Update #68 - Update release today!
over 9 years ago – Fri, Aug 12, 2016 at 08:22:28 PM

Hey everyone, 

Today we are releasing the Community Balance Update on the MAIN branch on Steam and GOG.com! As some of you know, last week we released this update on the preview branch to test, and with the community’s help, it’s ready to go live. Thank you to everyone in the community who helped with the preview feedback! 

You can read the updated patch notes here! If you report any issue, please make sure to double check that you are running version 29020. 

Xbox players, we are submitting the update today to Microsoft. Provided all goes well, it should be live early next week! We will also remind you once it goes live on our social media.

Narrative Team

Alex

Behind the scenes, we are continuing to work on the story. This week G, David, the two animators and I played the Arthur story line cutscenes from the intro through the last scene. Well, the last scene isn’t animated yet, but I’ve edited the audio. Now that we’ve got all the audio and most of the video, we can see if it has all the impact we’re hoping for.  

As a recovering movie writer, I have a tendency to write scenes that might seem a bit long in a game (though not a Japanese game!). So G’s asking me to cut down some of these scenes to their minimum. That’s usually a good thing to try to do anyway. A rule of editing is, start the scene as late as possible (as far into the scene as possible), and get out as soon as you can. So we’ll probably be reducing one scene to its hard nuggets of drama.  

Meanwhile, today, I’m recording about 150 new female NPC lines. Monday I’ll record Arthur saying another 180 or so lines; and somewhere in the upcoming week we’ll get about 150-200 new male NPC lines. Most of these are in the Garden District; I’m still trying to figure out what sort of new interactions will work in the Village, and of course, we’re still building encounters there.  

Nice to get back into the recording studio!  

Oh, and I wrote a new newspaper!

Art Team  

Marc-André  

I have really enjoyed this week as a whole, since I have had the opportunity to work on a wide array of things.  

STONE MATERIAL:

First, I’ve been tasked with creating new stone textures which we will be able to use in multiple occasions, ranging from churches to arches. Notably, I’ve been experimenting with the bump offset feature of Unreal 4 which allows for more depth in textures at a relatively small performance impact. The newly created rocks material is based on the following textures, which each have their own purpose at adding to the realism.

Here, you can see a comparison of the same texture with and without bump offset. It does make for a notable improvement:

BATHROOM ASSETS CREATION:  

The art assets you will find in the village house bathrooms are some of the earliest made in production. For quality and historical accuracy, some of these had to be remade. Little did I know bathroom sinks in England have their cold and hot water handles spaced apart!

BUG FIXES, TRIVIAL MATTER:  

I have also done a bunch of small fixes ranging from typography mistakes, re-texturing assets and optimizing a lot of textures (from signs to illustrations) that were taking up precious memory resources. I finished the base structure for the interior of the church. I reorganized pictures throughout the houses of the garden district to better put in value the artwork done by our talented concept artist.

Sarah  

This week I've put my full focus into UI, and making some much needed icons! We finally have a holster expansion icon to replace the suitcase, an itch I've been aching to scratch for a while now. I also gave Bread a little make-over, and added a Moldy Bread version, which will hopefully lessen instances of accidental food poisoning via hasty bad bread ingestion.

Emmanuel  

This week I made a new tiling sidewalk texture we will use to make more flexible sidewalks. I also did an art pass on some encounters, and started to work on an ArtMap and new techniques to make better and more accurate skylight Cubemaps.

Editor’s note: if we knew what he was saying, we’d try and translate this for you.

Design Team  

Antoine  

Hello hello! This week I worked on finishing up the Motilene mechanics. Soon you’ll be able to use the Motilene harvester to suck up spills found throughout the world (*wink* *wink* you know that purple ground splash in the second garden district island shelter). There’s also a Motilene Dispenser where you can plug in one of your empty power cells and fill them right back up. Just as a recap, the power cells are valuable for going into underground areas where you’ll use power cells to fill up your flashlight and plug them into other environmental things.  

