As you know, this month we are working on the night cycle. Along with our work on the night pass, we’ve also been implementing some fixes/changes requested by the community, some of which you can read below.

We’ve also made some changes to our forum layouts, which means you’ll actually be able to know which threads you have read and which you haven’t! Crazy, we know. And, to make sure that we can communicate better about what we’re working on (and what we’re waiting on), we have also set up a Trello board for tracking issues. If you see an issue or have some feedback about the game, you can take a look at it to see if someone has already brought it up, if we are already working on it, and if it will be included in the next update.

And again, thank you for all the feedback so far!

Programming Team 

Camille 

The last two weeks involved a lot of silent behind the scenes work as I researched and put together the system with which our artists can create the distinct appearance of the day, twilight and night conditions. Previously, our environment, lighting and effects consisted of various components hastily cobbled together and often interacting with each other in unpredictable ways. With so many variables to control, changes like changing the overall colour of the world was tedious and overly complicated.

So I created a new master control for all these effects and linked together the parametres that made sense in order to simplify the creation and maintenance of these new lighting conditions. Emmanuel finally got his grubby little hands on this new tool on Wednesday and we have been working together to improve it and reproduce Whitney’s fancy new atmosphere concepts within the game.

Narrative Team

Alex

As part of a general cleanup of combat, we’ve decided to try and improve immersion by removing the very gamey suspicion eyeballs that hang over the Wellies’ heads. As part of this, we need to significantly improve both the visual and audio feedback that we give the player about the suspicion states of the AIs. For me this means we need to clean up the combat voice overs. AIs were talking over each other, and you couldn’t tell who was coming after you in a mob of people.

So, one of the things I did this week was trim down some of the Wellie attack lines in Pro Tools (an audio editing program). That allowed us to separate the audio barks into short lines for the Wellies to say while they are smacking you (“Keep CALM!”) and longer lines for the Wellies to say while they’re waiting to smack you (“Why aren’t you happy? You need to be happy!”). Once we’ve done a better job of locating the voices in space (“spatializing”) this should make it easier to identify where the next attack is coming from.

I also wrote more greetings for both NPCs and for the playable character (since everyone’s been asking for them), lines for NPCs to react to night coming on, and lines for Wastrels to react to other Wastrels being in a fight with you.

You should probably soon hear Uncle Jack warning you not to be out at night; you’ll know why ;)

And, Julian Casey (Uncle Jack), my wife Lisa, and I recorded “combat grunts,” i.e., noises people make when they are trying to make you lie down. Those should make combat feel much more visceral.

Art Team

Marc-André

This week I've been working on adapting a double decker bus model by creating new topology, textures and materials, as well as a small prop. As you can see, we won't be driving it! It will have an interesting ​mysterious​ purpose though :)

Gameplay Team  

Rémi

Finally, this week I have been working on something that is not entirely top secret!

I have been animating and tweaking a lot of gameplay animations in order for the AIs to use a particularly nasty weapon of choice: the bayonet! They may not be able to shoot you, but you have to remain careful about the pointy end!

So basically, I had to retarget most of the combat animations of the generic male characters, and tweak them all so they fit with the proper handling of the bayonet (going from one handed to two handed).

Since we have more than a hundred animations it would be too much and probably boring to show them all. I would prefer that you guys experience them directly in-game!

But I was still able to extract a few of them to show you guys. Enjoy!

J.R.

Yep, we animators are coming back from the dead (read secret narrative stuff) for the week!

For the same reason that Alex worked on combat barks, I worked a lot on general feedback of the animations this week, both on revising what we currently have as well as creating some additional animations that we needed.

For instance, I have exaggerated some poses for the suspicion of the NPCs, so that the difference between “aware”, “suspicious” and “aggressive” is now clearer. Also, some players were having issues reacting to the Bobbies when they charged, so I added a “rally the troops” kind of animation that will telegraph the sprint, giving you more time to react to it. I tweaked the charge itself as well, to make it look much more aggressive so that it wouldn’t be confused with the run cycle anymore.

Additionally, I animated other things like: standing up from sitting on the ground, NPCs cowering for a couple of seconds before running away, melee blocking for NPCs as well as unarmed attacks (yay, fists!)...

Vince

Again this week, more nightly goodness!

