Update #93 - Groundhog week
about 9 years ago – Fri, Feb 03, 2017 at 09:29:50 PM

Hey everyone,

It is hard to believe that we are already in February. We know for some of you it feels like it is taking forever to get your hands on the final game but for us, time is flying! The grind never stop.

We hope you enjoy this week’s journal and as a reminder, we post a video every Wednesday on our Youtube channel that we also link in our Weekly Journals, just in case you needed your fix a bit earlier during the week :)

Animation Team

Rémi

Hey everyone, this week is the beginning of a full month of encounter animations for the whole team! That means we should have plenty of things to show for the upcoming weeks. (without spoiling too much, we still want you all to discover some bits of new content ;) ) So this week I’ve had the time to make a little video with Clara. Explaining the process that I went through to generate Facial Animations for Grunts, Convulsion, Electrocute, Laughing, coughing, etc. There’s still a lot of work to do since I’ll have to apply the same process to all our archetypes. That means, 6 FaceFX actors for the Wellette, 6 more for the Wastrel Male, 6 for the Bobby, and so on. I was also able to start the work on some Simon Says animations! The encounter is going well and I can’t wait for you guys to play it. Have a good week!

Vincent

This week has been all working with Antoine on a small shelter encounter involving plague Wastrels… In there is a mini cutscene that needed a bit of work to feel right, and it was a good occasion to spend a bit of time on adding variation in the plague Wastrels blinded animation!

Design Team

Adam

In-between beers, I managed to script a pretty awesome Simon Says machine. Lots of tweaky timings and whatnot in-between animations and lights blinking and turning on/off, etc.  

SImon Says

SImon Says

SImo-

Simon Sa-

Simon-

Simon Says

Si-

Yeah.. that’s what I’ve been hearing all week.

See a sneak peak of the encounter in Sarah’s section!

Antoine

This week we started the realization phase of the new encounters. In this phase we’ll actively collaborate with all departments to bring to life all those new locations and work towards the final polish pass. I’ll go back and forth with animators on the right timing for turning a wheel in first person (an interactive object that’s going to surface more than once going forward). I did the final blocking touches to the revamped house of curious behaviors and started integrating animations for the new shelters. Changes to the house of curious behaviors are mostly to “open up” the encounter. There’s now multiple ways you can go about entering the house and it should feel a little more solid in terms of scripting robustness.

I’m also doing a refactoring pass on Mine Mine All Mine. It has such a cool layout but the encounter made little sense. One funny comment of David our design director was that “it was the only encounter that completed itself”. You could watch Wastrels trying to avoid tripwires but eventually pass through them and die without you having to do anything. The encounter will now be a more open hooligans camp. I improved the layout so the player can climb in different places to avoid guard patrols and also find better loot.

Art Team

Carylitz

Hi guys! This week I have more props to show! This are for a secret location we are working on.

Have a nice weekend! :D

 

 

 

Sarah

If Bert had a falling out with Ernie, and shacked up with Raggedy Anne, their children would probably look something like this. I ship it, anyway. Say hello to the new and improved Spanker TV Faces, the last thing naughty trespassers will ever see before a good Spanking™. I also designed some Simon Says related goodies, here's a taste!

 

 Simon Says icon!

Thanks for tuning!

Compulsion Team

Weekly Journal - The fun of iterating together
about 9 years ago – Fri, Jan 27, 2017 at 10:19:28 PM

Hi everyone!

With everyone working on new content, it’s a lot of fun to see the pieces being put together. So this week, you’ll be able to learn more about how we create, fix and edit what we implement in We Happy Few.

From how the programmers develop new mechanics, to how the design, narrative, animation and art teams polish encounters, we hope you get a good idea of the way we are working together here!

Design Team

Adam

This has been one busy f*$king month. On the plus side, I have a ton of stuff to show. I won’t do videos just yet, as some things are really work in progress, but I’ll take images of a few new encounters.

• Murder House

I affectionately call this encounter “The Murder House”. Cheap knockoff drugs = psychosis.

