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We Happy Few - Welcome to Wellington Wells, you Saucy Minx

Created by Compulsion Games

A game of paranoia and survival, in a drugged-out, dystopian English city in 1964. From the studio that brought you Contrast.

Latest Updates from Our Project:

Update #43 - Sick Update!
about 10 years ago – Fri, Feb 12, 2016 at 08:18:13 PM

Hey all! 

Another week has come and gone here at the studio and things are getting busier by the day. Before we get to what the team has been up to we just wanted to remind you that the whole team is very much present in our forums. If you would like to ask someone a specific question, talk about the game or about video games and other fun stuff, feel free to drop by :)

Programming Team

Camille 

I was exasperated at our placeholder effect for food poisoning still being in place after so long, so I finally caved in, took a break from my usual fare, and decided to do a polish pass on status effects. I always intended for food poisoning to be somewhat reminiscent of the real thing and also to try to capture the progression of food poisoning symptoms from the classic roguelike Nethack. 

Should the player be foolhardy or desperate enough to eat bad food, there is a chance it will cause food poisoning. The worse the food, the worse the symptoms, though if the player keeps eating tainted food, a case of mild food poisoning can still develop into a lethal one. 

The first symptom is dizziness, which causes blurry vision and slows down the player:

Mild cases will wear off over time with no further penalty. But more serious cases will eventually cause vomiting (courtesy of Vincent): 

Left untreated, this only stops when the player has spewed out the entire contents of their stomach, reducing hunger to 0. 

It doesn’t stop there! Truly hapless players who have managed to contract lethal food poisoning will keep on dry heaving, losing health each time, progressing to fainting and an eventual horrible, painful death: 

Have a care not to let this happen! Gameplay wise, the idea is to have bad food be a viable but risky gamble in a pinch, but to have that risk balance itself out. For instance, if the player keeps gorging on raw meat, that mild food poisoning might develop into a case of vomiting, in which case all that short term hunger will be lost unless treated. 

Aside from food poisoning, I felt we also needed some more general purpose polishing of status effects, namely in properly animating and communicating their progression. So just in time for the last update, I took the time to create some simple animations for their application, which can be seen in the sequences above. Status effects that can eventually kill the player will pulse regularly. I also implemented UI feedback on the health and stamina bars for changes to their maximums, as we will be adding items that can permanently boost these. Lastly, I prototyped Infection, which reduces health and can be contracted from dirty bandages or ongoing bleeding:

This will also need design and iteration, but the idea is that staunching a wound might satisfy the short term health damage at the cost of some vulnerability until the infection is treated or fades away.

Narrative Team

Alex

Happy Imbolc, everyone!

The other day a narrative designer friend o’mine who works at a Big Studio tweeted, “Pro tip: if you design a narrative/audio heavy feature, loop them in early so they can spot potential problems before they happen”.

Compulsion is a strange beast - something in between a 4 person indie team and a 100-500 person AAA team.

What we get in return is that the team is small enough that everyone talks to everybody. At least, I talk to everybody.

For example, Mike is designing in-game tips. How do you pick up a body? How do you throw one? An in-game tip can throw you out of the game world if it’s written in gamer terminology; on the other hand, if it’s not clear, it’s useless as a tip. So I have to figure out how to rephrase the tip so that it sounds like our world.

Meanwhile, Valentino is building soundscapes for the introduction. There’s a critical flashback to a traumatic event. He’d like to know: what does that sound like? I’ve already recorded and edited the dialog, but what else do we hear? There’s a train. Do we hear steam building? A whistle? A bell? Crowd walla?

Meanwhile, there’s an encounter where you can find a note on a bobby describing you. Well, it takes a level designer two seconds to write that. It sends me down a rabbit hole. Who’s writing the note? What tone is it? Is it officious? Are they scared of you? Do they want the bobbies to follow normal procedure? What is it? Or do they want the bobbies to take care of you by any means necessary?

Meanwhile, David is working on combat buffs. I feel an urgency to rewrite the combat buffs into the voice of the game world, to strengthen your immersion in it. Oh, and, sometimes we want both the player character and the NPC’s to react when these buffs take effect. So those lines of dialog get added to my dialog list, and I start pestering our sound guys to set up another recording session.

And since I’m recording and editing all sorts of cutscene dialog and gameplay barks and encounter dialog... I have to keep after the sound guys to make sure none of it gets lost along the way.

And, there is a Very Important Article that you’ll read in-game that wasn’t clear enough. So I rewrote it, and that meant poor Whitney had to throw out her old painting and make a new one. And then the advertisements were wrong for the date, so we had to fix that. In this game, the advertisements look like throwaways, but they’re important lore, and they’ve got to not only be consistent with our lore, but be revelatory of it.

