Update #83 - Back to Business
over 9 years ago – Fri, Nov 25, 2016 at 06:42:48 PM

Hi everyone,  

Two weeks to go until patch time! As the team is mostly back to normal, we’ve got a lot of stuff to talk about this week.

Narrative Team  

Alex  

Three recording sessions this week.  

I brought back the Voice of the Honey Bandit, Jay Simon, for a slew of new barks about, among other things, the Plague. A big Marvel no-prize to whoever figures out what the Plague Wastrels are saying, once they start saying things in the game.  

Lisa (new writer) and I finished our rewrite of the playthrough of She Who Must Not Be Named, which meant I was able to call back the actor who plays One of Her Many Fans. And I brought back the utterly charming Alex Wyndham (Arthur) for a slew of new barks – plague, again – and to pick up revised lines for many of the cinematics. There’s been a fair amount of carnage in the cinematics; it’s a sign of how healthily we’ve staffed up that we can afford to burn some old work in order to do even better work.  

We are starting to design a slew of new encounters, particularly in the Village. It’s always challenging to write dialog for an encounter that hasn’t been built yet, because I have to guess what the events will be that will trigger the dialog I’ll write. On the other hand, I get to shape the encounters so that they are revelatory of our world and its people.  

A little while we all went to MIGS. I blogged a bit about what I heard about dynamic stories in Richard Rouse III’s talk.  

Two more recording sessions next week, one with She Who Must Not Be Named, and one with an evil Hammer-movie-villain scientist named…

Programming Team  

Matt  

After what feels like a six month break, I am finally finding time to come back to world generation. As you can see from the picture below, world generation is currently done on a whiteboard using diagrams of dubious value.  

You can see a couple of things on here that we’re looking to address. One of these is removing the grid structure and moving to a more natural road structure, and one is bringing back height variation. There are some other hints about future plans, and our relationship with a shadowy worldwide organisation, if you are into that.  

It’s a bit challenging to show this today because we are not sure whether these will work out. However, if it does, the world should look and play with much greater variation with each playthrough. If it doesn’t, we’ll have to figure something else out.

Design Team  

Antoine  

It’s been quite a busy time for the level design team. We’ve been pitching ideas around for story missions, reviewing those with the leads and getting some traction on the golden path logic. A “golden path” is really the main quest logic from beginning to the end. The idea is to get everything that we currently have for story missions and lay them out in a really crude way inside the editor. That way we can see if the pacing is correct and make adjustments to whatever we want before delving deeper in the polish phase of production.  

We’ve been also discussing the ramping of difficulty from one island to the other. There are some things in the works for Village 2 (currently you’ve been scouting Village 1 which is called St. George’s Holm) on the side of spankers. We will be incorporating Spanker TVs in the streets that are able to know if you are on joy or not (like the ones in Faraday’s Lab). We’ve been also slowly incorporating more of the “Hooligan Wastrels”. These will be placed in the world sometimes guarding water pumps. That way you have a bit of challenge getting to water resources. Don’t worry though, we won’t make it so that every water pump have a bunch of angry hooligans running around.

Art Team  

Sarah  

Another week, another sign(s). Soon the Villagers will have a local oasis, inside which they will congregate to hit on that lady they saw at the Chemists, or to make absurdly friendly conversation in the lavatory while drying their hands. They'll have a place to offer unsolicited advice to persons nearby, who will be offended despite carrying on highly personal conversations at full volume. I am of course, referring to the Village Pubs to come. One such pub will be named The Green Man, and this is it's painted hanging sign.  

Hanging signs like this one will be the beacons guiding Wellington Wells locals toward familiar sticky floors and that sweet, sweet stale beer smell. Here are some beer spout labels I designed for the local big seller Real Ale. It tastes so delicious, it must be Real!  

Guillaume Jr.    

Hey everyone!  

This week, I've been working on props to help Marc-André on the Pub he is making. I'm really happy with the end result I have for the leather couch. I took the time to sculpt the details and folds to have a better normal map. I've also started working on the cannon scene that I'll share with you guys next week. That's it for me, have a good one!    

Emmanuel  

I did this:  

I know it makes no sense. But it will! One day, when we’re ready to talk about this section.