As you can see, an all new layout for a house has been created. Once we mop up the blood, you might see this house layout appear in other places

• Hoard House

Old ladies like to collect crap… lots of crap. Here are some images of the updated layout of Hoard House

• Church of Simon Says

An art pass has been done on the church of simon says. I’m probably stealing Marc-Andre’s thunder, but I’ll show this anyways

• Love Birds

This encounter is getting a complete makeover. The plan is to make it a scene out of Cyrano de Bergerac, where Arthur needs to hide in the bushes and feed lines to a romantic guy to say to his girlfriend, but if she spots you, the jig is up.

The logic is pretty much there, but I’m still working on the layout as you can see

Narrative Team

Alex

This past two weeks, I wrote a pirate into the pub, singing a sea shanty. I’ve always wanted to put “The Eddystone Light” into something or other. Yo ho ho, the wind blows free! O for the life of the rolling sea.

Oddly, some otherwise brilliant actors cannot sing a lick. Fortunately, Jay Simon, who voiced the Honey Troll and Johnny Bolton, Special Agent, can.

I also recorded our Arthur, Alex Wyndham, and She Who Must Not Be Named, and I’ve edited most of the new lines into the cinematic audio.

It’s an interesting challenge rewriting the scenes so they convey the new information without requiring new choreography. In a movie, where the camera is third person, it’s easy to expand a scene, because the camera keeps cutting. In first person cinematics, you would have to create animation that would take the characters from position A, to do new things, and then back to exactly position A. So I try to avoid changing the timing of the scene – I try to make the new words fit as closely as possible to where the old words lived, or at least take up the same amount of time, so I don’t bump other lines that are still working.

Shouldn’t we have made these changes before the animators went to work? Sure. But it’s very hard to read a script, and still fairly hard to evaluate an audio track. Sometimes people don’t spot things until they actually see them.

More importantly, when you spend three years working on a story, you spot weaknesses in it that were not immediately apparent. Hopefully, you’ve left some room in the budget for fixing them.

On the other hand, because it’s not a movie, it’s a game, we can keep making improvements. A while ago we added an epilog for the first few characters. This week G asked us to find a way to tie all the stories together thematically at the end, which makes the game more coherent narratively. It also gives a new mandate to the epilog. So, we are rewriting the epilog to incorporate some ideas.

Also, we continue to improve the ending of the playthrough for SWMNBN. I think we’re on version 5 or 6. The first one was good, but too short to convey the catharsis we need. So each time we’ve been going deeper while, I hope, keeping to the essentials of the story.

And ... I’ve just about got all the dialog written for this sprint, which leaves me some time to play the game! So yay for that.

Animation Team

Vincent

¡Hola compadres!

I spent most of this week editing super secret stuff : some special scenes that will reinforce player immersion in our world’s twisted story ! Yes, that is very vague.

Ah, there is something that’s not a secret. Maybe some of you saw in the last few updates a little graphic bug on the wellies’ masks that looked like this :

If nobody has noticed, then maybe I wasted my time. But this has irritated me for a while. And it shouldn’t be there in the next update. Hopefully.

Ninja Team

Clara

Another week, another video!

This time I had the pleasure of having Whitney (art director) and Ben (level designer) sit awkwardly in front of the camera to talk about a very special robot, probably Wellington Well’s favorite: the Compliment Machine.

You also may have noticed that we slightly changed the format of the weekly videos since two weeks ago. We hope that it will further explain our development process and expose the hard work that our team is putting into the game. We will also do our best to include any answers to questions or comments written on the Forum, Steam Community or Youtube. So feel free to drop a line to tell us what you think!

Art Team

Carylitz

I started doing some props for the game, yaay! I can just show 2 of them because I lost one during the week and the others are work in progress. But there will be more for next week.

I have also been the Death Cube Hunter these weeks. I spent part of my days hunting and killing them, and I’m working with the team trying to fix the bridges bug, but we are still trying to figure out how to fix it. Enjoy the weekend!

Engineering Team

Serge

This week, I've been implementing a gameplay prototype for the Toxic Fog. This is a feature we would like to test before to invest more time into its realization.

The first video shows our testing map where the fog is in the middle of the street but doesn't affect interiors so the player can enter houses to take a breath.

The debug display is added in the second video and with the free camera you'll see how that effect is done. Because particle effects can become really expensive to process, we opted for moving a wall (which is a plane with a transparent texture) on the perimeter of the toxic zone that is replaced by an aqualung on the player's camera once in the fog.