Most of my week was spent on prototyping a dangerous new threat that will come at you during the night. We're still not 100% on exactly how dangerous this will be, or what it will look like, but we know enough that I could get the basic functionality in, and I made it as customisable as possible. I’ve made it so that we’ll be able to vary the threat across biomes, which will help us increase the game’s difficulty throughout your play session.

Combined with hostile patrols in the streets, this threat will make players not want to linger more than necessary in the streets at night and be extra cautious. It should make for interesting stealth gameplay scenarios.

Besides that, I did a few changes and fixes for the loudspeakers in the Garden District and TVs in the Village District.

Lastly, I have an announcement to make. I'll be dad of a second child in a few days! My parental leave starts next week, but I'll keep track of the progress on the game to be ready to jump right back in in five weeks! See you all soon!

Have a great weekend!

Team Compulsion

Production Update

Sam

Hi folks! Looking over this and last week’s update, I felt that it might be useful to describe the current way we’re building the game, to give you context on why we’re working on the things we’re working on week on week.

As you may know, we update the pre-alpha build of We Happy Few approximately once per month. We do this for several reasons. First, it helps us refine our production processes to make sure we can push out regular updates during Early Access and beyond. Secondly, we get great feedback on features as they develop, which means we have much more information throughout development. Secondly, it is a simple way of splitting up our development. Each month we focus on a major area of the game we want to develop or improve - a “theme” if you will.

This month’s theme is night. In the pre-alpha currently, running around at night isn’t particularly threatening, or interesting. There are more Bobbies in the Village, and the Wellies all go to sleep, but otherwise nighttime is actually less threatening than day time. So, this month we’re working on implementing our designs for night, to make the gameplay, ambiance and threats substantially different, which will lead to a big change in how players play the game past the first few hours. Obviously, we’ll continue to improve this over time, but this is the first big push on this subject.

As an example from the design team, one thing we want to do is communicate better what happens in which time periods. We’ve decided to have a more clear three state system - day, dusk and night. This is because we want night to be very threatening, but we don’t want you to be caught out with no way to deal with the situation. So we need to consider what time each state change occurs, what the lighting/ambiance should be, what threats come out to play, how the AIs behave… and hopefully, that’ll help put into context what the team has been working on this week!

Narrative Team

Alex

This week I whistled a variety of tunes into a mike for the Bobbies to whistle when they’re alone in the dark.

Figured out with G the mechanics for one of our player character’s interactions with a later player character. It’s important that there is narrative “glue” between the scenes; but we don’t want to over determine the player’s choices. So rather than preventing the player from short circuiting a particular sequence, I came up with a way to handle the short circuiting in narrative. Now I’m rewriting the scenes.

Wrote lines for Uncle Jack to urge everyone to get indoors before it gets dark. I’ll record them next week or over the weekend.

Worked on figuring out which Wellie attack lines are not convincing, so we can disconnect them.

Gave notes on the early animation of one of the cutscenes. It was an interesting conversation because I come from film and theatre, and I tend to want the “actors” to move around the “scene” to illuminate their inner turmoil. But the cutscenes are all first person, like the gameplay, and it’s very odd if the player character is turned away from the NPC she’s interacting with; the player is looking at the landscape. So how do you square the circle?

Created a list of extremely English names so that we can name all the Wellies. Edited Alice Kensington’s Wastrellette lines so we can put them in the game (after José, our audio producer, levels them). Came up with ideas for what’s on the inside of a Happy Face.

Gameplay Team

Vince

This week, we are working on bringing a whole new meaning to night time in Wellington Wells.

Simply put, there will be a curfew and all citizens should stay home at night. The Bobbies will be patrolling and making sure everyone is sound "asleep".

For my part, I updated the mounted TVs in the Village so that they will now open and "look" at you when you go near them at night. This will mean the sound and the light might alert a patrolling Bobby.

Also, the Bobbies will have lamps on their helmets at night. They will be able to spot you as well as a giving the player a good indicator as to where not to wander.

I am also working on deadly fog! You heard that right. I did a bit of testing on how I can add moving deathly fog.

We’ve also been working on the broadcasting system. I am removing the loudspeakers on the houses in the Village, and we are adding a new loudspeaker system in the Garden District so that you can listen to Uncle Jack everywhere in Wellington Wells.

Programming Team

Marc

Lots of relatively small changes in the past weeks, no major feature, but all these changes do pile up.