Marketing Team  

Clara  

Hi!  

My name is Clara and I work on both on the production and marketing side doing video... stuff. There is surely a name for it, but I'm pretty much a ninja.  

I have been working on the video for the December Update and also made this little video about MIGS, enjoy!

Animation Team  

Vincent  

Ahoy! On this week schedule, nothing particularly fancy, new or exciting on my side. But some necessary stuff, like giving a hand on french localization. We’ll end up having professionals reviewing everything on that front, but as lots of us are native french speakers, we try to have a first translation pass on all in-game text : subtitles, journal entries, tooltips, map markers, you name it! That way, we can build systems that will allow things to go (a bit) smoother when the real thing will come in. If you ever played the game with subtitles, you know we still have quite a way to go! <snoring>  

I also spent some time on reviewing the ‘POIs’, aka the Points Of Interest. That’s what makes the NPCs do a bit more than walking around. And yes, I’ve been toning down the puddle jumping to make room for other things, like flower sniffing, shady deals, patty-caking (?). Don’t worry though, they still like puddles! Now before you wonder : “Why does this guy say he’s an animator?”, I’d like to point that I’m also starting to work on an animation that’ll show when you first get out of the shelter…  

Thanks for tuning in!  

Compulsion Games

Update #82 - Short announcement about the November update
over 9 years ago – Fri, Nov 18, 2016 at 03:53:13 PM

Hi everyone,  

We have a short announcement today concerning the November update! As you know the November update will be a big one, and we are finally done (bar some final QA and cert!). We are currently working with Valve and Microsoft on timing, and it looks like we’ll be pushing it out on or around December 8. We appreciate everyone’s patience; we know it’s been a long wait. And, more good news, as the update itself is now in QA, the the team will be able to get back to normal next week.  

In other news, this week was the Montreal International Game Summit and 4 of our team members gave talks. Whitney’s talk was about “ Art Direction of We Happy Few: depth and style in a procedural world”, Matt’s on “Building Wellington Wells: How we procedurally generate the world of We Happy Few”, Sam was on a panel about “Demystifying music: Music as an opportunity for digital projects” and Guillaume was on a panel was titled “ Why the F$#K are you making games?” We also had a small booth, with Red Barrels (the creators of Outlast), where we showcased art from some of the indie teams here in Montreal.  

Whitney will talk a little bit about her talk in her section of the weekly. Here are some pictures of the event!

 Whitney Clayton - Art Director

 Matt Robinson - Technical Director

 Guillaume Provost - Creative Director and Founder (second from the right)

Philippe Morin from Red Barrels (Outlast) and Guillaume Provost

Programming Team  

Camille  

I haven't really had the opportunity to work on new features recently, so this won’t be about that. But even if programming work isn’t always immediately apparent to you guys, sometimes it’s fun to share a bit of what’s happening behind the scenes. So today I’d like to give a quick peek at what it’s like to optimize the game, specifically for Xbox.  

As some of my colleagues might’ve mentioned in earlier updates, we recently went through an engine update, where we pull the latest code from Epic’s Unreal Engine and integrate it to our own. This usually means exciting new tools and features to work with, but it also means new bugs and, occasionally, new performance issues. In this case, the Xbox felt unacceptably slower after the integration, despite all the effort we had previously put in to optimize it. So I rolled up my sleeves and started looking at profilers.

This is one of the many views of the Xbox performance investigation tool (PIX). It’s what I’ve been staring at for the better part of the last 2-3 weeks. The big spaghetti muddle of a graph that you see allows me to see at a glance what is taking up the most performance at that particular moment in a captured frame. By comparing captures from before the update to captures after the update, I can see how these bottlenecks have shifted around and try to adjust optimizations in consequence. PIX has lots of other views which allow me to essentially dissect a frame down to the calculations done for every single pixel.  

Thanks to these tools and views, I’ve been able to push our framerate back down to where it was before the update. But now I’m looking to see how I can push further…! And, once all is said and done, I can see if any Xbox-specific optimizations would be a win to port back to PC.

