Before we dive right into the weekly update, we would love it if you could take this anonymous survey, even if you’ve never played the game! (we will close the survey on monday). This is important to us as it helps us know if we are going in the right direction :) 

Programming Team

Camille

Working on death and dying for the next update is fine and dandy, but before we even start communicating about the player’s death, we have to make it clear what’s keeping them alive and what’s killing them. For a while, gameplay was simple enough that we could communicate a lot with HUD icons and minimal feedback, but this hasn’t been the case for a while now. We’re finally addressing this by implementing a status screen, something that is arguably essential to any survival game. Here is its first version:

It’s nothing too glamorous, but it’s important for the player to have a central location to get information about anything that’s currently affecting them. There isn’t much information to show right now besides status effects and the player’s current needs.

But that is bound to change as we start tracking more information and stats about the player’s experience for the update. For instance, wouldn’t you like to know how many mean old grannies you’ve whacked? Or perhaps how much damage you’ve dealt in total? Since this isn’t an RPG, statistics like these are mostly cosmetic, but it remains fun to have some random tidbits to consult.

Narrative Army of One

Alex

I feel like I’ve had a productive day when I do something that results in big hunks of content. For example, the other day we had a recording session for a soldier. We got 180 lines recorded in an hour. Since we’d scheduled two hours, I had to scramble to come up with some other stuff for our actor to record.

However, I’m also responsible for lore. On Monday, Whitney asked me for some ideas for posters and things to flesh out the Garden District. The easy way to do this would be to repeat something you already know: a poster promoting Joy, for example, or another war poster. The harder and better thing to do is to show you something you didn’t know. In this case, it was, “What is it like for the Wastrels to come off Joy?” Now there’ll be a painting that tells you something about that. And a painting that’s the flip side of that: what proper decent Wellies do when they’re confronted with the awkward past. Sarah and I had fun coming up with that one.

And, I wrote three editorial cartoons from some sort of samizdat dissident paper. Who knew there were ever dissidents?

I sometimes wonder where my day goes. Something like “think of five ideas for the art team” can take an hour or more. We are also coming up with a new game mode. But what to call it? The names of the modes have to communicate what they’re like while being of the game world -- for example Wakey Wakey for the mode where you wake up after death, and We’ve Come to the End of Our Time for permadeath mode. See if you can guess what the middle mode is from the following rejected trios of game mode names:

Die Another Day

You Only Live Twice

Dr. No

As the World Turns

General Hospital

One Life to Live

I Am the Resurrection

A Man Named Lazarus

The Angel of Death

But Soft, What Light from Yonder Window Breaks

Double, Double, Toil and Trouble

To Be, Or Not to Be

This sort of thing can also take an hour or more: a lot of thinking, and not very much writing. The best way to do it is to write down all the ideas you have, not just the good ones; a probably bad idea (Please Sir, Can I Have Another mode anyone?) can be a “bridge” to a good idea.

These things take up a lot of time, but they’re the difference between feeling that the world is deep and rich and strange, and would exist even in Arthur’s absence, or feeling that it is merely there to support gameplay.

Animation Team

Rémi

This week for me I’ve been spending a lot of time on gameplay and encounter animations. First goal was to provide some animations to the Level designers for them to be able to create their encounters. That usually means unique animations that will be seen only a few times in the Game, but since we are a small team of animators, we have to think ahead about it. How could we reuse them? Or how could we animate them in order to be re-usable somewhere else in the game?

For gameplay animations, most of them were made in order to give feedback to the player. For example: When the NPCs see you in their house, what’s their reaction? That reaction needs to tell the player that they have been spotted. How would the player know that they are in trouble? Quite simple: NPCs now take a moment to draw out their weapon before bashing it on your head! These animations make it so much easier for the player to understand what the hell is going on! So without going too much in detail, here are some of the animations that I have completed this week.

Art Team

Tito

I’ve been revisiting all the characters’ masks. I'm happy I finally got the mask material to look soft and pliable :)

Marc-André  

This week I've been working on kitbashing buildings for the garden district. Kitbashing refers to creating new assets (in this case, buildings) from pieces we already have. It's a very efficient workflow. I've also been creating and tweaking props for the houses' back gardens, which I'll showcase next week.