We’ve also been thinking about incorporating more areas in the game where stealth is a valuable option if you can’t meet the conformity requirements. For example, there could be little factories in the village that only workers can access. In order to find valuable mechanical loot and fill your power cells at the Motilene Dispenser, you either need to stealth around patrolling workers or find yourself some Coveralls. I’ve been discussing this for quite some time but we may extend the idea of The Apple Tree. In this encounter there are three bobbies guarding a source of regenerating apple loot. What I’ve pitched is that you have slightly bigger areas in the Garden District that are guarded by Bobbies and you have Wellies inside growing food for the Village. The food inside however is not rotten but top notch food. So it’s either a matter of finding an alternate entry and steal food or make it look like you belong in this area. Beware though if you get caught :).

Mike  

Hey! New stuff this week! It’s not in the game yet, as we have to test it for a while to make sure everything works properly. New “high cost area” for the Garden District:

 It’s a Greenhouse with good loot inside, but the doors are planked so you need a Jimmy Bar!  

New filler for the Village:

It’s an additional way to circulate between the streets, and a little alley cafe where Wellies and Arthur can chill sometimes. :D See you guys later!  

Thank you for tuning in!  

Compulsion Team

Update #67 - Map markers, thoroughfares and sewers!
over 9 years ago – Fri, Aug 05, 2016 at 06:26:04 PM

Hey everyone,

We have just pushed the first candidate for our next update out to the “preview” branch on Steam and the “beta” branch on GOG.com! As we mentioned last week, this is a preview to our next update, which addresses the feedback that we have received in the past week and a half. You can read the initial patch notes here. 

If you would like to help test this for issues (or just want to take an early look at what’s coming!), you can access this by: 

• changing to the preview branch on Steam (right click on We Happy Few in your Library -> Properties -> Betas tab -> select preview from the drop down list), or 
• changing to the preview branch on GOG.com (click on We Happy Few in your Library -> More -> Settings -> change Channel to Betas).

So! That’s exciting. We’re looking forward to seeing it in action. While you wait for the download, here’s some of what we have been up to this week.  

Programming Team 

Guillaume 

Matt, Camille, Marc and I met with the design team this week to do a post-mortem on the quest & objective systems. The quest systems are a relatively recent addition to the game. The first quests appeared in the update right before PAX out of the preliminary feedback that you guys wanted more lore and history in the game, and we’ve learned quite a bit about what works and doesn’t work in the last 3 months.

The Early Access build was the first time we were pushing a very large number of quests and missions to the community, and with it came a lot of complexity in handling persistence (saving and loading quest states). Matt helped break down the atomic operations that occur in the scripting of quests, so that we could build more robust and easy systems that should be less likely to break.  

We also reviewed two example quests, and looked at all the logical actions a player could take that might break or impact the quest’s narrative logic. For example, what happens if you kill the NPC? What happens if you steal the loot he was supposed to reward you with? Should the NPC have lines for that situation?  

Our attention in the next two weeks will shift to supporting the level designers with more robust tools to create missions, and then we’ll be reviewing the quality and replayability of individual missions while Matt improves the world generation.  

Camille  

It’s been quite the interesting first week! We’ve had a lot of feedback and, in my case, some clear cut priorities for UI. Among the top requests were better and more responsive map markers, custom map waypoints as well as quest tracking.  

The state of the map markers is a bit unfortunate. Since putting in the functionality, we’ve explored different ways of handling them and, as a result, have had wildly varying implementations, with the results that we’ve seen. The good news is we now have a clear idea of how each marker should behave and will be updating most of them to conform. Our preview update should show a marked improvement, but we’ll continue to work on them until we consider them up to par.  

The first improvement on top of the existing functionality is tracking. It is now possible to mark an encounter as active in the journal and that encounter and its objectives will be highlighted on the map.

More importantly, tracked encounters appear on the compass no matter where you are in the world:

I also added custom waypoint functionality, allowing players to drop a marker anywhere on the map that will then show on their compass:

I’ll be sure to polish the actual appearance of these elements, though. It might be good programmer art, but it’s not sufficient.  

Art Team  

Marc-André  

This week I've been working on bug fixes, some props for encounters, as well as a few new signs for the Garden District. I've also started working on arches (work in progress) to help break up the visual space in the Village.

 

Emmanuel  

Fixing bugs like a pro, did a light pass and made this new bridge!

