Update #98 - Teasing the teaser
about 9 years ago – Fri, Mar 10, 2017 at 04:40:40 PM

Hi everyone,  

Half of our team left yesterday to go to Boston to meet the community and fellow developers at PAX East. This is always a great opportunity for us to share some good times with our community, as well as to meet our friends from different studios, to exchange ideas about what they’re/we’re doing and learn how we can get better.  

The rest of the team in the office is split into groups. On the one hand, we’re adding the final touches to the next update’s build to make sure you all have a great time. We’re also working on the marketing side to make sure everybody knows when we update the game, so they can check the improvements. On the other hand, some of us have already jumped onto the next sprint, where we’ll focus on dramatically improving some essential gameplay features. You should be loving it!  

Also, you may have seen this week that we’ve published a video regarding subtitles. This is a very important feature we need to spend time on, to make sure we can include as many players as possible. That also means that most of our team will spend the next few days reviewing all subtitles and making sure they match the audio they’re linked to, as well as localizing everything in French, so that you get everything for the update. Long nights at the office ahead!  

Enjoy the video here:  

Animation Team (or what’s left of it)  

Vincent  

Ahoy! This week has been mostly about wrapping up the content for the next update: fixing little bugs, finding and reporting the ones I couldn't fix myself, updating conversations with the last voiceovers...  

Once this was done and half the studio was at PAX, I took some time to work on a Python script I've been craving to write for a while... A little tool to help with our gameplay animation export process. It's about time -- that's gonna save us hundreds of clicks in the long run. I'll be lobbying to have the other animators give it a try, and hopefully they'll give me feedback and I'll be able to improve it little by little!  

Ok, what may happen is that the script won't run on their pc for an obscure reason, and I'll spend a day pulling my hair trying to find out why. Oh, the fun!  

Art Team  

Sarah  

Hey guys! I had a very exciting art week. The frenzy to make new 2D content for the upcoming update is over, and while the QA dudes and Programmers are making sure the build is solid, I'm free to make some less critical pieces (however totally necessary for atmospheric purposes). I made a ton of new abstract expressionist and pop art paintings for the Village interiors, inspired by real peeps including Franz Kline and Jasper Johns (though both are American I would argue that their art vibes are globally iconic). The current paintings are repeating too much for our liking, and it was a great challenge to get them to really feel like textured, gloopy oil paintings despite being born in Photoshop. I'm really happy with how they turned out, and hopefully the Wellies will be too!  

Clara and I also worked on a Mr.Peabody inspired animated teaser video for this next update. We went over a script and storyboard together, and I designed a ton of graphic assets for Clara to animate. I'll share more of them in the next weekly so as not to spoil her hard work, but for now here's a still! Have a great weekend, and for those at PAX East, have a wicked good time!  

Programming Team  

Michael  

It’s been about a month since I flew over from England to join the elite ranks of Compulsion Games. It’s super exciting to be working on such a cool project, and the team have been great, and very welcoming.  

I’ve been doing a lot of bug-fixing to start off, which has been great for getting familiar with a new engine and a game that already has so many systems in place. So most of my time is spent staring and scrolling through pages and pages of code trying to work out exactly how something like the lovely ( and the not-so-lovely ) status effects work… and then how they don’t work.  

Other than bugs I have been looking at UI. At the start of this week I was looking at improving the New Game menu for the next update. It’s no longer just a few drop downs in the corner of the screen. We’re adding some cool icons (created by Sarah) and descriptive text to help you choose how you want to set up your playthrough. This involved creating a new layout for the icons and creating a little menu in the bottom of the screen to keep track of the options you’ve chosen.  

Okay, back to bug-fixing.  

QA Team  

Lee  

Hi there. 

QA’s been busy testing all the new content we’ve got going into this next update as well as some interesting changes to world generation for the Garden District, compliments of our technical director Matt.  

 

A major goal for these changes is to make this part of the world play in a much different way from the village islands. This involves splitting the gridded blocks of ruined buildings up into smaller hamlets which are separated by sprawling forests, to give it a more natural feel. Encounters have been spread out as well in order to help fill these large sections of forest and encourage exploration.  

 

After testing the game with these changes for the past couple weeks, I can tell you the Garden District gameplay fits much better with the atmosphere of those islands. We still have some kinks to work out with road & encounter placements, but it’s all coming together very nicely.  

Until next time! :D  

Stephanie  

Hey y'all  

Along with what Lee mentioned, we have also been:  

• Testing a few refactored encounters that we missed for the Clockwork update.  
• Testing fixes for a bunch of major issues with various older encounters.  
• Having epic forum battles with Korean casino spam bots. - Doing some database house keeping and updating forum FAQs.  
• Drinking unhealthy amounts of coffee. Stay tuned for our next update's patch notes!        