Emmanuel

Making entrances and windows frame look simple but when you’re crazy and you want every single pieces to be modular, it’s a puzzle. But the final result is a really fun kitbashing set! Also I'm really satisfied with my fancy tileable wall padding mesh (it was surprisingly hard to make).

Design Team

Antoine

Hi there! I’ve been talking to a bunch of people on the team about the role of cars in the game and we decided to tweak it a little. You can now hide in trunks! Especially useful when skulking about in the village streets at night. You can also dispose of bodies inside them. Please enjoy some really unpolished shots of the corpse poses made by a level designer…

Thank you for tuning in!  

Compulsion Team

 

Last week we released Pre-Alpha Build 12, so we hope that you are enjoying the changes! Balancing the different items and your progression through the game is going to become more and more difficult from this point on, so if you’d like to let us know what you’re finding good, bad, or confusing, please come visit us on the forums.

This week, in addition to looking at your feedback from the latest update, we are beginning work on our next update, which is focusing on developing the game’s response to death. Sounds a bit morbid, but we’re beginning with touching up a few atmospheric pieces, and will eventually progress to things like “what happens when you die?”, “how should people respond to corpses?”, and improvements to non-lethal gameplay. Very exciting!

Narrative Team

Alex

This week I’ve been working on passive conversations. These are conversations that you might hear while you are very stealthily not interacting with Wastrels or Wellies.

We have two kinds of these. One I’m calling “Atmosphere.” These are the sort of conversations you might hear dozens of times. “Oh, there you are!” “Were you looking for me?” “Not at all – but there you are. Hahaha!” “Hahaha!”

These sorts of conversations are standard in video games. However, we’ll also have showcased conversations. These are conversations you’re probably only going to hear once in a playthrough. They’re longer, and they are about people’s distinct desires and problems. We’ll rig these conversations to play in specific encounters where you will, for example, have to stealth your way through a specific location in order to achieve a goal. So your reward for not killing everyone in the house, in addition to whatever loot we give you for being non-homicidal, will be learning about someone’s life.

The showcased conversations really came about because in my first effort at writing atmosphere, all the conversations came out very specific and personal – all way too memorable to be conversations that you might hear from any number of totally different people in totally different places. Asking a screenwriter to write undistinctive dialog is like asking a singer to sing off-key: all their ten thousand hours of training are telling them not to do what you’re trying to do. Fortunately, rather than scrapping the memorable conversations, we’re going to use them along with some more general conversations.

All of this represents yet another metastasis of the amount of recorded narrative in this game! This game is going to have a lot a lot a lot of voice work. Should be fun.

Art Team  

Marc-André

These past two weeks I've been working with Shawn to create the new trees for the beautiful world of We Happy Few. I've been in charge of everything going on with the leaves, from their textures to the color variation as well as technical stuff (generation in the world, creation of multiple levels of detail, etc.) Although creating levels of detail is pretty boring, it has to be done and is a very important part of optimization to make sure that the game runs smoothly on a wide range of hardware.

Design Team

Mike

This week I worked on a new quest that’s gonna take place in the Garden District. A Wastrel couple wants to move to the village, and you need to help them move...  

I also updated descriptions for several items in the game… you should now get a better feel of how useful the item is from reading it.

Antoine

Oh hi there! Been keeping it quiet for a bit, because I was working on a special secret encounter. Once it goes through realization (voice, effects, animations, art) I bet it will be something you’ll remember. As a tease, I’ll say that there is a really strange reunion happening at night (in the village) and, if you conform properly, you might be invited. I’ve been developing some kind of street barrier which you’ll be able to exploit by reversing its polarity. Hilarity and chaos will ensue. I’ve also been opening old village encounters and noticed that they needed some love. So I relit the The Butcher with the permission of the environment artists until they do a real light pass on it. Here’s what it looks like :

Vince

Hey there, folks! Now that the build was released, I had much more time this week to pimp my encounters up! I made a whole new house layout for the “Hallucinogenic Salad” encounter and added more NPCs running and yelling. I tested the level a lot after adding hiding spots and each time I play it now turns into a nice hide and seek game with those loonies! Just to recap, there’s a house where some Wastrels ate some bad mushrooms (or good, that depends on if you’re hungry or are wanting to hallucinate) and run around doing weird stuff, basically. It was really cool to place furniture at weird angles to create this mayhem-ness and it really adds to the atmosphere. I did also finally re-add something I started quite a while ago, the deadly night fog! All the systems are now in place and working, so we can set the density of these patches of deadly fog for each zones, meaning that there will be more of it (and it will be more deadly) as you progress to new zones.