 

Design Team  

Hayden  

Hello there, folks… Hope you guys are enjoying the game as much as I am enjoying watching you all play. It’s been a long past few weeks for me, filled with lots of bug fixes and realization to levels like The House of the Inventor and Blood in the Streets. Thanks for all your comments and suggestions on our Early Access release. It’s so awesome to be able to support a community of gamers who care so much about what we are creating.  

With that said, this week was mostly bug fixes peppered with planning for realization and concocting more challenging situations for some of the other Encounters that I am tasked with. To put it simply… Bugs, Balance, Presentation – rinse and repeat.

Here are a few screenshots of updated areas you guys have probably already played through.  

First is The House of the Inventor, Faraday got herself a Big Red Button, she has no patience for those who waste her time, and she’s not afraid to let you know.

And here is a nice screenshot of an updated area in the encounter, Blood in the Streets -- I’ve revamped the placement of the buttons needed to complete the quest and made a lot of general improvements to the flow of the quest with emphasis on providing the player lethal and non-lethal ways to complete the quest.

Mike  

Hey guys, This week I fixed a bunch of issues related to savegame in a lot of levels, basically bugs that would occur if you quit/reloaded at least once on this game. New Doodad for the Garden District:

*visual content may change for improvements  

Some more are in the works, I should have more ready for next week!  

3 new sewer levels:

 

 

These places are scattered through the world. They are meant to be simple, yet interesting places to explore and find a bit of loot. Maybe there’s a story behind each of these places… who knows? ;)  

Thank you for tuning in!  

Team Compulsion

Update #66 - Launch Week, and Next Steps
over 9 years ago – Fri, Jul 29, 2016 at 06:46:45 PM

Hello everyone!  

On 9am on Tuesday, we released We Happy Few into Early Access! The “Gameplay Alpha” as we’re calling it was a huge upgrade to the pre-alpha version, and we’ve had tens of thousands of people playing and giving us some fantastic feedback.  

To those of you new to the community, welcome! It’s great to have you here. Every week we post up news about the game, including future plans, important info and, most importantly, what we have worked on this week. This one is a little longer than usual, as this has been a bigger week than most.  

Before we get started: we’d like to thank everyone who has been so positive and awesome in the community, providing feedback, helping others with the game, and even reminding people that (a) We Happy Few is a survival game, and (b) the story is coming on 1.0. We’re seeing a lot of commentary that people are still confused about what the game is - understandable for those people who only saw the E3 gameplay and didn’t look at anything else - and we’re grateful to all of you for helping spread the word, and reminding everyone that We Happy Few is in fact, not Bioshock. We’ve seen you in comment sections, twitch channels, and on twitter, all being awesome. Thank you.

Next Steps - A community update, and the first content update

We’re currently hard at work preparing the first two updates to the game. The first is what we’re calling a “community update” - this is something to respond to the initial wave of feedback, and includes a significant number of bug fixes and quality of life changes (such as reducing the hunger/thirst rates). We’re currently looking at the following fixes:

• Toning down the survival needs and lengthening day cycles. 
• Map markers being broken on quests or not visible on quests. 
• Support for tuning X and Y sensitivity of the mouse independently. 
• Saving the game with Plague kills you instantly when you respawn. 
• Dig spots confusing, sometimes marked on the map before they are active. 
• Tuning the durability, range and damage of certain weapons (ie: the pointy stick). 
• A large number of quest issues reported by you guys (full list of fixes next week). 
• Performance updates for AMD Cards and for slower graphic cards. 

This will take a bit of time, so we are hoping to push this live to the “preview” branch on Steam next Friday 5 August. This branch will be available to anyone who want to help test the game. Once we are happy that it is stable, we will publish it to the main branch for everyone to enjoy. Secondly, we’d like to let you know that the second update will be the first one that substantially changes the world. This is a content patch which will change how the world generates, including:

• adding more variety in the world generation,
• coast, lighting and vista updates, 
• journal, quest and compass updates, 
• additional NPC dialogue, and 
• more flexible difficulty settings.

We are aiming to release this in the first week of September.

Feedback and Roadmap Boards

To help collate all the feedback we are receiving, and keep you informed of our plans for the future, we are setting up two different Trello boards - one for our design roadmap, and one for community feedback.