Art Team  

Whitney  

Hi everyone! This week was a big one! It was MIGS here in Montreal, and Monday Sarah and I had the privilege of taking a day long master class with renowned art director Viktor Antonov (Half-Life, Dishonored), where we learned a ton about using historic references to design unique worlds. Tuesday I gave an hour lecture about how we developed the art director for WHF, and how we apply this direction to our procedural system. Creating my presentation was a lot of fun! I went back over original references and inspiration, and also found old builds from the start of the project to document our progress. Here are some images from those old builds.

September 2014

Here was our test build where we tested Matt's early system. There isn't any lighting, and the buildings were fast and temporary, but this was an exciting moment for us because this was when we realized the procedural system would actually work and we could create an English village with it.

February 2015

This was when we implemented our first set of filler buildings and interactive buildings. Our filler buildings were so flat and boring! The filler buildings were also causing arbitrary gaps between buildings which was very unnatural. We knew something needed to be done about this, and this was when we came up with our "squishy building" solution, where we created another set of (less boring) fillers with a high texture resolution that would stretch between buildings and fill the gaps.

Sometime mid 2015

Here's the first attempt with the new "filler building system". It's working! More interesting buildings and no ugly gaps! Lighting was very gloomy though.

Current

And here we are today. We've filled out the streets, adjusted the lighting to have a purplish hue, and created arches and different assets that block the line of site and give the streets a sense of composition. It's cool to look back and see how far we've come :)

Marc-André  

This week, I started working on the pub for the Village. I started by blocking out what I could with the pieces we have, to get a better sense of scale and space. After that, I started working on elements such as the floor material and a modular set for the bar counters. On the side, I also worked on a new clock model that we can adapt to pretty much any color palette. It'll come in handy.

Sarah  

Well, I have some good news and some bad news. The good news is, I've been working on more top secret lady character stuff that I think you're going to like. The bad news is, I cannot share it with you just yet. Sorry bunnies, but I absolutely refuse to spoil any story for you. What I CAN show you are some book sleeves I designed for her nightstand, to give you a little taste of her special interests (hint, it's space. She likes space.)

Animation Team  

Vincent  

There’s been lots of testing the game this week, on top of the two days of MIGS! Pulling hair because some long gone bugs are back, you know, the usual.  

But we’re also going back in business on the cinematic front! As we are giving shape to the main storylines, some rewriting has occurred, and Whitney’s crew starts to art up the old temp levels… so we need to go back to some old animations to fit all that. Which means I’ve been starting to review how to do that.

Design Team  

Adam  

MIGS was this week, so that took a couple of days off our schedule. However, we have been testing the game heavily to make sure encounters can be completed, and map markers are in their right places.  

Thanks for tuning in!  

Compulsion Team

Update #81 - Remember November
over 9 years ago – Fri, Nov 11, 2016 at 10:20:52 PM

Hi everyone,  

Another week has gone by and the team is still hard at work on the next update. Finalising this is taking longer than expected, as we’re still getting to grips with some of the ins and outs of the new quest/save systems.  

As a result, this is another small update. However, to give you an idea, we have fixed around 420 issues over the past couple of months, many of which you guys have never seen! So, we’re getting there. Also, as a quick heads up, when we do release the update it will be accompanied by an explanation video, and we’d love to get feedback on it when it arrives.

Art Team  

Marc-André  

This week I've been juggling between many tasks!  

I've been creating a new material which allows us to create virtually infinite color combinations for patterns using very little textures, thus saving memory. This converts to faster load times for you guys!  

I've kitbashed a door for the Fine Cuisine encounter.  

I've also been laying out and lighting a new store (The Apothecary) for the Village, where players will be able to buy the weirdest of drugs. In the process, I created new corner modular office pieces that will prove useful in the long run.  

I did a modular set of scaffoldings for use throughout the game.  

We now have a new member as part of the environment team! Guillaume has come to join us to work on the environment art of the game. I've been spending some time with him installing software, answering questions and teaching him about various things like how our source-control software functions. 

On the side, I've also started to think of a system where we can effortlessly organize files between artists. This would provide us security with off-site backups and ease of use. Right now, we all have our separate folders and it's becoming more and more messy as the team grows.   