Programming Team

Camille

I’ve been working on an upcoming part of the UI. Our alpha players will have noticed a long disabled icon in the player menu:

It needs lots more aesthetic and functional polish so I’ll only tease it for now, but expect a new screen and functionality in the next update.

Animation Team

Rémi

Hello everyone! Remember last week’s update that I gave about Drunk Bobbies? I told you there was more coming up and I wasn’t lying! Here’s a few more animations that I made this week. I’m not sure if they are final yet, but I think it’s good enough to show to the community. Enjoy!

Thank you for tuning in!  

Compulsion Team

 

This week the team worked on the Ultraviolence pre-alpha update! This update contains a lot of new gameplay elements, weapons, drugs and gadgets. While the game world hasn’t drastically changed, these will really spice things up. While we’re putting the finishing touches on the build, you can read the build notes here.

Design team

Vince

Hello everyone. This week has been a real labour week: looking at lists, updating objects, placing sockets (to tweak the position of objects when picked up), fixing bugs, finding bugs, balancing loot lists, and back and forth between all of those things. So please, go and enjoy all these items! Gotta find ‘em all!

Animation team

Vincent

Ahoy! These days I’m working on a scene with no less than 14 moving ‘things’ (characters, props, environment). The process to export all that in the engine began to get heavy, so I took some time to adapt an export script in Motionbuilder to our pipeline. Exporting everything in one click should speed up the whole thing for next time!

Rémi

Hello everyone! I was on vacation for half of this week, but here’s an animation that I made yesterday! Luckily I will be focusing on gameplay animations for the upcoming weeks, which means I will be posting a lot more videos! So here’s the “Success” version of the gifting action for the Bobby and more “Drunk” animations are underway!

Art Team  

Warren

Hi! You've never met me before, I know, but I'm one of the environment artists here. I've only been on the team a few months but it's been a great ride so far. I wanted to show off some of the meshes I've been working on lately. I specialize in hard surface stuff so these types of mechanical doo-dads tend to land on my plate. The art style of this game really meshes well with my brain so I have as much doing the textures as I do making the models themselves. Some are for hitting, some are for finding, and some are for ... curious purposes.

Shawn  

This week I have been back on tree duty to finish what had been started a few weeks back. All the trees but one have a finished sculpt and are assembled in game. Currently just working away on getting the textures in order. The shot in the image is of a WIP Oak tree.

Emmanuel  

This week I started worked on our first proper modular interior set for the Village so we can make infinite new layouts and new stories!

Thank you for tuning in!

Compulsion Games

 

We hope that you have had a good week! This week we have been preparing for the next pre-alpha update, which is focusing on introducing the full list of “regular” useable items into the game. Aka all the food, items, weapons, etc, that we need to create a full play through. We have a bunch of surprises coming in, and are very looking forward to your experimentation and feedback. If you do not have access to the pre-alpha but are curious about how the players respond, you can always join the conversation in our forum!

Before we get onto our weekly update we wanted to let you know that The Flame in the Flood was released this week! The Flame in the Flood was a game that got funded on Kickstarter (and some of you guys asked us to check out) and is now fully released on Steam. It is a beautiful survival game made by ex Irrational devs and it has a killer soundtrack by Chuck Ragan.

Narrative Team

Alex

I’ve been continuing to search for a voice for some revelatory audio. There’s a character in game who’s autistic. Good actors are hard enough to find; actors who can play autistic with emotional truthfulness are rarer still. And, the role has another characteristic I can’t tell you yet. Few people can handle a speech impediment without the impediment becoming the whole performance. And, we want charisma in our voices.