Bonus Gif:

Design Team  

Hayden  

Hello Folks,  

The last few weeks have been a blur of last second polish and bug fixes—with several long nights and slightly more gray hair in my beard, things are looking good.  

This part of the development process is where you battle your own mistakes and fight for time the clock has ticked away, and you begin to realize where you can improve and prevent issues in the future. You may even pick up a new trick or two to put in your bag for the next update.  

The process is molding you into a better developer, with every bug you fix…  

Naa… I’m just joking, it’s a pain in the ass and I’d like to have a nap, now.  

Narrative Team  

Lisa  

Howdy. We Narrative Few are in Texas this week, but between margaritas and rodeos, we are talking about Wellington Wells. (Alex says he is “bad at vacation.”) So, for example, we completely re-broke the story of the playthrough for [redacted], whom you might see in [redacted].  

Vacation is the best time to attack big-picture narrative questions. What are the relationships between the various characters you meet in the game? Wellington Wells is a small place. People know each other – they are relatives, friends, exes and enemies. They’d write about each other in their diaries – and maybe they’d remember same incidents differently because of their Joy.  

Oh, and we realized that [redacted] is clinically [redacted]. That will be fun.  

I’ve been reading the forums, and love reading your theories about where Arthur’s story is going and who the other key characters are. At least one of you Downers is right about Arthur’s story … and the other theories make us think, “Huh. That would have been another interesting way for the story to go.”  

My goal in writing environmental narrative is to not only tell you about the place and character you’re dealing with at the moment, but also to reveal the larger story of Wellington Wells, so that the world feels rich and strange. I know from the forums how eagle-eyed you Downers are, so I hope you’ll enjoy putting the pieces together as we add more things for you to discover.  

Have a great weekend!  

Compulsion Games

Update #97 - Approaching our next update and PAX East 2017
about 9 years ago – Fri, Mar 03, 2017 at 07:42:32 PM

Hi everyone,  

Another big week for us as we finish up work on the next update. We’ll be on bug fixes only from Monday onward, so expect a date for the next update hopefully next week!

Next week, 6 people from the team will be going down to Boston to attend PAX East 2017. We won’t have a booth but we will be walking around the convention wearing our WHF T-shirts, so if you see us, don’t hesitate to say Hi!  

We will also be having a gathering on Thursday March 9th at 7:30PM at the 6B Lounge in Boston, to talk We Happy Few and hopefully meet some of you guys. Don’t be shy and come have a drink with us! (must be over 21).  

This week’s video features Sarah, one of our Concept Artists/Illustrators. She takes you behind the scenes of the signage around Wellington Wells and jokes about venereal diseases.

Design Team  

Adam  

I’ve been working on finalizing several encounters, as we lock things down for the next update. Hoard House has a ton of new VO and animations plugged in. The Church of Simon Says is as polished as it can be! Murder House is… well… I’ve been playing Resident Evil 7 a lot.  

Oh, and I also fixed up the bridges so you have to actually interact to spawn into the next island (airlocked). This is important because it allows us to have more control over when loading occurs, meaning that we’ll be able to optimize loading better in the future. I also balanced the loot drops for encounters in the first Village island and some of the first Garden District island (and the bobbies!).

Art Team  

Marc-André  

This week I have done a myriad of small tasks. I transitioned our environment art assets folder and backups to a new computer. I updated the lighting, signs, textures, layout of some rooms of the House of Curious Behaviours. I finished working on the level art of a depressed musician’s house and backyard. I spent a bit of time going through Jira to fix some bugs. I also started to sculpt the dig spot mesh, since the one we have currently in the game is horrid. This is an opportunity for me to dive into sculpting organic meshes, which is something I haven’t had the chance to do a lot. New signs from Sarah have been implemented into the game.  

As we’re in the last stretch for the current sprint, this week was mostly about putting last-minute stuff in so the art of all of my encounters feels coherent and, very importantly, finished.

Sarah  

Hey y'all, busy week! It was the last chance for the team to pump out a bunch of last minute items for the update, including lots of art. This week I made icons, little gameplay relevant signs (such as "go over there" and "don't f*cking touch that"), you know, the usual. I also had a nice chance to give this poster some love!

This is going in Nick Lightbearer's house. I thought it might be cool to show you guys how it evolved, rather than just show the money shot. The first image is a screenshot of a staged pose that I asked JR to set up in Unreal. From there, I adjusted the lighting and colour balance, carefully touched up his face and hair, sexed up his eyes with some last-night's-eyeliner à la Steve Tyler, and gave him a lil' pout. Throw in Lisa's headlines, and voila, you've got yourself a trash mag.  