I also helped Valentino with multiple sound collisions issues and figured out what we have to do to fix some of the most obvious sound bugs in the future. That's it for my week! Happy remembrance day everyone :)

Guillaume  

Hi, I'm Guillaume the new environment artist from Belgium! This week has been pretty busy catching up with Emmanuel and Marc-André's workflow but I managed to finish this cannon that will be placed in the Garden District.

Animation Team  

Rémi  

Hey everyone! The beginning of this week was still about fixing some bugs and testing the game, making sure every fix we make truly works in the build. For the rest of the week I had to go back to rigging! I wish I could show you guys what character I’m rigging, but he is part of the narrative, so that means it’s top secret! I’m still making some videos of my workflow and hopefully I’ll be able to show you what I’ve been working on once the story is out.  

In the meantime, enjoy our video of the few animations we were able to accumulate from the past few weeks. Have a good weekend!

Thanks for tuning in!

Compulsion Team

Update #80 - An update for ants
over 9 years ago – Fri, Nov 04, 2016 at 10:17:35 PM

Hi everyone,  

Wow this is our 80th journal entry! Every Friday since we launched our campaign on Kickstarter, we’ve been writing these post to keep the community updated on what the team has been working on. Some updates are smaller than others depending on the stage we are at in development (bug fixing vs. adding new content) but we are dedicated in never missing an journal entry (except during Christmas break or when we are away at a convention). We hope that you enjoy these as there will be plenty more to come! We are also thinking in starting a podcast. If there is something you would like us to talk about or see from the team, let us know!

As you know, the November update is an important one that we have been working toward for the past three months. At this point, the majority of the team is fixing bugs or working quietly on the story, which is why our post this week is a bit light. However, it’s getting very close to done, and we should be releasing this within the next two weeks.  

In other news, we will be at Montreal International Game Summit on November 13th to 15th! With our friends from Red Barrels (Outlast), not only will we be showing our games in development, We Happy Few and Outlast 2, we will also be hosting 7 local indie companies! Our goal is to showcase the amazing talent coming from the indie dev scene in Montreal. If you are in the area, feel free to come see us!

Narrative Team  

Alex

What I did, in between frantically rechecking http://fivethirtyeight.com, was write up the narrative playthrough for She Who Must Not Be Named. Last week was the rethink. This week I wrote it up, and I’ve started in on the scenes, including one with our Hammer [Films] Villain. There’s a fair amount of carnage; we’ll have to redo some minutes of animation. But the story will be better for it – more jeopardy, and more aligning of player objective with player character objective. 

Also did the same for our Mad Scotsman, although his story is holding up a bit better. We can probably keep most of our animation, but some of the dialog in those cutscenes will change. 

All of which means more recording sessions, of course. I’m looking forward to it!

Lisa  

I’ve spent much of the week mulling our dystopian world, but aside from reading about the American election... I worked on environmental narratives, which means I’ve been writing propaganda posters, diaries, official memos, and letters that you can find in certain locations as you play the game. They’ll give you a little story about what happened there before the player character arrived. It’s a fun way to tie together different narrative elements from the game -- and you’ll see that many minor characters have mini-stories of their own.  

I also helped Alex with story for She Who Must Not Be Named. But it’s all double-plus good.

Animation Team  

Rémi  

Sorry everyone if I didn’t give you any news for the past few weeks, but the reason is quite simple. I haven’t been animating much! We have been working to improve the realization of most of the encounters, which means we are spending most of our time fixing bugs, integration issues, tweaking existing animations, fixing animation pops, etc. These are usually very busy weeks and I hope you guys will be able to enjoy it all once the update is out!

Art Team  

Sarah  

My week revolved primarily around ~*ToP sEcReT~*~ story related concepts and illustrations, which sadly, I will not be sharing with you (but they were really, really fun to work on). I also made some new icons, helped welcome our new 3D artist Guillaume (aka Junior), and assisted Marc Andre in optimizing some wallpapers to take up less space in the engine. He'll go into more detail next week, as he is very happy.

Thanks for tuning in! 