When entering a house, the transparent wall is moved on the closest surface of the building so you can see the fog through the windows on the ground floor.

This is an early feature that explores a cheap rendering technique in order to be able to scale the fog to an extreme. There's a lot of edge cases that aren't handled just yet but you can understand that we have to start somewhere.

Thanks for tuning in!

Compulsion Team

Update #90 - Playstyles in We Happy Few
about 9 years ago – Fri, Jan 20, 2017 at 06:28:14 PM

[Hey, we just realized this was not actually posted last week, even though it was done... so double update this week!]

Hey everyone,   

This week we have a journal packed with juicy information. What is on the menu you say? An in depth explanation on upcoming difficulty settings (or as we call them, playstyles), our plans for the year 2017, a behind-the-scenes video of our Narrative Director’s recording process and much more! So grab your cat, a cup of tea and enjoy.

Design Team  

David  

Hi  

Most people have an opinion about game balance; resource distribution and most of those opinions are valid in one way or another. Unfortunately it is not possible to address or support every individual preference and still create the overall game experience we are targeting. What follows here may give you some insight into the design philosophy behind “selectable player experience” and difficulty settings.  

As we have found from interacting with you and reading the forum posts, players of WHF generally group into three categories or playstyles. For this reason we are taking a playstyles rather than pure difficulty settings approach to make balancing the game for each category of player a realistic proposition.  

Explorers: These gamers are story oriented or simply want to investigate the world but usually do not want to spend lots of time looking for food and water to stay alive, and are generally not looking for an arduous combat challenge.  

Adventurers: These players prefer a more balanced gameplay with some challenge but not too much difficulty. They may or may not care about story but probably don’t hate having it around them. In this setting the game is a blend of survival and traditional action game elements - pretty similar to the game that is currently playable.

Survivors: These gamers prefer the more hardcore aspects of survival games and love a punishing, if motivated, challenge. In this setting, the game increases the importance and demands of survival game mechanics. Our tentative names for these categories are BIRDWATCHER, DOWNER, and VIGILANTE for now. Sarah has mocked up what the selection screen elements might look like:

Each of these playstyles brings inherent difficulty/challenge adjustments, but they aren’t purely about difficulty. Think of them as “packages” that tailor the experience more to your personal preference. The sorts of changes associated with the packages include but are not limited to your starting inventory items, the AI aggression, durability, and suspiciousness, crafting prerequisites, resource amounts and distribution, carrying capacity/encumbrance for your character, rate of food spoilage and weapon/item degradation, effects and duration of various drugs and other buffs, and much more. The baseline for tuning is the DOWNER playstyle from which BIRDWATCHER and VIGILANTE are modified.  

Additionally, if you want to further control the challenge or flavor of a playstyle, you have the opportunity to choose whether you play on “second wind” or permadeath. We’re getting rid of the existing second wind mechanic (see below), and this mode will basically be normal - you can resume playing after death with modest penalties. However, permadeath kills you forever.

We felt that the existing second wind mechanic didn’t make much sense (“waking up” from dying in a damaged state), and it led to a bunch of problems with respawning, design (what happens if you can’t get a healing balm?), and problems in the story mode etc. So instead, as your health (or food/water/disease on Downer or Vigilante) gets low, eg 10-20%, you’ll enter that dying state without blacking out.  

Overall, our intention is to address your varied desires for a game set in the world of Wellington Wells that is both a survival game and not a survival game; that is about the exploration of narrative mysteries or a focus on stealth, combat, conformity and crafting, or a game that is something in between. In all cases we think that WHF has a configuration for almost all players.

Adam  

Hello all,  

This week I have been cleaning up the script to the Church of Simon Says a bit, and have also completed a first pass on a Retirement Home for little old ladies. This place is dangerous! They will not hesitate to call the Bobbies as soon as you are seen. This is partly because they call the Bobbies at any given opportunity, and not necessarily because they’re in danger… naughty old ladies.

 

 

Antoine  

Hello good people! I’ve been working on making sure we can play through Arthur’s story from beginning to the end. It’s of course in a rough state but you can do all the missions and get to the end and actually finish the game. Exciting!  