Oh yeah, I was also featured in the weekly video talking about signage! I would say "Sorry, Mom!" for the tasteless joke at the end, but there's no sense pretending that kind of talk wasn't openly encouraged in my house growing up. Hi, mum!

Narrative Team  

Alex  

We have now, finally, at the last minute, got everything recorded for this sprint, including at least seven little old ladies for Hoard House. Guess how many actors? Have a listen when the update comes and tell me how many you think there are.  

As I mentioned last week, I did a massive casting session for a character named Ed MacMillan, affectionately known around the office as Meat Boy. (Obviously he is in no way an homage to anyone associated with the game Super Meat Boy.)

I found an amazing actor, Joe Sims, who has won all sorts of awards for his radio work.  

(I didn’t know he’d won awards until we cast him. I generally ignore CVs when I’m casting voices. It takes much less time to listen to a voice reel and decide whether the actor is inhabiting the roles he plays.)  

Joe will break your heart, I hope, as Meat Boy. He’s also assorted bookies, bobbies, lads and soldiers. We had fun.  

In other news, affordances.

Affordances is a fancy word for “things look like you’re supposed to use them a certain way.” I read a great book by Don Norman called The Design of Everyday Things. It’s about doors that you can’t figure out whether to push or pull on them, and how to design things so they’re intuitive. It’s actually super helpful for game design. You might dig it.  

Well, we put some phone booths in the game, because, you know, iconic. Can’t have Britain without red telephone boxes.  

But then you guys said, “We want to pick up the phones and hear something.”  

So we put some voices on the phone. And a baseball game between the Dublin Dukes and the New York Yankees.  

But then you guys said, “There’s voices, but there’s no gameplay.” Gosh, you people are demanding.  

So Lisa and I came up with a story and some gameplay for the phone booths. It won’t be in this update, but maybe it will be in the next. So I hope y’all feel the love.

Animation Team  

J.R.  

Hey guys! This week was spent on a bit of everything, aiming for the end of the sprint. Nick Lightbearer is done, with fixed cameras, sound and VFX. Also he finally has facial animation (for those of you who pointed out that he didn't in our previous video!), and let's not forget his dashing new outfit! Otherwise I worked on many NPC conversations, namely for an encounter we like to call "The Butcher". And finally, I once asked Cary for some props to sell a “potential” broken leg... and she delivered.

So, for your viewing pleasure, here is a--somewhat disturbing--clip starring our poor delivery boy.

Have a lovely week-end. Enjoy your legs while you can!

Vincent  

Well, the next encounters are coming along nicely… One of the characters you’ll have to deal with has had a pretty bad day!

As you can see, this week I did a very small bit of texture work, in between animations and integrations, to give some uniqueness to that poor lady. Can’t wait for you to find out more about her little story. Spoilers: something isn’t quite right with her.  

Have a great weekend!  

Compulsion Games

Weekly Journal - Ugly AF toxic fog
about 9 years ago – Fri, Feb 24, 2017 at 05:51:02 PM

Hi everyone!

Sam and Clement here, as Naila is away sick with some version of the plague.

This week, the team is in a big old “content integration” phase. This means that we’re approaching the end of development on the next update, and are making sure all our work plays nicely inside the game. We’ve got one week left of content work on the update, and after that we’ll move our level design/art/animation teams over to the following update, so our programmers can lock down the next update. That doesn’t take too long, so you can expect an announcement on the date of the next update within the next two weeks.

Engineering Team

Serge

Hello! This week we made a video about the toxic fog which is an early prototype of a gameplay element created to increase the challenge of navigating during curfew. Please accept my apologies on the lack of realization (aka how ugly it looks) but we wanted to share it with you so you can give us your feedback before investing time in polishing the feature. This will be something new to discover in the next update!

Narrative Team

Alex, Narrative Director

I will tell you what I did. I was not satisfied with what we were able to do with one particular character in a recording session with an otherwise wonderful voice actor. Our voice actor is very good at accents, but this is a fairly hard role — a developmentally disabled adult who has to break your heart.

So I fired off a casting call to the UK.

Saying “developmentally disabled character” to the entire pool of agents in the UK is a little bit of waving a red flag in front of the Running of the Bulls. Playing disabled is an artistic challenge, so it shows your acting chops. The clip will almost certainly go on your reel. I got 80 submissions in about three hours late on a Thursday afternoon.