Oh, and, just now, one of our programmers complained that a Pythonesque object description I wrote turned out to be too long for the UI. It doesn’t take long to do each little thing; but they do all require thought.

In all this, of course, I’m piling up a bit of work for myself. Anything specific to Arthur I’ll have to redo, or replace, for Girl With Needle or the Mad Scotsman. They don’t just have different barks. Anywhere Arthur has a journal entry after an encounter, I’m going to have to rewrite the entry in the other PC’s voice.

This is an ambitious game for its narrative. It would be much easier for me to write generically. The more generic a bark (“Go go go!”), the more often the player can hear it without getting irritated. I’m writing distinctive barks. Hopefully we’ve got enough so they won’t get old. Let me know if they do get old.

And then, there are always the recording sessions and the cutscenes. I can’t tell you what amazing actor I recorded last Thursday, or what role she plays, because it’s all a Big Secret. But the animators are slowly chewing their way through several playthroughs worth of cutscenes. Tuesday and Wednesday I put together a cutscene for the Mad Scotsman’s playthrough; Vincent Schneider’s been storyboarding it since. I also spent a bit of time inserting new dialog in old cutscenes; sometimes there’s a line that doesn’t get recorded, or a brilliant idea that we have after the recording session, and I’ve got to wait until my next session to get it recorded. (Recording with union actors is crucial, but Not Cheap.)

It is a miracle to me that I haven’t fallen behind. Sometimes I wonder if it would be the end of the world if I, you know, left the text of the combat buffs alone; so what if they’re a bit gamey? But I count myself blessed to be in a team where I have the privilege of meddling like that.

Design Team  

Mike

I spent all week making a terrain / visuals / foliage pass of around 14 encounters. So they should hopefully look better now :)

I also fixed some bugs and improved gameplay, so they are more fun!

Vince

After countless frustrated pre-alpha player reports, someone had to go back to the Garden District houses and make them more “navigation friendly”. And that someone got to be me! It was a bit of a pain, but it’s done, and I hope you guys (and those poor Wastrels) won’t get stuck in narrow corridors / furniture / cramped spaces / debris clusters anymore. So I basically went back to those maps and scaled up a bit the houses, moved furniture to the walls and shrinked the debris, as well as fix some weird collisions on objects. Pretty boring to do, but I hope it’ll go a long way for your gameplay experience in the Garden Districts!

Once that was out of the way, I joined Mike in doing some more encounters! It was a nice change for me after being stuck in a single map (the infamous intro scene) for more than two months. These encounters are specifically for the second island of the Garden District, so they present a bit more challenge, but will also net more interesting and useful rewards, as well as introduce new items and NPCs.

One of the latter are the Sick Wastrels. Thanks to Marc and Camille’s work on status effects, the Sick Wastrels can actually afflict you with a nasty Infection! It’ll reduce your Max Health considerably. How to cure it you say? You can’t… yet! But I’ll get on that next week! :P So here’s a little tease for my new encounters:

  • Pump Fixers: These thirsty Wastrels are desperately trying to repair this water pump without success. You probably won’t be able to quench your thirst, but you still might be able to get something out of it… If you can get past these guys!
  • Mystery Parade: A bunch of Sick Wastrels walking around in a group at night. Do I really need to say you should stay clear of them?
  • Altar of the Yam: This tasty looking Yam looks like is the object of worship of a bunch of crazy Wastrels. Well, Wastrels are pretty much all crazy, but these guys are definitely crazily focused on protecting this Yam, which is even crazier.
  • Unkind Dead: A rotted smelly corpse. I guess it’s been there for a while: mushrooms are growing out of this guy’s face! Ewww… But I bet you’re hungry… Will you take this risk?
  • Hallucinogenic Salad: Great, more crazies! These guys run around in a house, freaking out and beating imaginary beasts. I bet you wonder what got them in this state. How can they spend so much energy without even slowing down?

Antoine

Oh hi! I hope you people reading this are doing well. This week I was tasked to create a reusable system to make various type of traps. Been fiddling around in the scripts reparenting some things, creating new blueprints and making sure the system is easy to use. You’ll get traps you can trigger from a distance using projectiles, traps that’ll nicely shock you if you try to open doors (a bit like the old handshake shock gag), tesla coils that now fire proper lightning at targets and new pickups to interact with them (mostly disarm tools). Some of those traps are linked to “trap control boxes”. You’ll have two options if you interact with those : “disarm” which disarms every trap linked to them or reverse polarity which switches trap targets to other surrounding NPCs. I’m sure you’ll like to reverse the polarity on tesla coils (now called Spankers) and see it spanking your opponents while you dance around dodging hits. I hope you have a great week-end and wishing you lots of joy for coming week!