I’ve also been working on some new little challenges. We are now treating the shelters as areas you need to “unlock” in order to use them. Like in the new intro shelter, where you have to fight a Wellie that went “wakey wakey”, other shelters will feature small challenges. Some will have you explore completely dark environments with the torch, or you may have to navigate a live wire running through water.

Narrative Team  

Alex  

Clara dropped by Signal Space (our audio partners) as I was directing Tony Robinow. Here’s what she saw:

To expand just a little on that last little bit... you have to listen to your gut. When the actor is really inhabiting his character, I feel it. The studio disappears for a moment and the character is there. It's a thrilling moment. When the actor is not inhabiting the role, I don't feel it. Part of the skill of directing is learning not to pretend you feel it when you don't.  

Hearing what you're actually hearing, as opposed to what you want to hear, or what you fear hearing, is something children and dogs do instinctively, and teenagers and adults unlearn, and artists have to learn again. You have to remember to ask yourself, sometimes, "Did I really believe that?"  

The other side of directing is figuring out what words to give the actor to help him or her get from where he or she is to where I want them to go. Sometimes it's just calling shenanigans on the delivery. "I didn't really believe that."  

Or, with a trained actor, you can often shorthand it. You can say, "More anguish," knowing they have the tools to get there on their own.  

But best practices is giving the actor an adjustment in the form of an imaginative circumstance. I don't think I ever say, "Louder." Instead I say, "Okay, now project it a bit more, as if the person you're talking to is on the other side of the street." Or, “You need help, and there’s no one around!”  

"Okay, but now, as if you know the person you're talking to. You're not only betrayed, you've been betrayed by your best friend."  

"As if" are the most important two words in the director's toolkit. (See John Badham’s book on directing, I’ll Be In My Trailer.)  

I can give a line reading, but when the actor is mimicking my delivery, it almost always comes out sounding hollow. I then have to say, “Okay, now make it your own.” If I have to give a line reading, I’ll try to use a paraphrase of the line rather than the words of the line themselves, and I won’t use a British accent; I’m trying to convey the emotion, not the delivery.  

A believable performance isn't the same as a "realistic" performance. It's the emotional truth that carries the line. A big, stagey but emotionally truthful performance is believable. (I believe it's often called "opera.") A performance that mimics what a real person does, but doesn't convey the emotion behind it, won't convince the audience.

When the actor inhabits the character, it's amazing. A line you wrote fifteen minutes ago can catch you off guard and make you laugh as if you just heard it for the first time. When I laugh, I know the line's a keeper.

Art Team  

Marc-André  

Upon getting feedback, I spent the beginning of the week finalizing a few minor details of the environmental art pass of the train station.  

Afterwards, I remade my old holly bush tree from scratch. Across the past year, by trial and errors, I learned quite a lot on how to create foliage that is optimized and stylized. Trees are highly complicated objects that can't be represented in-game without a lot of hacking. Because of technical constraints, we can't represent all of the tiny branches and leaves as separate geometry. We instead combine them into planes with areas which have transparency. You can see down below the textures that have been used.

I also updated the old barrel mesh (and at the same time, the flower pots) mostly with textures we already have in-engine.

 

 

After that, I started to adapt the church to the level designer's layout. Throughout the week, I've also been helping the level designers on house layouts and workflow.

Carylitz  

Hi guys, I’m the new environment artist! This is my second week at the company and I have been doing a little bit of everything. One of the main tasks was to optimize the assets. We have a lot of them in our libraries and some are old or not used anymore. So I have been going through a list and deciding which ones we should delete, keep or improve so the game looks even better!  

After cleaning all the assets in the libraries we started having our Death cubes* everywhere that I replace after with new props.  

 

*We use this asset to replace with the old one so it's easier to identify where the asset was. It’s better to have something glaringly obvious than something subtle.  

I have also been fixing some bugs with disappearing bridges (where parts of them appear at distance but others don’t, making them look strange), so they won’t disappear in the future. So far I think that’s all for me, have a great weekend!

Programming Team  

Serge  

Hi all! I am new programmer here at Compulsion Games and this week I will talk to you about Artificial Intelligence.  

From a programmer perspective,when it comes to the artificial intelligence of our game, we have chosen to move away from a pure simulation approach for every AI. But what does that mean, you ask?  