The community feedback board you can find here: https://trello.com/b/qF8RTSDh/we-happy-few-community-feedback, in which you can vote on the issues that you are most concerned with fixing. Note that this generally does not contain bugs (these are entered directly into our bug database), and instead is focused on suggestions and ideas for improvement.

The high level roadmap will be less detailed, but will outline the various tasks we have planned to complete as we finish the game. This is going to be a very flexible board - we are currently planning on spending between 6 and 12 months in Early Access because we don’t yet know exactly where we’ll need to add content - but is loosely based on our progress on the three characters’ story campaigns. This is not yet available, but we will post this up soon.

Backers! How to get your code

Most of you have already received your codes before we launched on Early Access. If you do not know how to get to your code, here are the steps:

• Follow this link to your project profile. https://we-happy-few-welcome-to-wellington-wells-you-saucy.backerkit.com/ 
• Login using your Kickstarter name and password. 
• Find digital downloads and expand, and click on the green “claim” button.

If you hadn’t answered the survey until this week, you might not have a code yet. Fret not as your code is incoming, we just need time to sort through the late backers, generate new codes and distribute them. As a reminder, we are unable to change codes once these have been distributed, and Xbox One codes are unavailable.

Narrative Team

Alex

I spent the first part of this week beating the game! As the narrative director, I don’t always get the luxury of time to sit down and go through a full playthrough. This week I did, and it took me about twelve hours! It was nice to finally get Arthur to the hatch on Apple Holm.  

... which also meant writing a score of bug reports for issues that only I’m going to catch. I’m the guy whose responsibility is making sure that the world makes sense and that all the characters have in-game reasons to do the things they’re doing, and so I found a bunch of things I’d like to improve.  

Of course after Tuesday morning’s launch, we’ve all been absorbing players’ reports of bugs. Some of them are bugs we know about. Some of them are not bugs at all. Some of them are new issues. For example, some people have complained that the NPCs can get a bit repetitious. Partly this is a bug in when they tell you to back off. Partly this is because we haven’t yet implemented the systems for atmosphere and showcased conversations. You should be hearing them talk lots more in our second update.  

But, issue heard, I’m going to be writing and recording many more things for Arthur and the NPCs to say.  

Of course, like Whitney, I’m sort of at the beginning of the pipeline – a lot of the things I do hit the game in weeks or months, rather than tomorrow. So I have to keep putting things in that pipeline.  

Last Friday and this Monday I recorded two voice actors for a series of audio flashbacks for Arthur. Now I’m editing them. You’re going to know a lot more about what exactly Arthur’s remembering.  

And, I’m just starting on a similar system for another playable character, the Girl in White, or as Sam thinks of her, She Who Must Not Be Named. She’s going to have some surprising things to say for herself. You won’t hear this stuff for some time, but you will.

Art Team

Whitney  

This week was all over the place. I concepted a new NPC variant, started developing some strange new technologies and gadgets, fleshed out ideas for some symbolic statues and landmarks, and worked with Tito, JR and Emmanuel on a new piece to help showcase the Wellies. Super busy!  

Here's a quick concept I did for the Mystery House. We wanted it to feel like an old, abandoned manor house - a place with clearly some history.

Marc-André  

I had quite a lot of fun this week! Being out on Early Access doesn't mean we get to slack off! This week I've worked on props such as Garden District signs, church benches and a majestic organ. You guys should be able to play it soon.

 

 

Sarah  

This week has been a major whirlwind! It's been great to see so many new faces discovering Wellington Wells for the first time. After watching streamers big and small all week, I find it hilarious how deeply and universally Crazy Legs is despised. I'm with you there.  

This week I've been putting a lot of focus into some more Garden District signs (you can see examples in Marc-Andre’s image!) and new architectural archway concepts for the Village to add more ye olde English flare to the environment. I've also been tweaking some paintings and advertisements so that they can be integrated into the Village and beyond, so stay tuned! Below is a painting the naughtier Wellies commissioned for the House of Curious Behaviours, I do hope you enjoy. Ta for now!

 Emmanuel

I worked on vista and rock formation. This is going to change how the edges of the islands appear, and should help to improve the look of the world.

Design Team  

Vince  

Hi! I have been very busy answering and reading a lot of feedback on Steam and on our forums. I tried to reply to as much questions as I could, and at the same time compiling all the recurring feedback we are getting and of course fixing and testing a lot of bugs that you guys reported. Keep them coming!