Animation Team

Vincent

Only secret things have I worked on this week! So here's the video of the Vomit and Shock animation I told you about in the last update.

As you can see it's not in game footage, but a preview from the animation software we use, Motionbuilder. A little funny trade secret while I'm here, with nothing new to show: the shake on the 'Shock' animation is actually done by hand! I recorded the movements from my mouse, which I then tweaked and plugged into my animations, on different parts of the body! Poor man motion capture... it's a pretty common feature in 3D software but it's not used that often. But I still prefer that over procedural noise, it gives the movement some spontaneity... Cheers!

Thank you for tuning for another week, have a great weekend everyone and happy Valentine’s day, remember to treat yo'self!

Compulsion

Update #42 - Pre-Alpha build 11 is live!
about 10 years ago – Fri, Feb 05, 2016 at 09:51:56 PM

Hello everyone,

 

Before we start with our usual weekly update, we wanted to let you know that the latest pre-alpha update for We Happy Few is now live on Steam! You can read the build notes here.

This week we also made IGN’s list of most anticipated horror games of 2016! While We Happy Few is more creepy than horrific, it’s really exciting to be included with the many cool games in this list :)

Programming Team  

Marc

Hi all, I haven't given an update for a while as for the last month I've been mostly involved in the migration to a new sound engine: Wwise. It is an excellent sound middleware used all over the industry, including by major studios. We needed to change as Unreal 4 sound engine has got some limitations (for the moment), in terms of features, workflow, and performance, and Wwise is much better suited at the moment to bring top quality audio to an extensive open world game like ours.

It meant a lot of assets changes, and a lot of code modifications to replace calls to the Unreal sound engine by calls to Wwise. You will notice some regressions in the game audio but you cannot make an omelette without breaking a few eggs.

I am still fixing actively various sound issues with the help of our sound designers, but I now finally had time to start working on a variety of gameplay features. We will be introducing a lot of new items, and some of them require extensions of our gameplay and AI framework. Lots of behind the scenes work that is only impressive when it finally materialises, that's why programming is often less glamorous than art, where you can easily present your progress :)

Design Team

Antoine

Hello dear people ! I’m a new addition to the We Happy Few level design team. So thrilled to be able to put my weird mind into this crazy game. The last couple of weeks, I was tasked to build and script the new bridge encounters from David (design director). We had a lot of fun seeing those things come to life and chuckling at the odd situations we’ll put you through. Conformity, joyfulness and special items will be needed to cross those now life threatening bridges. Be ready to be roughened up with a smile if you don’t meet the criterias to pass. I can’t wait to show you explicitly what those look like but for now we’ll need to keep these under top secret wraps *hush hush*.

Mike

This week I worked on a bunch of encounters that are not in the game yet… but you will see them soon enough! I made it so they appear with a specific shape of terrain, like a unique, hand-made hill for example. That way we can control how it looks and plays, while keeping it random and rogue-like ‘ish.

Adjusted a couple things related to the loot, especially in the 2nd wastes and 2nd village area. For instance, rubber ducks will now spawn in bathtubs :P

Made a bunch of adjustments and bug fixes to make sure the tutorial experience is smooth and fun!

Art Team  

Sarah

Marc-André  

This week I made a new grass texture that will be used for the new updated ground material, 3 grass Levels of Details (For optimisation purposes, so the grass doesn't slow the game down), and some small assets like darts and syringes. I quickly pimped up the fireplace with new buckets and wood pieces, and recycled Shawn's amazing rocks (TM) and Emmanuel's wood texture.

Animation Team

Vincent

Ahoy! This week, in addition to the usual secret cinematic staging and animating, I took a bit of time to make two animations for the player character. One will be giving feedback for our favourite in-game status : Food Poisoning! So yeah, it’s a vomiting animation, and I hope we’ll have great sound effect to do it honor. The second one is a ‘Shocked’ motion, that’ll play when you get struck by various electrical devices.

Can’t wait for you guys and gals to get sick and shocked! In-game, preferably.

Thank you for tuning in!

Compulsion

Update #41 - First Weekly Update of 2016, preparing the next Pre-Alpha Build!
about 10 years ago – Fri, Jan 29, 2016 at 10:05:38 PM

Hey everyone,

 

We are back on regular schedule with our Weekly Updates, hurray! A good part of the team has been working hard on the intro of the game but unfortunately you will have to wait until the game’s release to see it. It’s not something we want to spoil, but let us tell you that it is very cool!