(My daughter is autistic, so autism is something I think about a lot. It’s nice to be able to put it in the game. And by “nice,” I mean that it’s going to take us to a seriously effed-up place.)

Meanwhile, I’m continuing to work on dialog for encounters. Writing encounter dialog is tricky because sound eats memory, and we need the game to be a reasonable size on your computer or console. So I need to suggest as much as possible in as little dialog as possible. Also, any time Arthur talks, that means our other player characters will eventually have to have something to say, too. On the other hand, we’re long past the point in video games where we can get away with throwing text on the screen. And a voice performance adds so much, anyway.

I’ve also been having a bash at tooltips. The designers have written very “gamey” tooltips, e.g. “does .2 shock damage + .4 blunt damage.” I feel that takes you out of the game, so the tooltip will now read something clever-ish like, “this weapon is really smashing, and a bit shocking too.”

And there’s the usual ongoing support. What brand gin do people drink? What do Wellies say after they are no longer distracted by Rick the Stunt Duck? What do Bobbies say? Each one of these is not a lot of work, but they add up, and there’s a fair amount of bookkeeping necessary as well, to make sure that everything gets recorded and shepherded into the game.

Programming Team  

Marc

I have been doing lots of small gameplay tasks in the past weeks. Our overall game design is shaping up nicely and we are in the process of adding a lot of weapons, gadgets and tools. As you can or will see it requires new art, new sounds, and new animations, but all this stuff needs to be integrated, we need new behaviours for AI, and modifications to our gameplay framework.

For instance we added quite a few throwable bombs with various effects in the game: the sick bomb makes the characters vomit, the tear gas make them cough, etc. We also added some "distraction" devices whose purpose is to attract the AI in one specific place while you go around them, to reinforce the stealth gameplay.

There are new melee weapons that can "shock" the enemy, giving you a pretty extended stun, darts that exhaust an enemy, serving a similar purpose, and more.

All these must be taken into account for the AI to make sure the behaviour always make sense. It's pretty hard to anticipate all the situations, and I expect we will have our share of bugs as in any systemic game, but we constantly expand the variety of behaviours so that the player understand intuitively what's happening.

On the animation side I changed the walk system a bit, to easily add more variations to the way the NPCs walk and to simplify special cases (e.g. they run away when they're on fire), but the major improvement coming soon will be the integration of facial animations generated with FaceFX. I added a simple system that automatically chooses and plays the correct facial animation whenever a bark (NPC talking) is triggered. Remi generates the animations from the audio files using FaceFX, he puts them in, and it will just work. Because of course it always does. It does change quite a bit the interaction with NPCs, you now know who's talking to you and it feels a lot more real. The animations are not perfect (not as good as hand crafted ones) but it's pretty good, enough to read on the lips of the character in some cases.

And of course I also did the usual sound fixes, general bugs (NPCs should not appear anymore on top of benches, hopefully...), and general support for designers (e.g. extending the patrol system to simplify scripting NPCs in specific situations).

Art Team  

Marc-André

This week, I had a tremendous amount of fun modeling and texturing interesting props like the Elite Hammer Tool, the music box, the gas masks and a bunch of other small props.

Emmanuel  

I did a lot of props this week; some are more fun than others to make. A vinegar bottle is not something intellectually challenging but it has to be done. But I have to say, I love making pies!

Design Team

Vince

Lots of different tasks this week, I don’t really know where to start!

I did some tweaks to the encounters I’m working on, and started new ones. The Altar of Yam is getting even more epic, but I’m keeping that a surprise for next week.

We are releasing a build to all our pre-alpha backers soon, so I did a little bit of work that will go in that build, notably: added a whole bunch of descriptions to pickups and a lot of updates to existing ones. Level designers usually put placeholder objects in the game real quick when we need them and write a bunch of silly stuff in their description. But now, Alex wrote even more funny stuff for them, so try to collect and read them all!

