one for a while). 

It’s taken us a while to smooth out our production process, but we’re building encounters much more quickly these days, which means I’m writing and recording quite a lot more. Fun! 

I’m also pondering giving a talk at MIGS… but I have to figure out about what? I have some ideas, but it’s hard to know what other people don’t know. Any devs out there want to know something about what we’re doing here, technically, with our narrative?

Art Team  

Carylitz 

This week the art team spent some time optimizing our 3D models, so that things run well on low end systems. Big part of the week was about that, so with the time left I had the chance to finish my prop from last week. As you can see the prop went through some changes, this is because in the making I was bouncing ideas with Remi, and after a bunch of test in game this was the result.

Marc-André  

This week, I spent a good three days in hell optimising encounters. Notably, I went back to Nick’s house to heavily decimate the scaffoldings. The amount of polygons for them decreased more than tenfold. I’ve also merged all the little pieces of scaffolding together to reduce the amount of elements in the level, reducing the amount of draw calls (which always is a good thing). I’ve also merged the level building’s exterior and interior shells together. I also got rid of a few very complex lights in the scene, that impeded performance.

 After that optimisation, I was able to get back to creating some masochistic machines. It’s scaring me. I’m really starting to wonder where David gets these sick ideas. What are these machines going to be used for? I’ll leave it to your imagination.

Work in progress nearing completion:

Guillaume  

This week and the last I’ve been working on a new underground place. The idea behind this underground is that the Wellies found and restored an old underground to build a high tech facility. Bare in mind that it’s still very work in progress. Have a nice weekend!

Design Team  

Hayden  

Hey Folks, This week I spent some time working on our Old Soldiers Encounter. I mentioned this one last week, but in case you missed it, this encounter centers around an Old Soldier, his heinous caretakers, a long-lost brother and a dog that came between them. It’s a sad story. This encounter will now be passed off to art/animation for more realization.  

Also, this week I revisited Speaker’s Corner… The original design called for posting some fliers for the speaker; I reworked this interaction, including how we will communicate where to post the fliers. The system makes a lot more sense now, you should quickly be able to determine where to post the fliers and each location will include an increase in challenge in order to complete the objective.  

For now, enjoy a sad photo of our friend, Thomas Lawrence. Veteran, Brother, Father… We salute you.

Thanks for tuning in!

Compulsion Team

Update #101 - Sam's boring production talk and most importantly, arm variants!
almost 9 years ago – Sat, Apr 01, 2017 at 12:49:38 AM

Hi all,  

This week we launched the Maidenholm Update on Steam and GOG! In case you missed it, here is the update video, and the patch notes are available here.  

The Xbox One version still needs a bit more time. With the introduction of the new content, we’ve had to rework our loading and streaming systems, which is a non-trivial task. The good news is, the work we’re doing now will make it faster to create updates in the future. As soon as the update is ready on Xbox One, we will let you know!

We also released earlier today a hotfix for the Maidenholm Update which should address crash and performance issues. If you have been experiencing these, make sure you are playing on version 38678 (the latest one). Thank you all for letting us know about your issues and sending us your logs, they have been very helpful in narrowing down the issues. The game might still experience some problems, so feel free to let us know and we will keep on working on hotfixes.

Production  

Sam  

Hi folks! I hope you are all enjoying the Maidenholm Update.  

Today I’m going to talk about something that causes immense boredom in most people, but makes me super happy: production pipelines!  

One of my responsibilities is to look after how the team works together to create our updates.  

First, we begin by planning what’s going to be in an update. This begins with David’s (our design director) design, and gets built out into a gigantic planning spreadsheet:  

These are some of the encounters we created for the Maidenholm Update. X means done, and a gap can mean we have more work to do on it (in this case we want to do more work on the digging spots in a later update). Also note that these are dev names - the names you see in game are what they become after Alex has his way with them. We look primarily at encounters because these are the critical path for an update, and they require ~80% of the team to work together.  

You can see here that we have a ton of columns referring to the different parts of each encounter. We generally have one level designer, one artist, and one animator who look after any individual encounter. We also have Alex and Lisa working on environmental narrative and VO, Sarah on all the 2D art, Valentino and Chris on our sound, Weili (who you’ve probably never heard of) working on VFX, David checking in on the design at all times, Whitney looking after the overall look, QA testing for logic, save/load issues, stuck bugs, etc, Matt and the programmers looking after everything working correctly, and me making sure that people aren’t blocked on what they need to do. All in all, it’s quite complex.