The rest of the team has been working hard on implementing new features, new areas and new art, some of which you will even be able to see in the next build we are in the final stages of testing!

Programming Team

Camille

After a fair amount of testing, consideration and feedback, we’ve decided to do a major change to the player menu (eg your inventory) and keep the game running while it is presented. This has quite a few repercussions, not least of which is needing to let the player be aware of their surroundings while the menu is displayed. Therefore, the menu will no longer take up the entire screen.

This, in turn, requires a decent pass at resizing and reshuffling widgets around in order to make everything fit. Thankfully, the menu had a fair amount of free space to play around with so compacting things for this new menu wasn’t overly onerous.

The difficult part is the gameplay aspects -- one of the main objectives of this switch is to get rid of the arbitrary constraints on changing equipments and using items in combat. But in order to keep things balanced, this means there needs to be some cooldowns to certain actions to avoid savvy players from quickly hopping in and out of the inventory to instantly perform actions. And those cooldowns need clear communication both on the UI and the player animation point of view.

So a few passes have been done over the last few weeks to improve this feedback and balance things. I find that the menu is much improved from this, although there is still a lot of work to be done.

Design Team

Hayden

Patrol Paths, Security Systems and Barbed Wire…

This new, super-secret area of the game is on lockdown and you’ll need to keep out of sight and quiet if you want get out alive. After a lot of testing and tweaking, we are now seeing groups of NPCs patrolling more complex paths. I was also able to implement security systems that broadcast across the level and are capable of placing NPCs on high alert; coupled with game play specific lighting, geometry placement and loot, it’s an iterative process that I hope will present the player with a rich, stealth gameplay experience.

Working on a level of this size means that you have to use your time wisely in order to complete all the tasks required to bring it to a level of completion satisfactory for passing it on to the art team. I hate to see it go, but like some crazy-ass caterpillar, when it emerges from the art department cocoon it will be a thing of beauty and I can’t wait to help it fly.

For now, enjoy the picture below…

Mike

I added a bunch of new items and crafting recipes to the game! Some of which you can see in the next build, some of which you’ll see later ;) . Keep in mind that these items are still being worked on, so they may have a wrong name / image / description at the moment. Everything is gonna fall in place in due time.

Rebalanced the loot distribution for the garden district area. Wastrels should now have more interesting loot, and their houses as well! White berry plants now (rarely) appear in open, grassy areas.

Reworked the beginning of the game. We now wake up in the Safe House, and learn how to do basic stuff before going out in the wild (we do not force you to do it). Things like crafting, lockpicking, healing up, etc. The items you can find in there have changed a bit... so have a look around!

Animation Team

Remi

Hey everyone! I FINALLY have something to show you this time! This week I was in a sort of transition between rigging and animating the next cinematic, so I decided to take a day or two to make some gameplay animations. It’s not a lot and not super polished as well, but it’s good enough for the time I had.

First of all, I absolutely wanted to work on a specific animation that has been burning my eyes every time I saw it in-game: The NPC Newspaper animation.

This image shows how it was before. It was a placeholder that was implemented a very long time ago. The issue with that placeholder is that it was wayyyy too obvious.

And now, here is the final result. It will still need some animation work for the intro and outro of the animation, but with this animation loop, it will not be as glaring as it was before.

I then tackled some animations that our friendly level designers needed for specific encounters. The first needed animation was for a Sick Wastrel! Because when you only have rotten food to eat, there is a great chance of throwing up! The second animation was a Bobby that gestures to the player to proceed to the next step. Those are very simple and fast to make, yet they are extremely important for the player to understand what is happening and what to do next.

More on the rigging side, I was integrating Wastrellette variants! This has been requested by a lot of you, so we couldn’t wait to show you. We now have different dress colors, hairstyles and hair colors for the Female Wastrel! I received the different textures and mesh from our character artist and I was in charge of integrating them in the game. Here are some of the possibilities that we have for the Female Wastrel.

It feels good to share with you again! Hopefully I’ll be able to share more stuff with you guys and we can’t wait to show some of the incredible work the whole team has been doing on cinematics.

Art Team  

Sarah

Hi everyone! My name is Sarah, I'm new to the team, and very pleased to make your acquaintance. I've been working on fluffing up the background with 2D art and posters. I'm here to make sure the Wellies are in ship-shape and remembering to be good citizens, giving them the latest in Joy products and Happy Face glam. Over the last few weeks I've been working closely with Whitney to narrow down a painterly style that's in keeping with We Happy Few's aesthetic, and we couldn't wait to share some images with you guys.

Marc-André  

Good day everyone!