 Compulsion Team

Update #79 - I Yam what I Yam
over 9 years ago – Fri, Oct 28, 2016 at 10:04:36 PM

Hi everyone,  

This week the team continued working on the November update. This week we have finalised all of the new content/changes to the existing encounters, and next week we begin on QA/bug fixing. It’s pretty exciting, because as part of the refactoring, we were able to go back to some encounters and significantly improve the experience you will have (eg by adding better animation, voice overs, or more interesting quest logic).

Before we get into this week’s journal, we have a PSA for the current players of the game. It will be very important that you start a fresh new game with the November update as it WILL break your save file. Previously, save files have had partial compatibility between versions, but with the wholesale changes to the quest and save systems (for the better!), this will not be possible this time around. However, in the future, progression should be saved between updates much more reliably.

Art Team  

Whitney  

This week I'll take you into the exciting world of Brutalist architecture and the importance of it in our world. Brutalism is one of the most iconic architectural movements of the 50s and 60s, and it was particularly prominent in England. It symbolized a loud, obtrusive stance against tradition and history. It's notoriously "ugly", usually made out of economic cement. The minimalist, futuristic designs were developed to abrasively clash against the environment, and take up an unnecessary amount of space. Brutalism is important in We Happy Few because it symbolizes our society’s underlying desire to reject their history. Brutalism was often used for municipal buildings, and in WHF we've used it for checkpoint bridges, government buildings, and buildings the bobbies and government workers occupy. Buildings that represent the modern society.  

This concept is a design of one of our Brutalist check point bridges, strongly inspired by the high school down the street from our office (Montreal is also full of Brutalism!). In this concept, a protesting Wastrel is trying to get past the Bobby and back to society. It was important to me that the bridges keeping the wastrels out of the Village were as intimidating as possible.  

And here is an older concept where I explored various Brutalist designs, testing to see if they would even fit into our world. The shape of the top right image has become iconic to the bobbies.  

Marc-André  

At the beginning of the week, I continued to work on the Village house layouts and lighting. I received a lot of feedback so I focused on making the rooms more coherent. I also updated the lighting (and fixed lighting bugs) and added some subtle fog. Here are a LOT of screenshots for your enjoyment:

Then, I went on Jira (our bug database) and did a bunch of small tasks.  

• Added decals to the Altar of the Yam that appear when you’re tripping on mushrooms 
• Fixed the old fountain roundabout layout so that it spawns seamlessly in the world 
• Added some of Sarah’s signs and paintings to levels 

I also did some tweaking to old assets, such as the German signs and shutters, so that they integrate better in the world. I did a few new props such as the doll doctor variant and a full chess set.

Emmanuel  

This week has been mostly bug fixes, global lighting tweaks, advancing some story locations and creating some new really strange environments…  

This is a picture of the newly improved encounter “Altar of the Yam”  

Narrative Team  

Alex  

This week I cast two important characters who are, of course, part of the story, so I can’t tell you anything about them. Except that the words “Hammer villain” may have been in the casting breakdown for one of them.  

Last week I recorded almost all of my unrecorded encounter lines. This task, of course, is never done. I need eleven lines from our Mad Scotsman for some revisions we’re making to a scene in the Train Station. But an actor’s minimum call is an hour. So I’ve been writing barks for him – 225 of them. That should round out the hour, eh?  

I’ve been working on rethinking the playthrough for She Who Must Not Be Named. G felt she was not in enough jeopardy, and that her motivations weren’t lining up enough with the player’s own motivations. So I’ve been reworking the story logic and the characters involved. This will involved a fair amount of carnage – animations we have to throw out – but it will result in a more powerful story and better integration between gameplay and story.  

And, I’ve done a pass on the journal text. You are reading your journal, right?

Design Team  

Adam  

Hello everything. This week has been crazy. Lots of issues to tackle, lots of hours in front of my computer, which is why I am the only level designer writing this week! Everyone else is focusing hard on improving our encounters.  

It’s paying off though, big time. Faraday’s Encounter is looking amazing, and includes some nice new updates on conversations and animations :) Look forward to those.  

Apart from that, I’m fire-fighting other issues to help out my fellow level designers when they need it. 

Animation Team

Michael

This week I made some animations here and there. One of them involving your favorite duck!

Thanks for tuning in!

Compulsion Team