Over time, our production has evolved into this:

Each column refers to a 4 week “sprint”, and we have 3 of these per update. Each sprint represents a different phase of development, and each team has different focuses inside each phase. We’re currently at the end of phase 1 for the next update. This helps a great deal when we’re planning the overall production, for example, if art isn’t needed on update content in a sprint, they can work on story content.

While we’re not a super agile team compared to pure software development, because we have an overall plan/design we’re working towards, this system makes it easy for everyone to understand when we’ll be doing a certain thing. It’s easy for us to respond to player feedback – eg by fixing/improving encounters in phase 2 – and also bring new content in an efficient way. \ As you may expect, it isn’t always as clean as these charts make it out to be. But having the process and being flexible is much better than not having one!

Narrative Team  

Alex  

I’ve been writing encounter dialog this week. Yards and yards of it. When we started this game, we had no idea how much dialog was going to go into it. The first few encounters had very little. But you guys seem to like run-ins with strange people. So I just finished an encounter with 180 lines of dialog. Can’t tell you what it is, but if you liked the rat piñata, you’re going to love it.

Art team  

Carylitz  

Update week yaay! I have been watching a lot of streams and youtube videos, it is amazing! But well as I promised last week, I finished my big prop and did two more. I won't tell for what these props are for, but I can tell you that David and Whitney are behind this crazy idea and guys, I gotta tell you, their imagination has no limits. Hope you like them and if you have any guesses on what the props are for, let us know!

Marc-André  

These past few weeks I’ve been working on props (objects). It had been a while since I had done so much modeling and it is really cool to get back into it. Notably, I’ve been working on very special machines, one of which is called “The exsanguinator”. I’ll let you figure out what this one is used for. ;) I also worked on a wheelchair and a silver welding exhaust ducting pipe (yes, it’s the true name of the thing).

PS. New sadistic machines coming next week!

Emmanuel

This week I did exactly what Whitney told me to do and so I did great things! They were a lot of back and forth between concepts and modelling and the final result ended up just as planed and faster than expected. The statistics conjunction of the retroactive signal estimation determined that the creation curve is strong.

Programming Team  

Michael  

A lot of excitement this week, stomping out as many bugs as possible before seeing the new update out the door.  

For most of the week I have been looking into the inventory UI overhaul. I’m working on the code side of the player menu makeover. Hopefully it will be even prettier to look at, and have a bit more life to it to. There could also be some gameplay improvements in the way the player gathers and uses their items.

Animation Team  

Rémi  

Hey everyone, this week was pretty much the continuation of last week. I finished the whole 91 FaceFX actors! That was more painful than I expected… I’m still waiting on some audio renaming stuff before I can start generating all the animations, but it’s mostly done. For the rest of the week, I was able to do something EVERYONE wanted: First person arms variants!  

We’ve had lots and lots of comments and requests from the community to change the visual of Arthur’s clothes when we switch suits. And I am proud to say that it will happen. Our great character modeler, Tito, has been creating all the clothes variants for a few weeks already, and I finally got to the part of rigging the first ones. We are still missing some of the models like the padded suit, spikey suit. But the work has begun! This will add a lot to the immersion and I am very excited for you to experience it for the first time once the next update comes out. Until then, here’s a few screenshots for the hype:

Design Team  

Adam  

Been fun watching you guys break my quests in every possible way. Thank you for that. I’ll be fixing all that stuff for patches at a later date. In the meantime, I’m going to take a bit of a breather (with Antoine) on weekly updates, as we work quietly in the background on the story playthroughs.

Hayden  

Hey Folks,  

Had a lot of fun this week working on some new encounters, I got to actually build some new houses for Wellington Wells, a task I really enjoy doing… For me, it’s kind of the best of both worlds--as far as a task goes, it is without a doubt design, but it also has that element of architecture/art to it, which is something I enjoy.  

One of the encounters that I’m working on is part of a series of Reporter encounters, so it’s always interesting to watch as the whole bit comes together to form a part of the narrative.  

