After a lot of hard work, this week we released a Pre-alpha build 10, which contains a major tech update to introduce our new filler building and alleyway systems. These two systems are the biggest gameplay change we’ve introduced yet, and also drastically improve the appearance of The Village and the third biome. We’ll leave you guys playing the pre-alpha to figure out how this affects everything :)

If you would like a more detailed look, you can read all the changes and build notes here

Programming Team  

Camille

I prepared the build, pushed it out, and behold, it was very good!

Narrative Team

Alex

We’re making a big push to populate our procedural world with encounters, so I’m shifting my efforts from recording barks and cutscenes to fleshing out encounters. David has written a huge gigantic spreadsheet detailing all sorts of shenanigans you can get into on our various islands. My job is to take his gameplay specifications and make them into encounters that feel meaningful in addition to being fun challenges. Writing dialog is easy (well, I’ve been doing it for 25 years); the hard part is figuring out who the NPC we’re meeting is, what his unique agenda is, and making sure that is revelatory of our world, our lore and our theme.

Also, Sam and I put together my new standing desk. Thanks, Sam.

Design Team

Vince

I’m still working part time on the intro, making sure the artists and animators can integrate their work smoothly, and I’m working on the more specific functionalities needed for this particular sequence that arose from all the crazy ideas we had.

And when I was not doing that, I worked on a complete re-work of the loot distribution on the first Garden District island. We have a new loot system from Camille and I’m using that to make all containers give you more predictable loot. It will also be a lot easier to tweak those numbers without having to go inside each map. That also includes exciting new items and new crafting recipes!

Also in the Garden District, I started cleaning up all the houses so that the NPCs have more space to navigate because a lot of them would get stuck, and it was also sometimes a bit of a pain for the player to navigate without getting stuck in weird places.

We’re going to test and tweak this new progression throughout the next weeks, so prepare yourself for a brand new game start experience in the next update!

Mike

Hello!

This weeks I have integrated a new house in the Garden District. This house seems empty at first glance but is actually full of stuff :) If you pay attention you’ll find them!

I have also created 4 new encounters and a new quest for the Garden District, which you’ll have to discover in game ;)

 Art Team 

Marc-Andre 

This week I did a bunch of small props!

Thanks for tuning in!

Compulsion Games

This week we have another in depth piece written by one of our team members! But before we get into this we would like to announce that we will be closing our slacker backer campaign on BackerKit this Monday, December 6th. As mentioned in our end of October update, it’s important to us that pre-alpha players have plenty of time to play and give us feedback before then, as we don’t want anyone to be short changed and not get a chance to contribute before a bigger community joins in. So what does this mean for you? Make sure that all of your information is up to date (address, tiers, payment info etc..), as we will lock down backer information soon. And, this is also the last chance to get in on the pre-alpha feedback. Don’t hesitate to send us an email ([email protected]) if you have any concerns.

This week, Marc is going to talk about game metrics. It might not sound bubbly, but it is a crucial part of game development.

Hello happy few!

Marc, gameplay and AI programmer here. I have done a lot of small updates and added a few features to gameplay, sound and AI in the past few weeks, but I have been thinking that it’s not that interesting to just deliver a series of bullet points. Instead, this week I wanted to talk about an important subject of game development that is becoming critical at our stage: Metrics.

We have been recruiting a few people in level design and art to help push all the content the game needs and it’s becoming really necessary to make sure we’re all on the same page when it comes to the game space.

Metrics are what we call the series of “regulations” we try to follow when building areas: e.g. width of doors and corridors, height of windows, etc. Defining metrics allows for better tuning of the gameplay by controlling the space, it reduces player confusion, and, very importantly for game development, reduces the amount of bugs.

For instance in We Happy Few the player can vault over fences, enter windows, and climb walls. The level designers need to know the physical dimensions that are taken into account by the gameplay code to know where to place their objects.

Some games use really strict metrics (think about the square/hexagonal grids on turn based strategy games, or the block heights in most platformers), which has a lot of advantages: it’s clear to the player what he can do, it’s much easier to build, and to test; and there are no edge cases that could be the source of unexpected behaviours. But when you do a (relatively) realistic open world game, you don’t want to limit yourself to prefabs of a given dimension when building the world; it needs to be more organic than that, and as such, there will be problems.

So it’s even more important to have a clear idea of the capability of the player and the AI characters to try to avoid using geometry that does not clearly correspond to one ability or another. It will still happen, no software as complicated as a game is bug-free, but trying to respect the metrics as much as possible helps a lot to relieve the pain.