January was for me a productive month packed with a lot of learning experience. Being assigned to the task of replacing all of We Happy Few's ground foliage, I had to learn lots of new techniques allowing me to create "Oooh it's so pretty" foliage that does not bring gaming machines to their knees.

Overall, I'm quite happy with the results. I hope you have as much fun walking around in the foliage as I had making it!  

I worked on some small pickups objects and items for your inventory.

Narrative Team

Alex

This has been a big week for recording. I’ve been prepping all week for today’s (Friday’s) session with Alex Wyndham. Guillaume likes to wait until the very last minute to deliver brilliant notes on scenes, so I’ve torn the scene up twice. Obviously the last scene, in which all is revealed, couldn’t be more important. It’s a great scene for the other voice actor, who might be a surprise for you guys, if you ever figure out who it is.

I’ve also been adding new things for Arthur to say in various gameplay situations. Meanwhile, I spent a couple of hours with Alice Kensington on Tuesday. She’s giving another voice to our wastrellette, and a lovely, rude song.

Meanwhile I’ve been editing my last recording session with one of our unannounced voice actors. (Apparently she is quite gorgeous, but we don’t turn on the camera during sessions, so all I care about is that she is a brilliant voice actress.) The amount of voice acting in this game keeps soaring; we’ll end up with something like 30 hours of recordings. So we’re earning our “triple-I” monicker.

Thanks for reading!

Compulsion Team

A Blog Post for the New Year
about 10 years ago – Fri, Jan 22, 2016 at 10:53:39 PM

Production Update from Sam

Happy new year everyone!

I hope 2016 is treating you all well. It’s an unusually warm winter in Montreal this year, and the team is back to work, rested and excited about the year ahead.

As it’s the start of a new year, I wanted to write a bit of a recap of last year, and let you know our plans for the year ahead. It’s quite a lengthy post, so if you want to skip to what you’re interested in, here’s a brief table of contents:

  • 2015 In Review  
  • New Team Members
  • We Happy Few update - Plans for 2016
  • Kickstarter Rewards and Other Backer Info

2015 In Review

You probably won’t believe me, but we only decided on the title for We Happy Few the day before we released our announcement trailer. We had been wracking our brains for months, trying to come up with a name that might introduce the game in just a few words. Alex, I believe, came up with We Happy Few - an excerpt from the Saint Crispin’s Day Speech from Shakespeare’s Henry V - and we all agreed it was substantially better than the complete rubbish we had previously. You can tell an idea has something going for it when our team of substantially different people all think, “Shit, you know, that’s not bad. I don’t hate it. You know, I might even like it. I don’t like you, Sam, but I do like that title!”

So we announced We Happy Few on 26 February, after a little over a year working on conception and pre-production. Our plan was cunning: set up a new company website (that we could actually update from time to time…), then launch the wehappyfewgame.com site and trailer and see how interested we could get people two weeks before we went to PAX East. We were really surprised at how well the trailer did - we got more views on that trailer than we had on all our previous Contrast videos combined. We were 12 people by then, double the size we were a year previously.

Guillaume being interviewed by PCGamer
Guillaume being interviewed by PCGamer

We went to PAX East, in Boston, and were surprised at just how many people came by and said “we saw your trailer!”. We met some great new friends, including some of our earliest and most consistent community members (you know who you are), by showing a very, very, VERY early version of the game. We got some great feedback on what worked, and what didn’t. And we had a lot of fun, watching people try over and over again to beat the demo.

I want to reiterate here that it was a very early demo - that was really the full game, as we knew it, no holds barred. We’ve done this since the beginning, and we’re really grateful for both the players at PAX, and our pre-alpha backers on Kickstarter, for all the fantastic feedback. The game has improved immensely as a result.

However, during this time, we realised one very important thing. From the launch of the trailer, and all the feedback at PAX, one major comment shone through: this game looks like Bioshock! Awesome! I can’t wait to get my Bioshock fix.

This is something people said about Contrast as well, and we think it’s mostly about the recent-history, dystopian setting and similar stylization. But there’s a problem with making that comparison - Bioshock Infinite was a $200 million project, if you include marketing and production budgets. We were approximately 1/100th of that. While we have a lot of people defending us and saying “they’re a much smaller team”, people’s expectations appeared to be through the roof for this game. This has worried us quite a bit since then. It’s definitely a good thing to be compared to something as high quality as Bioshock (and a bit humbling), but it meant that we needed to make a few changes.

(Also - just to set the record straight, people keep saying that we’re ex-Irrational employees. We’re not - no one at the studio has worked at Irrational. If you’d like to check out what some ex-Bioshock people are doing, take a look at The Flame in the Flood or Perception.)