Well, partly this will help to achieve better performance, but the real goals are to improve the readability of the characters in relation to the player's conformity, and also to improve our control over group behavior! It is our belief that in some situations, the easier it is to predict a character’s reaction, the better, because you want to reward the gamer that uses good strategy. If it’s unpredictable, it becomes less about strategy and more about reaction.  

Artificial intelligence is a really popular subject these days with a ton of research funded, from self-driven cars to personal assistants. For a game, it is more about creating a good action-reaction loop with the limited resources available! In next entries, we will update you with more details on how that will affect the gameplay, so stay tuned.

Production Update  

Sam  

Hi folks! At the end of last week, we mentioned that we’d talk about 2017 plans in this week’s update. This begins with talking about the Clockwork Update from last year.

We released the Clockwork Update on December 8, after releasing the game in late July. As you may know, an update like this (where we’re refactoring stuff to improve the quality of our work) means that we need to add some time to the end of the development, or cut existing planned content. 

We don’t want to cut content, and we’d rather spend more money and time on the game. So, the updates will keep coming along, it just might take a bit longer to get to 1.0. As usual, once we have firm timing on updates and the release date, we’ll let you know. We want to be up front and open with you guys whenever we face challenges or delays like this. But, to leave on a positive note, 2017 is going to be awesome. We have an exciting next few months planned, including:  

• The next update! We hinted at this last year, and it will contain the playstyles listed above, the second village island, a whole bunch of new content to play through, and more. 
• New partnerships to help expand the game world! This sounds like a boring corporate thing, particularly because we can’t announce them yet, but we are very excited. We’ll announce them soon, and hopefully you’ll be as excited as we are. 

Thanks for tuning in! 

 Compulsion Team

Weekly Journal - Improving subtitles, aka, shut the hell up Eric
about 9 years ago – Fri, Jan 20, 2017 at 06:04:13 PM

Hi everyone!

This week, work continues on building our encounters for the next update.  We’ve been working on our production pipeline, as now that we have built our new encounters with the new quest system, we are able to build content much faster.

In the background, work on playstyles and improved AI has continued.  Clara has created a quick recap video on our playstyles, for those of you who may have missed this in last week’s journal:

Note, we have made improvements to Sam’s haircut since filming this video on Monday.  We had to outsource this work, but we hope you’ll agree that the quality is much improved, is better optimized for warm weather, although it is unlikely to substantially affect gameplay.

Engineering

Camille

As Unreal Engine 4 licensees, much of our functionality comes from said engine. This saves us a lot of trouble reinventing so many wheels. However, not all functionality from the engine is fully featured, and sometimes we have to put our shoulders to the aforementioned wheel to actually reinvent it.

One such feature is the subtitling system. While functional, it was clearly meant for action games with little simultaneous dialogue. Only one line could ever be displayed at any time, based on a priority system we hadn’t fully harnessed. While we could’ve done so, I felt that a dialogue heavy game such as ours deserves a more thorough treatment.

Being hard of hearing myself, I nearly always play with subtitles on and have therefore gotten to see many different systems in action. One of these is Source engine’s, which you can see in Half-Life, Left4Dead, etc. Instead of only showing one subtitle line at any time, they simply show a scrolling history of subtitle lines colour coded to different voices. When rewriting our own subtitle management and display system, I’ve heavily borrowed from this system, so fans of Source games will feel right at home.

For flexibility’s sake, I’ve retained our subtitle size options and also offer 2 different subtitle display styles that users can choose from. This is the backgrounded style in action:

Unfortunately, now that subtitles are no longer squandered by Crazy Legs’ chronic lateness, it also underlines how much work we need to do on our underlying data. Most of our data was directly imported from our scripts with little regards to priority or timing. We’ll be working on this over time, but I’m confident that the new display is already going to improve things vastly.

Narrative

Alex

I have an interesting relationship with the designers.  They are instinctively concerned with “what does the player want to do?” As the narrative guy, however, it’s my job to ask, “Why does Arthur want to do this?”

For example, let’s suppose Arthur discovers that a delivery boy is late. The player gets an objective to find out why he is late.

However, why should Arthur care whether a delivery boy is late? “Because the player got an objective” is not an answer. Nor is “because it is going to set him off on an adventure”; he doesn’t know that. Most people Arthur knows are forgetful; aren’t people late all the time?