Antoine

Hello! I hope you people are enjoying playing the Gameplay Alpha. We’re reading the comments, having great discussions over many things you people mentioned and obviously making changes and fixes. We’re really excited to have some honest feedback on the survival mechanics and to be able to iterate on them. That’s what Early Access is about! The team is working a lot on breaking repetitions in both the things you see and the things you do. For example, we’re prototyping new underground sections, that bring more of a creepy dark atmosphere with an aspect of randomness. 

We’ll be using that thinking to improve the ways we vary layout. For example a path that was opened in one game will be closed in another, traps could have been placed or not and rewards for exploring those areas could be in different places. They could be guarded by maybe some people of the night gang that established a small point of operation in there or by a small group of plagued wastrels. I think many of you are wondering what the Torch (flashlight) is about since you really don’t have any use for it right now. The plan for it is that you will need it to navigate underground sections that will be mostly dark (with certain light sources so that you don’t get stuck because the power cell in your Torch has depleted). All those empty power cells will also be able to be refilled with the Motilene Harvester! 

Mike  

Hey guys - This week I made a bunch of bug fixes and improvements following the awesome feedback you guys have been giving us. Thank you very much for this!

Also, making a bunch of new buildings for the village, with focus on adding secondary circulation between the main streets and the back alleys:

...and I’m working on a few more that I might show you guys next week. I completed the basic layout for a new underground level:

 ... this should be pretty fast to flesh out and finalize.

Minor stuff:

• New “unfitting NPCs” system, where a NPC of the wrong type for the island can spawn at random (for instance, you can sometimes see a Wastrel appear during the day in the village… mayhem ensues.) 
• Improved our position when we sit, on all chairs and benches, so it feels more natural Fixed a bunch of issues with map markers 
• Fixed a bunch of issues with save/load 
• You can now throw the rubber ducks at people :D

Animation Team  

Remi  

Hey everyone! This has been a very important week for us to receive all of your feedback. It is very exciting to watch people play our game and allows us to take TONS of notes about what to fix and improve. That being said I have mostly spent my whole week integrating more character variations and fixing bugs. It was quite a busy week and hopefully, we will be able to fix most of the issues in future updates. I would have loved to show you some of the upcoming animations, but I guess it’ll have to wait for the next update! Glad to have new people on board and I hope we’ll have more to show in future updates!

That is all for now, thank you for tuning in!

Compulsion Team

Update #65 - See you next Tuesday!
over 9 years ago – Fri, Jul 22, 2016 at 11:27:54 PM

Hey everyone, 

Judgement Day is upon us! We have finalised the release candidates on all platforms, so we will see you next Tuesday the 26th of July on Xbox One Game Preview, Steam Early Access and GOG.com Games In Development at 9AM EST! 

Until full release, we will be calling this version of the game the “Gameplay Alpha”, because that sentence above is a bit of a mouthful! It’s also to remind everyone that the Gameplay Alpha will not contain any of the playable characters' stories besides the introduction shown at E3. You will be able to experience the complete narrative when the game goes into full release next year. 

The procedural world, on the other hand, will continue to expand as development progresses. Please treat this as an opportunity to learn (and break) the rules of Wellington Wells and experiment with some of the key features. To contribute your feedback, come visit us at www.compulsiongames.com/forum/. Also, this game is still in development, so keep in mind that you may experience issues or lose progress between updates. 

Sam also wrote a great blog post for Xbox Wire explaining how We Happy Few came long, the development process and our artistic vision.

Backers!  

Your codes should be appearing within the next hour on your BackerKit profile! Please note that they will not give you access to the game until Tuesday the 26 of July at 9AM EST, but you can activate them beforehand. If you have any issues logging in to your Backerkit profile, try resetting your password and if that doesn’t work, send an email to [email protected].

Animation Team  

Rémi  

Hey guys, sorry for not keeping you updated for the past couple of weeks. I was quite busy on the E3 Gameplay animations that you have all seen on the Microsoft stage! Then as the Early Access release gets closer and closer, I spent a LOT of time working on bug fixes and animation integration so you can get the best experience from the get go. Luckily, I was able to spend some time on creating new animations this week! So in the video you will see an animation for when the player uses the Trap Disarm tool.