The most important change we needed to make was that we needed to make a better game than we were making at the time. We can probably never deliver Bioshock - not without the kind of money we need to sell our souls for - but maybe we could make an admirable attempt. We looked at the game we were making, and the budget we had to do it in, and we decided it wasn’t going to cut it. We needed funding - and this is where Kickstarter came in.

No touching!
No touching!

The first key to the funding question was to go to Kickstarter. Kickstarter is a fantastic funding method for game companies - if you do a great job on your campaign, you are able to access development funding on really great terms, you can easily keep in touch with a great new community, and most importantly you have validation that your game is interesting to people. It’s one of the best ways of knowing that yes, we should invest more in this game.

We had a great time creating our campaign. We made something unique: a video of Uncle Jack interviewing Guillaume. Just because I’m feeling quite candid tonight, it may interest you to know that Aladeen (the video director who has helped us on our trailers since Contrast-time) and I lost a lot of sleep making that video, because we just couldn’t get it to work until the day before we were due to go live. When it finally all came together… well, we were very happy with it. We hope you guys enjoyed it.

We made a few mistakes with the campaign - eg launching it around the same time as E3 - but overall we were funded to the tune of $334,754 CAD! We learned a lot during the campaign, and I hope we’ve been doing a good job on keeping you all updated since then.

For those of you reading who backed us on Kickstarter, thank you. I have a section below talking about rewards etc, but I want you to know that your contribution has been an essential part of making We Happy Few significantly better quality than it would have been otherwise.

At E3 2015, Microsoft announced something big - they were opening up their version of early access, a program called the Xbox One Game Preview program. Developers have been asking about this for years - for all the discussion about early access as a concept, it’s a really great tool to make better games, and to involve you guys in the process of making them. Microsoft’s version is different in that it is a highly curated program, with games like Elite: Dangerous, The Long Dark and Ark: Survival Evolved.

When we met with Microsoft, tentatively asking about releasing some day on Xbox One, their enthusiasm for We Happy Few took us by surprise. They were extremely positive, and offered us their support to help bring We Happy Few to the Game Preview program. We thought about this, and after saying we were interested, they said “well, we’ll need a new trailer in about… oh, 2 weeks or so”.

So we (and poor, long suffering Aladeen) busted our asses again, and created this. Microsoft showed this at the GamesCom press briefing, and suddenly we had even more exposure. “Holy shit this looks like Bioshock!” Thanks, Xbox One user! Now we can disappoint you too.

Just kidding. And so the cycle continued. At this point, with the success of the Kickstarter and Microsoft’s support, we had a solid plan for building the best game we could.

It wasn’t all easy going. In August last year, our game/level designer, Josh, was offered a position he couldn’t refuse at Ubisoft Montreal. I’m happy to say that he’s really, really excited about his new project, and has been enjoying every minute of it. At the same time, Vince, our remaining level designer, went on parental leave to supervise the creation of the second member of his little army of minions.

So, we were left short handed on the design side. We were also faced with this whole “have to make a bigger/better game” thing, which meant that we were not going to be able to launch on Early Access / Xbox Game Preview as early as we’d hoped. Whoever said “this holiday season” was being terribly optimistic.

In Contrast news, we launched on the NVIDIA Shield Android TV, which was a fairly incredible technical accomplishment. Contrast was a very demanding game, performance-wise, and the NVIDIA people are magicians to get it to run so well on the Android TV. We’re still getting emails from people telling us how much they enjoyed the game. This is still just lovely to hear, so thank you for telling us.

New Team Members

However, just as one door closed, another door opened, and a few cliches jumped out. In August, an old friend contacted us saying that he was coming free from his current project, and we jumped at the chance to bring him on board.

I’m very excited to announce that David Sears, a creative director/game designer with 25 years in the industry, including at Ubisoft Montreal, Sony and a host of other studios, has joined our team as design director. David served as a creative director at Ubi, working with the Rainbow Six and Assassin’s Creed teams, and was the creator of the original SOCOM. He was one of the first people we went to for advice on the concept behind We Happy Few, and has been advising us on and off since before we launched Contrast. We’ve finally convinced him to join us, and convinced the immigration authorities to let him into the country, and we’re really excited about .