Coming back to the vaulting & climbing example, the code needs to detect whether an object is “climbable”. It uses at least two tunable values: minimum height and maximum height. As we have two different types of climbing - a “low” climbing and a “high” climbing - there is also a cutoff (middle) height. We want to avoid obstacles with a height that is about the cutoff point, as we want to be clear which kind of climbing it is: the “low” objects should be between the minimum and middle height, and the “high” between middle and maximum. Obstacles that can be “vaulted” over need to have a maximum depth, and ideally be well below it to avoid physics collision issues. But in this case we also need a minimum depth otherwise the animation will not match nicely.

As a gameplay programmer it is my job to tell the designers the ideal dimensions they should use, so I created a technical document with all this information, and created a test map containing grey blocks representing these dimensions:

The other advantage of having test maps like that is to check the gameplay code is working as intended, i.e. it is useful for regression testing (making sure stuff that was working is still working).

Another very important aspect is metrics for AI. We all know how stupid characters can look in video games: getting stuck in walls, not knowing how to walk over a pebble on the floor, etc. One wonders why it’s still happening, and in big AAA games too, now that we have a lot of experience and very sophisticated game engines. Well, the answer is that AI navigation and behaviour is a hard problem, really hard. The number of factors to take into account is crazy. When you see these bugs in games, don’t believe it is because the developers are lazy (they’re not) it’s because they have tons of issues to fix and some just slip under the radar. You should see what it’s like before they release it into the wild.

What if the AI can walk above a 30cm step but a random object ended up on its path and it’s a 32cm obstacle? What if the AI capsule (its collision volume) is 70cm diameter but there is a flower pot that reduces a corridor width to 69? You end up with stuck characters, because game engines need to simplify things, and so when the AI looks like it should have the space to go somewhere its game engine physical representation may not.

To minimize all these issues the game spaces need to respect the AI constraints, which are stricter than for the player. For instance:

The other problem for AI is the generation of the navigation mesh: For a character to know how to get somewhere, she needs to have a mesh that indicates the connections between different spaces. Aka, where can you walk. This is generated with some extra tolerance/margins, relative to the geometry, to avoid AI getting into places they shouldn’t (for instance stuck through walls). So, you need to add space on top of the “size” of the characters:

The green areas are where the AI would consider walking, and the green arrows on doors represent the “navigation links” that AI can use to go from one patch of the nav mesh to another.

In this example the dimensions are minimum: a corridor needs to be wide enough for two characters to go through relatively comfortably (so they don’t get stuck walking in the opposite direction to each other), and a door can accommodate only one character. The wider the space, the fewer issues there will be. It’s one of the main reason there are few open world games that do a lot of interiors, and when there are some they are usually very controlled environments.

You can already see how the corridors dimensions are not “realistic” (for a corridor inside a house at least):

But there is a difference between “realistic” and “believable”. Video games rarely use realistic dimensions; in my experience, when they do they shoot themselves in the foot and it leads to buggy games. Instead, we use “believable” dimensions, where everything is slightly oversized and room layouts are much more open that they would be in real life. After all, what’s important is not the reality, it’s the illusion of reality. If you double check the games you’re playing you will soon notice how everybody's doing it.

So that’s why we need to define metrics: to simplify our life, and allow everybody on the team to be on the same page building consistent environments. I’d like to deliver a game that is bug-free, but I know that won’t happen, so we aim to deliver a game with few problems, that are of little consequence when they arise.

Hope you enjoyed this update, have a great weekend!

 

This week the team continued working on various aspects of the game including: the intro, the environment, the NPC voice overs and of course, the next build update!

We’ve been keeping quiet about the next update, because we were not 100% sure when we’d complete the work. It’s a very technically important update, because it is all about alleys and filler buildings in the Village and the new biome. “Why does that matter, you say?” Well, it completely changes the game. No more running away from people and hiding in random woods behind houses, no more easy escapes into the wilderness. Plus, it makes the Village and the new biome look significantly better - and much more in line with the first trailer that you guys saw. However, it has been a technically difficult thing to implement, and required a huge amount of work from Matt and the artists. Hopefully you’ll like it as much as we do.

The next update should be released next week, although that will depend on whether our office move goes according to plan. We’re moving just down the hall to a slightly bigger space next Tuesday, which should help us from stepping on each others’ toes as the team expands.

We also have a surprise guest this week!

This is a blog post by Nicolas Marquis, the composer working on We Happy Few. Nic also composed the score for Contrast, and we’re delighted to be able to share some of his behind the scenes work. This is Nic’s second post about his musical research for the We Happy Few score, you can read the first one here.