On the more technical side, I finally was able to integrate Clothing Colour Variants for the Wastrels. That means that we will be able to have a lot more color variations in the game. The way it works is basically to change a parameter in the material that changes the color of only one part of the texture, so we can create as many combinations as we want.

And finally, I made something that is kind of a hint for the upcoming encounters that we will be making in the upcoming months. I created and tweaked the hold poses for the Torch Light item. Since the torchlight is attached to the player, it required us to adjust the animation for the light to point in the middle of the screen. That includes toning down the running animation and making sure we see well in front of us when we are crouched. Enjoy!

J.R.  

Hi! I’m going to keep it short, the last few weeks we focused mainly on fixing things. I duplicated some animations to mirror them properly in different circumstances (i.e. NPCs will now be able to sleep on both sides of the bed!). We also did a lot of testing, as well as some animation scouting in order to review them and think about what we need to polish, and what we need to add to the game.  

I’ve still had a bit of time to animate some really cool items in the game, notably the Harvester! Take a look at the video right down here, I’ve mixed a couple of animations that Remi and I did, with a little information under the theme of “the tools of Wellington Wells”. Enjoy!

Art Team  

Marc-André  

These past few weeks, I've been giving some love to some of our old assets, that were no longer to our high standards of quality. I've also been doing some research on churches, and have created a modular set (interior and exterior) for them (walls, windows, peaks, columns, etc.) and a few other props, such as gravestones. Churches will help add variety to both the waste and village architectures and provide interesting new spots for encounters!

Emmanuel  

I made some Vista sets with low resolution trees so we can have nice 3D backgrounds .

Thanks for tuning in!  

Compulsion Team

Update #64 - 11 days before Early Access!
over 9 years ago – Sat, Jul 16, 2016 at 12:48:18 AM

Hey everyone,  

Less than 2 weeks before We Happy Few releases on Early Access and Xbox Game Preview! It is both exciting and terrifying, but mostly exciting. Of course everybody is really busy at the office, mostly debugging and polishing the Early Access build. It probably won’t be 100% perfect - it is Early Access after all so it will contain some issues and some bugs - but we’re pretty happy with how it is currently playing.  

Backer information!  

Last week we asked you all to make sure you were happy with your choice in platform when the time comes for key distribution (GOG or Steam). This week we would like to remind you once more to make sure that you have chosen correctly the option of your liking - you have until July 18 to change your mind.  

For those of you who have questions about accessing BackerKit, please email them at [email protected]. Failing that, if they cannot, please get in touch with us at [email protected] (but please, do try and contact them first, and please keep in mind that we will not be able to help with lost passwords, forgotten usernames, etc)  

And now for your Early Access teaser, we recorded a little something this morning with our beloved actor Julian Casey who plays Uncle Jack…

Art Team  

Sarah  

You guessed it, more signs from me this week! This time around I've been making more fifties/sixties type graphics, and it's been a ton of fun looking up references and knocking out some new designs to dress up the Village. I've also been working on a more detailed painting, but for now I'll keep it under wraps until it's ~*~*~PerFeCt~*~*~ Stay tuned!

Emmanuel  

I worked on the sky, the water and the vistas!

Gameplay Team  

Vince  

We’ve been testing the game a lot this week to find any critical bugs, crashes and other issues. I had lots of fun playing with all the new content that has been added into the build, there is a great deal more to do now. And I’ve been taking pages and pages of notes for fixes, small and big, fixing some of them, reporting bugs and assigning them.

Mike  

Hey guys! This week I fixed some bugs (again), and made 5 new buildings (we call them “fillers”) to help add variety to the Garden District. Here’s one of them:  

They each have a very specific navigation purpose. For instance some of them are only “one-way” from the street to the open areas (and vice-versa), some of them are shaped like a “Y” with a junction, some are made like a funnel, so they’re are not “one-way’’, but “likely one-way”. Some of them have stairs and verticality. They all contain a few items that you can find ;)  

I’ve also been working on prototypes for fillers for the Village! That I will show next week once it's ready! Take care!  

Thanks for tuning in!  

Compulsion Team