To help make this game as great as we can make it, we’ve also brought on some new very talented team members in the past 9 months. They are, in order of appearance:

  • Vince (level designer, mentioned above, slowly creating an army of children to take over the world)
  • Marc-André (environment artist, also known as la chèvre)
  • Mike (level designer, musician and beard enthusiast)
  • Vincent (note the “nt”, animator, joining us from France with an English vocabulary consisting almost solely of Monty Python quotes)
  • Antoine (level designer, and itinerant Montreal-Vancouver inhabitant)
  • Stephanie (quality assurance, and lead “you done fucked up” adviser)
  • Hayden (level designer, and Louisianan cooking expert),
  • Warren (3D artist, hugely experienced artist formerly from Epic Games), 
  • Shawn (3D artist, recovering Call of Duty artist and Very Attractive Man(™) - Naila’s opinion, although I won’t lie, he is attractive),
  • Sarah (2D artist and Dad joke enthusiast), and
  • Valentino (sound designer extraordinaire, who comes from Italy and speaks all the languages). 
The team - except Whitney, who abandoned us over the last two days for some field work studying recent developments in US pop tart supply
The team - except Whitney, who abandoned us over the last two days for some field work studying recent developments in US pop tart supply

Counting full, part time, remote and temporary people, our team has now increased to between 21 and 24 people on any given day. As that’s almost twice as many as we were a year ago, we could no longer fit into our old, leaky office. In early November, we were given a choice: move on 1 December, or in February/March. As we were simply not actually going to fit into our current office for much longer, I spent a very, very intense 3 weeks designing and preparing our new office.

The advantage of moving was that we had a blank canvas to work from, so I was able to give the place a few Compulsion touches. We moved from this:

 to this:

Our new office, Mike and Sam in the foreground
Our new office, Mike and Sam in the foreground

Our epic move, from one side of our building to the other, was completed in just under 24 hours, and we didn’t even miss a nightly build cycle. We landed next to our friends and neighbours Double Stallion Games (who just released their game Big Action Mega Fight on Steam), and we now get to see the sun during the day. Goodbye, dark cave where the dubious pipe heating sounds like a miniature dwarf is pounding on it with an iron hammer! Hello, air conditioning and a closet for our boots! And yellow pipes, because I was feeling whimsical.

We Happy Few Update

Looking ahead to 2016, we will be continuing with our weekly development updates and pre-alpha builds for another few months. We have a lot of content to build, and features and systems to master.

We still plan to launch on Xbox One Game Preview and Early Access on Steam at the same time. Thanks to the expansion to the game’s scope we discussed above, we are aiming for a mid year release. Once we have a firm date, we will let you all know.

We will very likely attend PAX East again, in Boston. We would love for those of you who met us last time to come and see us again, and we’d love to meet those of you who have joined us since. The showfloor is super hectic, so this year I’m thinking we should all go for a drink. We’ll pick a bar, and meet up there (or just drink alone, who knows?) to hang out in a more relaxed setting. Once we confirm we’re going, we’ll organise the meetup. We will likely also attend other shows, and will let you all know on the blog and on social media once we have firm plans.

And finally: the next pre-alpha update will be coming at the end of next week. We are attending the Montreal IGDA demo on Tuesday 26 January, and will show the next update there. Once we confirm it’s stable enough to release, we’ll push it out. I’ll try not to make too many bad jokes in the build notes.

Kickstarter Rewards

Alright! Rewards. This is going to be a little bit of a dry, organizational part of the post, so bear with me. Now that the BackerKit campaign has closed, we have enough surveys answered that we can start working on the rewards. For those of you who haven’t filled out your survey, please do so, because we won’t be able to send you your rewards until you do.

For pre-alpha copies of We Happy Few and the Collector’s Edition copies of Contrast, those have been available inside BackerKit since August. As always, we would love to get your feedback on the next build of the pre-alpha on the forum; look for that next Thursday/Friday.

For the non-pre-alpha version of the game, we will provide Steam codes on release of the Early Access version of the game. For those of you who chose DRM-free codes, this timing depends on a few things we have in the works, but I can’t talk about these yet.

T-shirts: we have everything we need to know, and are currently working with our distributor to get these manufactured and sent out to you.

The art book, soundtrack and collector’s boxes, both physical and digital, pose a bigger challenge. As we are still working on art and music for the game, and likely will be until quite close to release, we have to wait until then before we finalise these designs. So these physical items will be delayed beyond what we anticipated in the Kickstarter. I understand this is a disappointment, but we want to make sure that you get the best quality books and music that we can create.

In-game contributions: we’re just about at the stage where we will be asking for people’s contributions for the Vandal tier. We will email you guys privately to talk about how you’d like to contribute. We’ll then introduce you to one of our team members who will work with you to integrate your work into the game. This is going to be really exciting - we’re looking forward to what you come up with!

I hope I haven’t forgotten anything. As always, if you have any questions you can ask us on twitter, the forums, by email, or comment on our updates on Kickstarter. Honestly about the only thing you can’t do is just yell at us and expect us to hear it. Because we have headphones on.

Conclusion

In conclusion, your honour, I submit that this has to the longest blog post I have written in some time. I am sorry that I did not have time to make it shorter.