Hey all,

As a second post on this music blog about the 60's, I wanted to talk about one crazy beast… The Moog Modular (an emblematic synthesizer of the 60's) and also about some electronic pioneers of the era!

As you can see on the pic, there's a lot of controls! In fact, these are modules mounted in a cabinet. And to actually have a sound coming out of it, well you need to connect some of those various modules with patch cords (see on the table on the same pic). What was outstanding at the time, is that there was a lot of flexibility and controls to modify the sound, from experimental noise to something really punchy. The sound was mono meaning that you couldn't have more than one note playing at a time. As of now, you're lucky if you can put your hands on one, there are few available around the globe that are still working! For example, there's one at the Toronto University if you want to take a look ;-)  

The name comes from his inventor, Robert Moog and the first to order a prototype was choreographer Alwin Nikolais (who was also composing his own electronic soundtracks). But the very first commercial Moog Modular was available in 1964. Eric Siday, considered to be one of the the pioneers of psychoacoustics, was also an important figure in the development of the Moog Synthesizer. Check this very informative video from the BBC archive:

The first band to use a Moog was Lothar and The Hand People, but their first recording actually using one was released later on (in 1968). Have a listen to this extract (somehow it makes me think about Pink Floyd, in their Syd Barrett era):

In fact, the very first recording by a music band was in 1967 by... The Monkees!

But it was Wendy Carlos in 1968 that first brought the Modular to world-wide attention with her interpretation of some famous J.S. Bach works on his album "Switched-On Bach". It was one of the first classical recordings to sell over 500 000 copies. By the way, she's the same composer famous for her soundtrack on Stanley Kubrick’s "ClockWork Orange". 

On the other side of things, Perrey and Kingsley for example made use of it in a more ludic - almost schizophrenic - way (this track was released in 1967):

By the way, you may have heard them before: one of their tracks was sampled by the band Smash Mouth for their opening of their 1997 hit "Walking On The Sun"…without their permission!

Also, Perrey worked with Andy Badale aka Angelo Badalamenti (yes, the composer for David Lynch's movies) on the track "E.V.A." which will end up later on being, well, simply one of the most sampled track in hip hop and rap history!

Finally, The Beastie Boys released an instrumental album called "The In Sound From Way Out" as a tribute to Perrey and Kingsley.  

Then later on there will be Emerson, Lake and Palmer with "Lucky Man" in the 70s (where you hear the famous Moog portamento sound at the end) and Tangerine Dream, but ok, ok, I digress!

As to finish this post, I wanted to add that Mr Moog was also distributing the Theremin (created by Leon Theremin), another worthy instrument used by many movie composers in the 50s like Bernard Herrmann on The Day The Earth Stood Still (1951).

Next post is going to be about some more electronic music, musique concrete and… Delia Derbyshire!

Nic

Art Team  

Marc-Andre

This week I worked on a bunch of little things. I integrated various elements into the game, made pretty signs and optimized collisions.

Gameplay Team

Vince 

Still working on the intro, fixing all the little bugs and adding the last functionalities. It is now playable from start to end. I also integrated some of the key objects and animations as soon as the others were done with them to make sure everything still works as intended. I also tested spawning it in the actual game world, and it works…sometimes. I’ll need some of Matt’s magic. 

To give me a little break on the intro stuff, (and to give you guys something to tackle in the next update), I also did a little Village encounter! The Overdosing Wellie. Yeah, who said there’s such a thing as too much Joy, right? This poor Wellie learned it the hard way. At least some other good citizens are watching over him, caring for him… or are they? 

Mike

This week I have worked on several new encounters for the game. These special events are meant to add variations and content all around the world of We Happy Few. Here is one of them:

Mysterious special event!

Two wastrels are digging a hole in the ground… but for what reason?

New crafting recipes!  

I added new chemical crafting recipes to the game:

They can all be crafted, or found at some places in the game.

I have also worked on a big, multi-objective quest that we will reveal later. ;)

Narrative Team 

Alex 

I split this week between editing barks, and working on narrative content for the opening scene. 

I selected audio takes for the bobby and the doctor. I also built audio for the opening scene. 

We’ve been building the opening scene. Although the full narrative won’t come out until the game’s released, the game will start with a bang -- a bang full of details about Arthur, and about his world, and what he needs to do and why he needs to do it. There will be gameplay, and there will be narrative cutscenes, and there will be narrative audio that responds to the gameplay. 

So I’ve been building that audio; and I’ve been filling Arthur’s opening with characters and items, so that if the player wants, he or she can not only explore a bit, s/he can unravel some mysteries about who they are and what they’re up to. 