So I got to wade through 80 submissions. One weird thing about voice character submissions is the headshots. They send me headshots. Why would I care about headshots? I don’t care what the actor looks like. All right, it’s nice that Alex Wyndham could actually pass for Arthur if we did the movie, but he could look like Shirley Temple for all I care. When we do the recording sessions, we don’t have the camera on, so I literally do not know what half of my actors look like.

I winnow those 80 submissions to 9 I’d like to hear from; plus I go through my last casting call and ping the agents whose clients were great but not right for those roles. The actors will record an MP3, and a dozen actors will come down to three or four. I’ll audition those guys on the phone.

The lucky actor — by “lucky” I mean “probably spent a decade or two painstakingly learning how to turn his talent into craft” — then gets to record this one particular part for about fifteen minutes, plus a bunch of other stuff for forty-five minutes. And the scene will play for about a minute and a half in the game.

It is a ridiculous amount of work for a role you’re going to see on screen in the first playthrough for 90 seconds. This is why recording voice actors is expensive even for short recordings - you’re not paying for 15 minutes of work, you’re paying for the lifetime of experience that is needed to deliver a great 15 minutes of work.

But if those two minutes break your heart, then they add meaning to the hour or two of gameplay following that encounter. They show us a side of Arthur we wouldn’t know without them. So you care.

I mean, that’s the point of the narrative, after all: to make you care.

So that’s why I was up till midnight on a Thursday.

Lisa, Writer

No matter how dystopian, a 1960s English town should still have a groovy pop star. I’ve been writing environmental for just such a character – his secret song lyrics, his fan mail, his drug journal (because pop stars have a tendency to mix & match), and more.

I’ve also been writing things that flesh out (so to speak) what happens at the House of Curious Behaviours (a k a the Reform Club). As Alice in Wonderland would say, “Curiouser and curiouser!”

You will also soon see a fresh edition of the village newspaper, The O Courant, to help you keep abreast of what’s new in Wellington Wells. (Spoilers: There appears to be a new island!)

Art Team

Carylitz

The little park is ready and is Downer free! : D

Guillaume

This is my last week working on the shelter. This one will be in the second Village. It has been made using Emmanuel’s brutalism set with some scifi elements.

Animation Team

Vincent

Hola! This week has been all about pushing the new encounter animations and conversations in the game, tuning stuff, and overloading Level Designers with requests to make everything move a wee bit better!

Have a great week-end.

Compulsion Team

Update #95 - Being Nick Lightbearer and PAX East 2017 info
about 9 years ago – Fri, Feb 17, 2017 at 09:19:19 PM

Hey everyone,

Since this week was Valentine’s Day, we decided that our weekly video should be a community appreciation video. After all, we love you! We hope you enjoy it and feel free to let us know what kind of video you wish to see more of!

PAX East 2017

PAX East 2017 is coming up fast and we would like to let you know that while we will not be having a booth, we’ll be there! We are going to hang out with the community, and to support other games.

We are organizing a gathering on Thursday March 9th, in a bar. So if you are in the Boston area during that time, feel free to come have a drink with us! And don’t you try to get us all liquored up to get some info on the story, Sam will go streaking before we leak anything.

We will release more details on the time and location soon.

Narrative Team

Alex

We are coming towards the end of our sprint, which of course means there’s nothing but tidying up a few loose ends…

…ah hah hah hah hah hah! We get ideas, you know, good ones. “Arthur gives a fellow some flowers” becomes “Arthur plays Cyrano de Bergerac”... and that means dialog has to be rewritten and re-recorded. But the sprint deadline does not move back, no, so it gets a bit frantic.

Recording does not sync well with sprints. Actors come in one hour containers, and a good actor can do on the order of 100-120 lines in an hour. A typical encounter has, say, ten lines for one actor. Many of them are ten lines for Arthur and ten lines for the NPC, so that’s all right. But Hoard House has, for example, about seven little old ladies; and no voice actor I know, not even the amazing Sammy Lee, can record seven little old ladies so that they sound distinct.

In other news, G did not cotton to Lisa and my idea for the epilog, so we wrote a completely new epilog, which I hope is at least as mythic and Neil Gaiman, but clearer and more in the voice of the game. You will get to see it ... eventually.

Art Team

Carylitz

FELIZ CUMPLEAÑOS MÁ!

In other news, I am working in my first location! It is a small cute little park and I did a small shed for it yaaay! The rest is still work in progress.

Guillaume

This week, I’ve finished a second shelter. This one was really cool to work on. I had to add some sci-fi elements to it while keeping this old bunker style.

Have a good weekend everyone!