Thanks for reading, and here’s to an exciting 2016.

Sam and the rest of the team at Compulsion

Update #39 - Last Weekly Update of the year!
over 10 years ago – Fri, Dec 18, 2015 at 09:26:12 PM

Hello Backers,

 

Wow, here we are at the final update for 2015! What a crazy year it has been for us. First of all, we would like to thank you all for your support, which is the reason why we are able to bring you weekly updates :) While we are only showing you half of what we are doing (as the rest is story related), we hope you’ve been enjoying the updates so far. We have a lot more planned for next year, so thank you backers, once again, for supporting us. 

Next week Sam will write an actual end of year post, which will round up the year, so stay tuned!

Narrative Team

Alex

This week I’ve been continuing to work on our gigantic Encounters spreadsheet. Level designers contribute the situation and objective: do this, get that. I try to figure out who the characters in the encounters are, and why they want those things, essentially retro-engineering from the gameplay. I then write dialog, if needed, as well as tooltips, journal entries, and lore. I’m most of the way through fleshing out the encounters for the first Garden District island. So GD1 is now, at least in our design, populated with all sorts of strange characters that the player can interact with in ways more challenging than clonking them on the head and taking their stuff.

We’re also working on the very early parts of the game, where we’ll spawn encounters that help define the world, and incidentally show new players how to do basic things, like clonk characters on the head and take their stuff.

In my copious free time, I’m also writing a later player character’s version of every single thing Arthur says. This character has a very different point of view on her interactions, and I don’t think she’s as inclined to apologize for, say, clonking people on the head, or taking their stuff.

Design Team

Vince

This week, I mainly supported the art team to integrate the new art assets and animations into the introduction sequence for Arthur. That means that my old ugly gray box that I’m tired of looking at gets replaced by beautiful breathtaking models and textures! It is one of my favorite parts in level design - to see this map I have been working in for a while suddenly become so nice and interesting, it’s a nice change of scenery.

But, it comes at a price. I have to make sure to test it and play it because new assets might mean adjustments to be made in the collisions, I have to make sure all the paths are unobstructed by the new props and that all the gameplay elements are still working properly.

And while I’m doing that, I’m also fixing the little bugs and fixing those small things that I keep noting down every time I replay the sequence. They aren’t game breaking, and someone not paying attention might not even see them, but they still need to be fixed at one point! This process can be frustrating sometimes, because some of the smallest little details sometimes take a lot more time than anticipated to fix because it creates another bug, or simply doesn’t quite do the trick, so you must start again with a different approach. But it feels very satisfying when you just scratch out one bug after another!

I also worked on a very special prop, some kind of device unique to our world, that you will be able to interact with. That’s probably the most complicated object I have worked on yet for the game and just love the challenge of figuring out with my teammates how this device works and then we all make it happen!

Hayden

Hi Folks,

My name is Hayden and I’m one of the new guys on the design team.

This week I tested and implemented some of our new stealth mechanics and patrolling groups of NPCs in a new part of the game we are working on, which by the way is turning out very well as you can see from the screenshot below. In addition, I was also able to block in a new super-fun scenario that I’m sure you’re all going to enjoy.

Animation Team

Yet Another Vincent

I’ve now been around for a full month, it might be time to say hello to all!

Hello!

I've been busy settling in and started working on a big cinematic... trying to do justice to Alex's great dialogue, finding out technical tricks for the staging to work better... and I can't say much more! Cause it's a secret. And I don't want to make any enemies amongst my new colleagues. Yet.

Sam edit: I’m watching you, Vincent number 2.

Remi

Hey everyone! I know it’s been a while since I was allowed to show you anything and unfortunately I am still working on secret animations. The only thing I can say is that we are currently working on a nice challenging part of the game and I can’t wait for you guys to see it! Hopefully I will be able to gather bits of the whole process that we are going through in order to make a nice breakdown post about it later on. Until then, I wish you all a great holiday and have fun playing games!

Programming Team

Camille

In our recent build update, we let slip by a pretty serious crash when loading saved games, which essentially was the result of a shortcoming in our save system that we’d identified early on but had only worked around until now by not saving select parts of the game data. Now everything is getting saved properly and the game no longer crashes attempting to load savegames.

But unfortunately our save system is still not robust enough to handle certain changes in format, making it hard to maintain save game backwards compatibility across updates. For now, our playthroughs are short enough that it’s not an issue, but I’ll have to revisit the save system altogether soon.

Thank you for tuning again this week!

From the whole team at Compulsion Games, we wish you all best wishes for the holiday season. May your slumber be reinvigorating and your gaming on point.