By “filling,” I mean writing lists of things that could be in places. Then I discuss them with the art department, and we talk about what can be done and what can’t. (It turns out we could do Uncle Jack bobbleheads! But we thought that was too Fallout-y/Borderlands-y.) 

The more we develop the characters in the opening, the more likely we’ll want to see them again later...

Thank you for tuning in!

Compulsion Games

 

 

This week the team is feeling quite wordy so we won’t take too much of your time with a lengthy intro! In today’s update: blocking out the in-game intro sequence, dialogue recording, finalising our initial filler building sets and tidying up combat.

Gameplay Team

Vince

Welcome back to normal life for me! So, as you may know, I was out for a bit more than a month for paternity leave, and I came back on monday. Baby Victor is well and healthy and everyone's still alive, but horribly lacking sleep. I'll get used to that.

My task this week was blocking out a map that will serve as our main character's intro sequence. It's a new place we didn't quite make any design concepts yet, and it is a mix between cinematic and gameplay, so it is a pretty unique scenario that needed a lot of thinking. I also had to keep in mind that the player might need to return to this place in the actual game, so I needed to make sure the dimensions of this map are pretty much accurate from the beginning. There was a lot of back in forth required to make sure everyone was satisfied with the result.

We also planned what the player can do in the gameplay parts and where each cinematic would start and end.

The basic layout is pretty much done, and I will continue to work on this next week and add all the required cinematic and gameplay placeholders to really get a good feel of the timing and the pacing.

Also, Camille mentioned the journal system last week, so she showed me around how that stuff needs to be implemented. I started converting one of the cinematic scenes I had already made with the old system and adapted it to the new system, just to get the hang of it. It works great!

J.R.

Apart from setting up for another cinematic, I worked on various animations here and there. I couldn’t start to detail everything, so let me just make a quick list of the things I did :

• Updated combat animations to make sure NPC don’t clip in the camera when they attack;
• Added a “backstep” animation for NPCs, they’ll now be quicker to get out of combat range; 
• Added left & right variations for the player’s hit reactions; 
• Added animations for gift offerings to the Wellies of your heart; 
• Integrated 45° strafes animations, or in simpler terms, diagonal walk cycles; 
• “Coughing” animation for player and NPCs, should they ever be suffocating; 
• Added a “vault over” animation for the player to smoothly navigate obstacles. 

So that’s it for me, bits and pieces!

Narrative Team

Alex

You did not hear from me last week because last Thursday and Friday I was in the recording studio with the intrepid José (our audio producer), recording a Doctor and a Bobby. We have roughly doubled the number of things Doctors and Bobbies can now say, although we (and by “we,” I mean Marc) have to integrate them into these characters’ AIs. When, exactly, does each character say each sort of line?

Today, I was in the studio recording Alex Wyndham and Katherine Kingsley, who were in London. Great actors are magic. They take a line that you heard in your head, and make it their own. Sometimes, you find yourself caught off guard by a line they perform, even though you are reading the words on the page, which you wrote, even as they do it. It’s a sure sign that the performance is amazing when you burst out laughing in the middle of the recording session.

Poor Katherine Kingsley! I auditioned her last year, and she was brilliant. And then I went more or less radio silent. She’d ping me, and I’d say, yes, we truly intend to record you, but I have to do x and y characters first. I did fairly long auditions with her over Skype, to the point where I wouldn’t blame her for wondering if I’d just recorded her audition and was using it in the game (which is apparently a Known Abuse of Actors).

So when she finally got the call, I imagine she probably went through a moment of, “wait a second, these guys are actually for real?”

She turned out to be every bit as superb as I hoped. She’s a part of the opening scene, which we’re working on now.

Now comes the work of cutting out sound takes. It takes much longer to cut out the sound takes from an hour’s session than the hour itself. Sometimes I have to listen to each take a few times to decide which one I want. Sometimes I have to construct better takes from two takes with good parts.

The other thing I did: rewrote the opening scene. The opening scene of Arthur’s playthrough, which is the opening scene for the game as well, has been sitting on my computer in various forms for well over a year. But now the team is all working on it. This week David and Vincent added yards of new gameplay to it. So, Arthur has to respond to all these new challenges in some way, right? He has to say something Arthur-y. So, two days before my recording session, I was writing new things for Arthur to say.

I can’t tell you when all this new content will make it into the game, but I hope you dig it!

Art Team

Emmanuel

I worked on some more brick buildings this week:

Marc-André  

I continued working on the buildings for the new Biome!

Thank you for tuning in for another week of updates!  

Compulsion Games