Sarah

You're never going to guess what I've been working on. Wait, did you say signs? Oh. Then, yeah, okay, you're pretty good at this. If you're anything like me, you're over Winter and could use a lil' floral pick-me-up to get in the mood for Spring. This park is not only full of flowers, but 100% Certified Downer-free! There will also be some Peepers for good measure, because you can never be too safe.

Marc-André

This week I kept working on house interiors and some very cool stuff for a special and secret encounter you guys should be hearing about soon!

Animation Team

Vincent

Ahoy! Still milling through encounters animations, here’s a pot-pourri !

J.R.

Greetings friends. In this week’s video, a peek at Nick Lightbearer’s peculiar state of mind!

In terms of progress, this is pretty much the level of polish that we’ll see for bigger “encounter cinematics”. You will notice however, that the facial animation hasn’t been generated yet. I still hope you’ll enjoy the show!

Have a great week-end.

Compulsion Team

Update #94 - Girl, you are my Joy!
about 9 years ago – Fri, Feb 10, 2017 at 09:10:41 PM

Hey everyone,

Next Tuesday is Valentine’s day so keep your eyes peeled for a special video! But most importantly, don’t forget your Valentine! As you know, being forgetful is a strong side effect of taking too much Joy.

Also, feel free to make and share with us your Made in Wellington Wells Valentine cards or fan art, we shared some of ours in this weekly!

Art Team

Marc-André

Good Friday to everyone! These past few weeks, I’ve been very busy on a myriad of things. I’ve created a gameshow machine and fixed a bunch of visual bugs, collisions, level of details, etc. The bulk of my time has been spent arting up brand new special locations for exciting encounters coming up, such as a very special church. I also started to work on arting up new house variants to bring more variety to the Village.

 

 

Carylitz

Hola! I have been working on secret assets, for a secret location with new secret things so I won’t be showing 3D stuff today. But I can share with you guys some St. Valentine’s cards I did on the side! (Alex gave me the slogans.)

Hope you like them and feel free to use them!

 

 

Sarah

What do you mean you haven't heard of Nick Lightbearer and the Make Believes?? Have you been living under a rock?? Well, now you have. Heard of him, that is. More to come!

 

 

 

 

Guillaume

This week and the last, I’ve been working on a new shelter. This one contains some surprises that will await in the Garden District (Mouhahaha).

Have a good weekend!

 

 

 

 Animation Team

Vincent

Lots of little things this week: a new animation variation for electrocuted NPCs, some polish on the “Shelter of Terrooooor” (check Clara’s video, featuring Antoine (who’s still currently single)), Wellies having jolly good fun in the pub, bits and bobs in the House of Curious Behaviours…

J.R.

Hey guys! For the last couple of weeks, I've been mainly :

- Creating animations to support the revamping of our stealth loop

- Planning and animating for new encounters, which was fun and a little challenging! It turns out that some of those actually got so big--and specific--that our generic talking animations were simply not enough. So we've been looking at giving those encounters a more "cinematic" feel with unique animations.

Design Team

Antoine

Oh hello! This week was super busy and Clara made a cool video of me babbling about the new shelters. Thanks to her for all that editing work!

[Ed. note:  Antoine is single.]

This week we polished the new Garden District 2 shelter. Again, Vincent was my wingman this week, going back and forth with him to see the timing of animations and do little adjustments. Even though this environment is supposed to be creepy we tried to make it feel a little bit cozy. It’s a shelter, after all. I also sat down with him to look over his next assignment, the Village 1 shelter. Artists and designers are always collaborating in order to create something that’s visually interesting but also feels good in terms of “space ergonomics”. I’ve also reworked a little bit how the hacking works for the Electro Lock Shocker in order to prevent permanent blocks in the progression. There’s also a pretty cool animation used for hacking, graciously made by Mishka!

Hayden

Hello folks,

This week I was busy polishing up Nick Lightbearer’s Pad. QA was able to get to this level and left me several, several bugs that I needed to address. Along with that, I prepped the logic for cutscenes and conversations, set up quest conditional objects, created lore items and massaged several areas outside Nick’s Pad to provide you with some interesting gameplay. I also spent some quality Compulsion time with one of our animators and our narrative team to hash out the final push for the realization of this encounter.

In case you didn’t know, Nick Lightbearer is a super fab celebrity in Wellington Wells and has been known to call some of the most memorable games of Simon Says Wellington Wells has ever experienced. Unfortunately, he hasn’t been showing up lately…

When you arrive at his home you’ll quickly notice all the construction work going on between Nick’s Pad and his Neighbors. When it becomes clear that Constable Hunt will not let you in to speak to Nick, you’ll need to find another way in...

Thanks for tuning in!

Compulsion Team

PS: Antoine is still single.