So, I’m the pain in the ass guy who complicates the job of designing levels by asking why the player character wants to do what the player wants to do.

So, first, I thought, maybe this delivery boy is never late. Okay, that’s helpful. But still, why should Arthur care?

I asked David. David said, “Maybe he knows him.”

So I thought, of course. The delivery boy was Arthur’s brother’s only real friend in school. Arthur’s goal in the game is to find Percy because he promised he’d take care of him. If he can help the delivery boy, he can accomplish a shadow of that goal.

Now the mission is personal. Note that it has not changed at all in design, only in meaning. And that changed meaning gave us an interesting way to resolve the encounter, which helps make the encounter even deeper and more personal. But you’ll have to play the encounter to find out how.

When I wrote sonnets back in university, I noticed that fitting a meter and rhyme scheme forced me to be more inventive with my language than writing in free verse did. Necessity is the mother of invention. Because our designers believe in our narrative, they don’t have total freedom. But in return, we discover new things about our world every time design crashes into narrative.

Or, as the old Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup ad went, only not exactly:

“Hey, you got narrative on my design!” “Hey, you got design on my narrative!” “Hmmm, tastes pretty good.”

Art

Marc-André

This week I worked on multiple things.

Bug fixes:

• Fixed multiple missing textures throughout the game, as well as deleting old meshes that were spawning in the world
• Created an LOD

Material fixes:

• Fixed garden district houses brick textures (proper roughness and normals maps)

Level design:

• Updated an encounter’s house layout interior and exterior pieces to match the conventional modular set

Assets:

• Church pulpit (created entirely from tileable wooden trim texture)
• Simple candle w/ holder

Level Art:

• Working on the interior level art (layout and lighting) of the Church of Simon Says

Design

Antoine

Hey there good people !

I’m continuing work on the new shelters for the coming update. Very soon I’ll be in a position to pass those levels on to every other department for the realization phase. Awesome art will be done, sound and dialogue will take shape and 2D art will be made. I’ve also addressed a few bugs that you guys found in the Shibboleth encounter. Those fixes should be in the next update!

Hayden

This week I finished up the layout and logic block-out for two new encounters, Nick’s Pad & Sad Treasure.

Nick’s Pad features two homes, one of which belongs to Nick Lightbearer and the other belongs to his nosey neighbors. Currently, both homes are being renovated, which explains all the scaffolding around the homes you’ll have to navigate to make entry into Nick’s Pad. Once inside, you’ll find that there’s a lot more to being a celebrity than fans think.

 Next up is a new park for a new encounter called Sad Treasure, it’s built into the center of a roundabout and is currently under observation by a Bobby & Peeper Downer Patrol Unit. There were also many reports of illicit drug use in this park, shady deals everywhere you look… someone is going to need to clean this place up.

Thanks for tuning in!

Compulsion Team

Update #89 - We got paid in beers to send this update.
about 9 years ago – Thu, Jan 12, 2017 at 08:33:48 PM

Hey everyone,  

This isn’t your usual We Happy Few Friday update! It is a small Kickstarter-only message to let you know about a new project from our friends and neighbours at Thunder Lotus Games, creators of the critically acclaimed game, Jotun. Here is a video where Sam from our team blatantly shills for Thunder Lotus, along with their CEO Will Dubé.

As a We Happy Few backer, if you back Sundered, you automatically get a free copy of Jotun on Steam! Jotun is a top down hand-drawn action-exploration game set in Norse mythology. Their art and ability to capture the feeling of epic landscapes and scale is super cool.

Sundered, their next project, is a hand-drawn metroidvania where you resist or embrace ancient eldritch powers, with massive boss fights and multiple endings.

We have a special spot in our hearts for hand-drawn games, so if this interests you too, head over to their Kickstarter page and select ”Notify me” to get an email once their Kickstarter goes live!  

Cheers,  

Compulsion

P.S. There are still some of you who have not yet claimed your We Happy Few keys! Please reply to this email, or post on Kickstarter, if you need help accessing it. Or, just go to this page, sign in with your Kickstarter credentials, and click “Redeem Key”.  

P.P.S. Actually, Will still owes us the beer.