Antoine

Hi there! This week was a lot of preparation work, talking to people on the team, and adjusting workflows so everything goes smoothly for everybody. I’ve sent a document to the art team explaining how all the current traps work. I believe they should start to art them up soon-ish (very excited). This means in the future I’ll be able to unveil some of them in the weekly updates (we’ll definitely keep a couple secret for maximum surprise when you get your hands on new updates). Been having talks with the artists since I’m entering the realm of Village encounters. We’ve talked about a workflow that is going to allow the design team to tweak Village houses geometry, encounters and so on. By the end you should be able to see more variety in the Village. I’ve also been working on a new trap which is definitely going to spice up house gameplay and two other encounters (including a house where people have very strange ways of passing time… leaving it there as a tease).

Hayden

Hello Folks! This week had me working on my first encounter for the game, Faraday’s Workshop, which is located in the Village. It’s an interesting space filled with many shocking surprises, literally and figuratively. Working on this encounter was a real gas; I was able to block-out the physical space, add all the cool surprises and stubbed in the first part of the quest. I’m sure when you play it, it’ll be an electrifying experience!

Thank you for tuning and have a great weekend everyone!  

Compulsion

 

We hope that you had a pleasant week! We’ve had a busy one, as usual, and cannot wait for the weekend! This week we’ve been focusing on making sure that all of the pick ups (weapons, consumables,etc) are in the build in some shape or form, which means functionality, art, and integration into our loot spawning system. We hope you enjoy it - remember that if you have something that you’d like us to talk about, don’t be shy to pipe up!

Art Team  

Emmanuel

I worked on a lot of different things this week! To start, I would like to present to you the most bad ass cricket bat I have ever seen. I have actually never seen a real life cricket bat but this is what I assume they look like:

I also experimented with transparent materials/shaders this week, to try and get some interesting looking glass. This is definitely not the world’s most drunk gin:

Marc-André

This week I've been working on optimisation and a bunch of props. Optimisation of art assets is really important to make sure that the game runs well, but it isn’t always very interesting. But the good news is, I also made all this stuff:

Design Team

Vince

Hey there! Just a few things this week, I did take a few days to go back to the never-ending intro and plug in more sounds and fix some sound issues as well as fixing some visual glitches that were happening when changing from gameplay to cinematics. It's just for a split second, but when you play it 20 times a day, it's nagging at you every time you see it! Feels especially satisfying to squash those irritating bugs. And we figured out a better workflow for sound integration because I ran out of pages in my notebook and lists were stacking up everywhere on my desk! Enough of that. I'm still not done with the infamous intro just yet, but I'll keep a day each week to go back and fix a few bugs, add a few sounds, etc.

When that was done, I went back to my encounters from last week and added all that was missing like adding conditions to clear the mapMarker for them, support progress in savegames, tweak AI’s reactions and behaviors and also making them look nice and give a unique feel to them.

Especially with the "Altar of the Yam". I started out with the already existing "TV altar", and it was a bit boring that they looked so much the same. I tried making a little story of why these Wastrels are fiercely protecting and worshipping this Yam. Here's a little picture! It was fun to look around and try to find props to my new friend, the "Couch God with the Yam". I'm sure we'll find something nice for her to wear, too. (Yes, that’s not a yam, but a giant potato. Still waiting for the yam model Emmanuel!!)

Mike

This week I worked on 2 missions that you’re gonna see at some point in the game! One is a creepy house filled with weird stuff, the other is an area filled with tripwires that explode. D:

Antoine

Hello! Hope you beautiful people reading this are “tip top”! I’ve been polishing the traps system I mentioned last week and developing some new ones. I’ve also started doing some encounters! So excite! Here’s the only place in the world that produces apples for the people of Wellington Wells (which is why it’s fiercely guarded by Bobbies… beware!). Enjoy a few in editor pictures of this encounter below :). 

Animation Team

Vincent

Ahoy! This week, apart from blocking out a cinematic and prepping the needed props for it, we had some urgent animations that had to be done for the next release!

Because there's no reason that only the player should get shocked and gassed, I quickly put together some status effects for NPCs. Here's the Shocked, Dancing and Coughing loops I did, plus the Running On Fire one that Rémi did as a bonus!  

The dance is a rough edited from mocap data from the famed free Carnegie Melon University database. As with all the cinematic work we didn’t have time to make a nicely keyframed dance… that’s sad, but maybe later… or at least improve this one a bit.  

Thank you for tuning in!  

Compulsion Team