The other encounter I’ve been working on takes place in two separate locations, and as much as I hate to say it, working on this encounter has revealed that there are some seriously disturbing and horrible people that live in Wellington Wells—if you had any hesitations about choking out a Wellie, after playing this encounter, you’ll find yourself relishing the thought, and you’ll know exactly who deserves it most.  

So much fun… have a pic… Enjoy your weekend!

Thanks for tuning in!  

Compulsion

Update #100 - Maidenholm Update on 29 March! Also, 100th KS update!
about 9 years ago – Fri, Mar 24, 2017 at 05:33:19 PM

Hey everyone,  

The Maidenholm Update for We Happy Few is arriving on PC on 29 March. Here’s a sneak peak at what’s in store:  

The update will drop on Steam and GOG first, and the Xbox One version will follow some time shortly after. The Xbox One version has been giving us a bit more grief thanks to the huge amount of new content, so it needs a bit more time in the kitchen. Please give a round of applause for Clara and Sarah who created this amazing teaser.

We are also a bit surprised because today’s post marks the 100th update since we started updating our Kickstarter backers with progress. This evolved into our weekly journals, so it’s a good a time as any to say “100 journal updates”! As a result, we’ve made an extra effort this week to post up some interesting material. We hope you enjoy it.

Production  

Sam  

Holy shit, 100 updates. When we started doing this weekly journal, I don’t think we fully understood the change it would bring to our studio. It’s very unusual for a studio to do this (and thank you to the team at Facepunch for inspiring us with their work on Rust), but it has become a core part of what we do. Sharing this with you every week is one of the highlights of my week. Thank you all for reading and supporting us.  

As you can see above, we are going to be bringing the Maidenholm Update to you next week. The team has done incredible work on this update, and it sets the stage for the work we’ll be doing this year. It feels like we’ve ramped up to full speed on the game, and the next couple of updates will be even bigger.

I’d like to write at some stage about how we are building our updates, to give you some insight on our production processes. However, time is a little tight as we prepare for the update, so instead I want to show you something Naila and I put together on Thursday: our Early Access update history.

http://steamcommunity.com/app/320240/discussions/0/135512305401468442/

I figured it might be interesting to publicise our update history, so anyone can look back at the updates we’ve made and read the build notes in context. We have also opened up a couple of public branches on Steam with old versions of the game, which you can download and play at any time. Probably this won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, but for those of you interested in game design (or digital archaeology, as I like to say), we’ll be happy to answer questions about why we made the changes that we did.

Ninja Team  

Clara  

Since it is the 100th update (hurray! an excuse for cake!), I figured I would show you a bit of what is happening right now in the ninja department aka the videography department (This was not supposed to be a thing but since it slipped through a few weekly journals ago…).  

With the arrival of the Maidenholm Update, I have been busy working on videos, videos and more videos, in-between the weeklies and the PAX report.  

As you guys probably saw today, Sarah and I did a very tasteful teaser for the update coming next week. It took some storyboarding and designing here and there, a couple of coffees and a lot of giggling but we are pretty happy with the result!  

We really hope you will enjoy it and that it will make for an exciting interlude before next week’s update.  

To this end, I have been working on the big update video. Sarah and Sam went back behind the mic for a new round of upcoming features and improvements, all condensed under 5 minutes... which was not an easy task this time. Hopefully it will give a good insight on what awaits you in the Maidenholm Update!  

And now, let's talk about that cake.

Design Team  

Adam  

Update 100, huh? I’ve been continuing work on one of our underground encounters. A Jubilator boss fight! This week I’ve been reworking the puzzles in the area and having the other designers playtest them and giving feedback. I also received feedback from our design director, David in the form of “yeh…. It’s alright I guess”, which is a monumental achievement.  

I’ll be recording a full walkthrough of the level for Clara so she can work her magic.  

On the super secret side, I have been working on a major location for the story mode. Needless to say I cannot mention exactly what it is, but it’s going to be sweet.

Antoine  

100 updates. That’s 100 weeks and boy did the game change in the span of a 100 weeks. To underline this let me scavenge some pictures off the good ol’ hard drive to do a quick retrospective of one of the levels I worked on extensively: the house of curious behaviours. I got the concept from David around mid February 2016 and it was supposed to be this small encounter taking place in one of the “regular houses”. You’d hear some suspicious noises and eventually find a room with people shocking themselves with the Shock Batons. Being a huge fan of Deus Ex and Dishonored I thought “ohhh I get to be the one making the whore house level or the red light district area”. Always loved the wrong ambience of the Golden Cat level or the Red Light District in Mankind Divided. So I thought we could push the concept a little further and turn this into a full fledge club. There was a part of the level (the entrance) where you had to pay 5 coins in order to be invited inside, something we eventually axed because it didn’t correspond to any of our gameplay pillars (conformity, stealth or combat). I’d say that early access facilitates those kind of decisions. We get to see people play our levels on Youtube or Twitch in the comfort of their home and comment openly on what they like or don’t (sometimes they hold back when coming in the studio for a playtest). Here’s some old greyblocking pictures of the start of the encounter:

 

 

I decided to add a little courtyard in front of the house so that players would feel a little more free to experience the encounter without having to always be confronted by the Bobbies patrolling at night. The pay fee was replaced with a simple button that only Constables are supposed to use. This echoes our conformity pillar. If you don’t care about rubbing people the wrong way you’d simply click the button and open the doors giving the red bobby inside a reason to smash your face in (because you didn’t follow the rules!). If you do play along the conformity axis you’d probably be talking to the red bobby and see what he’s got to say and look around for clues in the environment as to how to get in with minimum inconvenience.

 

Hope you like the changes in the update next week! If you ever stream the game or post let’s plays on Youtube I’ll be watching… and analyzing your thoughts and behaviors… (creeppppy). I also want to thank all the people of the team who worked really hard on this level. There’s over 6 people that were involved into realizing this encounter (average amount of people involved for any encounter to be honest).

Art Team  

Guillaume  

Hi people!  

This week and the last I’ve been working on our new systemic encounter system that will allow us to fill the new open areas between hamlets. Those are gonna be bunkers or cellars that will spawn randomly in the world, differently each time, giving you new challenges and the most important stuff... loot!!! Oh and I also did a coffee vending machine as a bonus. Have a good weekend.

 

 

 

 

Carylitz  

I have no pretty pictures with sick props to show this week, but I have been working on a big prop! I had some technical and pipeline problems but I'm sure it will be ready to show next week!

Sarah  

Good news on the UI front! We're charging ahead with our redesign, and I've had my head buried in the Inventory Screen all week. I've been meeting back and forth with David, G, and Whitney to make sure it's headed in the right direction. The fact that David wouldn't throw it in a dumpster fire means we're in a great place! Striking a balance between having a satisfying aesthetic and intuitive functionality has been really challenging, but since it's a screen that players inevitably spend a lot of time looking at, it's important to get it just right. It's nearly ready to share, so keep your eyes peeled! Happy 100th y'all!

Emmanuel  

I generally work in the shadow these days, on obscure secret conspiratorial story related massive and fascinating locations and FX but I had also the chance to do the environments for the new Hoarder House, Murder House, Butcher Alleyway, Joy control gate for the village and to redo the old place holder crafting station! Yeay!

 

 

 

 

 

 

Whitney  

Hey everyone! A few weeks ago I did a GDC talk about the art direction for We Happy Few! Public speaking is very scary but with enough practice not as horrible as I had once thought. I might not look like I was having fun but that's just because I was worried about forgetting to say something. Anyway, I hope you find it informative!

http://gdcvault.com/play/1024239/You-Look-Smashing-Procedural-Art

Animation Team  

Mishka  

What’s up guys. Anniversary milestone update huh? I have something to show you today! I started working on the Jubilator this week. Here are some first locomotion animations for this corpse-absorbing-monstrosity of a machine:  

This thing is meant to collect dead bodies at night. There will be other animations for it very soon once we finish the logic on the programming side. At the same time, I also started the polishing on a pretty complex story cinematic. To not spoil the narrative, we can’t show it to you guys just yet. However, BE EXCITED as it will be awesome!

Vincent  

Happy birthday updates! No frolicking doctor video today, but I’ve continued to work on him all week.

Rémi  

Hey all! 100 updates is pretty impressive! I wish I had something epic to share with you on this update. Remember the video a few weeks ago about FaceFX ? Well, that’s exactly what I’ve been doing all week long! A few weeks ago was for RnD and finding a way to achieve the result we wanted. This week is full on production! I’ve been creating all facial expressions and animations for each type of bark that we have in the game! And yes, we have a lot! I then have to re-create the same animations and facial expressions for every character archetypes we have.  

Just for you to imagine the scale, we have 7 character archetypes: Wellie, Wellette, Wastrel, Wastrellette, Bobby, Crier, Doctor. And then we have 13 types of Barks and Grunts. If you do the maths, there’s A LOT to be done. But the end result will be worth the amount of work! NPCs will soon open their mouths and have facial expressions when they attack you! We are sure that adding this level of detail will make NPCs feel a lot more believable. Sadly, I don’t have a video to show you this week, since the work isn’t finished yet. But here are some pictures of facial expressions in the meantime:

 J.R.  

Hey everyone. So yeah... wow! 100 updates… time goes by! It’s pretty special, so I wanted to write something for you guys.  

I would SO love to show you a little secret something. As you know, there’s a pretty neat story under development. That’s what I’ve been working on for the past few weeks and I simply wanted to give you a tiny peek… Sadly, some people just like to watch the world burn, and there’s no way around that. (I [redacted] you Sam)  

Kidding aside though, it truly is for a good reason, also not entirely under our control, and it’s only going to make the reveal of the story--and the characters--that much better. Please forgive me for teasing you with nothing. I hope you’re excited to know more!

Quality Assurance  

Stephanie  

Lee and I have been testing around the last few changes being made for the next update - no amusing gifs this time but here is my favorite graphical issue of the week:

Thanks for tuning in!

Compulsion Games

Update #99 - Back from PAX East and into the trenches
about 9 years ago – Fri, Mar 17, 2017 at 10:46:43 PM

Hey everyone,  

We are back from PAX East, after a few of us took a short trip down to Boston at the end of last week. We didn’t have a booth but we wanted to meet some players, check out where the industry as a whole is moving, and play some indie games. We played some fantastic games and even filmed a video about them, so keep your eyes peeled for next week’s video!  

We have finished content and most of the QA work on the new update. We were going to announce a date today, but we are going to wait just a bit longer, as the game is so big now that we can’t get away with the old optimization processes we have been using. So we need a bit of time to figure out how to make this run well on low end systems. But it IS coming and we even have a cheeky video to announce the date, once we’re ready.  

The good news is, we know now for sure what’s going to be in the update, and there is a lot of cool and new content such as: a brand new Island (not the Parade District, yet), the new playstyles, new encounters (Simon Says anyone?), THE PUB, new enemies and even brand new bugs never seen before! But let’s not spoil all the fun before you get to play it. And of course once we drop the update, all feedback will be very welcome.

Narrative Team  

Lisa  

Wonder why Joy isn’t working for everyone in Wellington Wells? Want to know what causes plague? Curious whether there’s a Big Bad? You’re not alone!  

This week I wrote environmental narrative for an intrepid reporter who’s tracking down some of the same questions a player might wonder about. Eventually you’ll see her reporter’s notebooks and rejected (i.e., not happy enough) articles, as well as her “crime board” (one of those crazy bulletin boards with photos and news clippings, like what the FBI uses on TV crime shows). One or two things might even be written in code you need to decipher. Hope you like a mystery!

Design Team  

Adam  

Hello all, I'm back from PAX East. What an amazing event. I got to meet a ton of fellow developers and check out their games. A huge congratulations to all of them, and I look forward to playing the release.

A shoutout to Bill Gardner at Deep End Games, working on "Perception" http://www.thedeependgames.com/  

To the Deetman brothers at Keoken interactive, working on "Deliver Us the Moon" http://deliverusthemoon.com/  

To Sean Slavik down in Brazil at chance6 games, working on "Colina Legacy" http://store.steampowered.com/app/371650/  

and finally to Giuseppe Enrico Franchi at 34BigThings working on "Redout" https://34bigthings.com/  

There are tons more I wish I could list.. but.. no business cards =/

Oh, and play Brawlhalla, it’s amazing.  

Now, onto business. This week, I have been putting together an underground level, entitled "Jubilator Attacks!". I don't want to give away any spoilers, but we will have some exotic gameplay from the Jubilator trying to run us over at 4 kph (Google tells me that's 2.49 mph). It sounds easy to avoid, but all the other tricks up its sleeve will make that quite tricky.

Antoine  

Hi! I think I can say I’m officially recovered from PAX. That was an awesome 3 days for us getting to meet people from all over the world (yep, Croatia, Germany, Russia, Italy and so on) doing some really inspiring things. Hats off to all of you. Shout out to all the peeps mentioned by Adam, you guys rock.  

Shout out to this crazy game called The Artful Escape of Francis Vendetti. Very awesome seeing devs pushing a stylized look with UE4. http://theartfulescape.com/

Shout out to the peeps at Runic Games! Thanks for letting us occupy their booth after a long day at the convention. We named this the Compulsion Occupation of 2017. https://www.runicgames.com/

Soo, this week I’ve been grey blocking a new encounter currently titled as “Cub Reporter”. Here’s some pictures. As always I’m trying to push the use of vents and small secret passages which I always find exciting when I encounter them as a player.

David (Design Director) did a cool PowerPoint presentation a couple of weeks ago that got me very hyped for what’s to come in the systemic open world portion of our game. This week we properly jumped into realizing those ideas. The plan is to have root cellars and bunkers placed throughout the open forest areas (which you haven’t seen yet!). Bunkers will be both German and also English to echo World War 2 events. Some of those will be below ground and some above ground, creating variation in the places you visit. Gameplay situations will also vary too. Root cellars are pitch black which means you’ll need your torch to navigate it properly if you don’t want to trip on something dangerous. Some root cellars are a bit larger and occupied by Hooligans which means you’ll get more of a combat/stealth scenario.

We are also working on a more systemic approach to honey collecting. The plan is to have “honey trees” scattered throughout the world. You’ll need to find a suitable way of taking care of the bees if you want to harvest their honey safely. Bees will also now pursue you until a certain distance. If you happen to be very close to an NPC the bees will change their target and pursue that NPC instead leading to some quirky situations.

Hayden  

Hello Folks,  

This week I focused on a good handful of bug fixes for the next update and writing docs for our next set of encounters. I was able to actually get in the editor this week and start blocking out a house that will be used in one of the new encounters, as well being set up for a generic house you would find around town.  

The new encounter that I’ll be working on is all about this workaholic reporter, I can’t tell you what story she is working on, but it’s big… big enough that some folks around Wellington Wells are willing to break into her home… Downers.  

I’ll have more to show you next week as I move into blocking out several other homes and encounters. For now enjoy an early pic of the reporter's home.

Programming Team  

Michael  

So the programmers are mostly working on getting all the new content into shape ready for release, which doesn’t give many exciting things to talk about. Just optimising and bug fixing new content. This week did see the beginning of construction on Compulsion’s new cyborg employee.

We’ll see if it passes probation.

Animation Team  

Vincent  

Heya! This week has been mostly spent on animating the Doctor! Yes, one day we’ll finally bring the Doctor into the game. It’s far from finished on the AI side, but I’m making sure the programmers have everything they need once they jump on that. Looks like the Doctor is very happy about being able to (finally) move about:  

Apart from that I worked a bit on the Export Script I mentioned last week. As anticipated, there were a few bugs that were promptly squashed. I also added a few quirks to it, like automatic settings saving. Here’s it’s lovely interface, a simple click on the top-right button, and your animation(s) is ready to import in Unreal :  

Shameless plug, if you’re into 3D and like to have script do boring stuff for you, I’ve got a little blog of my own, with some cool homemade tools in it : http://scriptsandtidbits.blogspot.ca/

Art Team  

Carylitz  

This game is just getting crazier every week! I started making normal props like a hat, a suit, you know normal stuff, but then I made a brain inside a jar, after I started working on some bones, trash bags with strange shapes and now this amazing vehicle, and for what I know, this is not even close to how crazy this game is gonna get!

Marc-André  

This week, I’ve spent three days doing fixes and tweaks. I went back to a bunch of old encounters and fixed sound materials, collisions and a bunch of trivial issues. I fixed huge negative scales bugs that affected the Xbox One build. Pieces of walls were floating around in the Garden District. This obviously was a major art and gameplay concern, and will now be fixed in the coming update.

I also took a look at hundreds (310, to be very specific) of unoptimized material instances in order to lower their memory footprint. I did the same for some UI textures.

After getting these bugs sorted out, I’ve started to work on new art assets for the game, such as a radio. There are also other props in progress which are close to be done but not yet ready for show. You will see them in next week’s update!

Thank you for tuning in!  

Compulsion Games