Audio: Fixes and improvements to AI barks, as well as adjustments to the player talking. New music in the PA system in the village.

Combat: slight changes in the dodge mechanic so it feels more fair. Improvements to the barks so you get a better idea who is going to attack.

HUD: the global perception indicator has now been simplified, it will only show the current suspicion level (i.e. yellow = someone is suspicious, red = someone is hostile). It was showing the suspicion emitted by the player, but few people got that, it was too confusing. Also the AI suspicion now transforms into a health bar when in combat, we will revisit the art at one point.

AI: I started working on behaviours specific to night time. Citizens will go to bed in the evening, only the bobbies should be left outside during the night, and they will be much more aggressive. Only a Downer would stay out…

Art Team  

Whitney

One of the big things I did this week was explore the different lighting and atmosphere progressions for our day/night cycle. Here you have what the player might experience for day, dawn, and night, both on your Joy (bottom row) and off your Joy (top row). As you can see, life is much better on Joy! I wanted to make sure each stage has its own distinct color palette and weather effect. This way we can have a special ambiance and tone that should complement the gameplay.

Emmanuel

This week I continued working on houses. These may seem a bit out of context but they all have a purpose - they’re part of our new filler building system, the system that fills the gaps between the lootable areas in game. The idea is that we’ll be able to warp each of these buildings to, either in combination or alone, fill in spaces we need to in the world generation. We’ve started implementing these, but it’s not likely to be ready for the next update. However, they are beginning to look really nice, and the world feels substantially different.

Marc-Andre

This week I have been working on small props, and adapting a high poly car model for our game (retopology and textures). As you can see, we won’t be driving it...

Thanks for tuning in and have a great week-end!  

Compulsion Team

This week we released Update 8 for our pre-alpha players! This update focused on bringing more life to Wellington Wells, such as ocean sounds, more dialogue, some patty-cake action and much more! You can read the build notes here. 

If you haven’t played in a while, we’d love some feedback on our forums. And, starting this week, we’re going to be asking pre-alpha players more specific questions, to help us analyse areas that we don’t have enough information on. For this week’s questions on suspicion and the water system, please check in here.

Now, on to the update!

Programming Team

Camille

I pushed out the stash functionality this week, something that’s been desperately needed for a while. Although a grid-based inventory is a somewhat old school and arguably outmoded concept, I firmly believe it can be made to work given a good system and interface supporting it. One of the big systems lacking for this was a decent way of storing extra items.

Thus the stash, which allows you to stow away items you don’t necessarily need to carry with you. In order to improve quality of life, this stash is shared across all shelters so you don’t need to take its contents with you whenever you move. Strategically speaking, this enables you to tuck away crafting items from the wastes once you are ready to move into the city, where different types of items await.

Speaking of crafting, another feature of the stash is that its contents are factored in when crafting, so you don’t actually need to take out all the necessary ingredients whenever you want to create something. From just a few quick playthroughs, I feel this has already been a huge quality of life improvement.

In order to make the stash work, I also reworked the inventory a bit. Instead of having containers show on the left-hand side, they now show on the right-hand side, replacing the equipment grid when you loot a container. Incidentally, this also enables quickly moving items to/from the stash through the usual “equip” right-click shortcut.

All of this functionality is available in this week’s update 8, but the appearance and name of the stash remains a temporary thing. Alex and Whitney have already come up with great concepts for it, so stay tuned for an improved stash in the future!

Gameplay Team  

Vince

Alright, this week was a big push on story elements and integrating them into our secret narrative build. Can't tell you much about it, but it's pretty cool!

Besides that, I made a bunch of small fixes and tweaks on Wednesday, just in time for the new update:

• Food won't give health bonuses anymore  
• Jimmy bars are now reusable, also fixed a few typos in its description 
• Pain Pills give less health 
• Removed Salt Box 
• Bobbies will never carry more than 1 security card 
• Updated the Banger inventory icon and in-game model 
• Fixed some doors in the Village houses that would lock from the wrong side 
• Fixed some safes in the Village houses that wouldn't open with the Advanced 
• Electrolock-Shocker 
• Reduced the number of healing plants in the Garden District

And also, thanks to Camille’s work on the stash system, I added safes in the shelters that will temporarily serve as your player’s stash to store your items.

Narrative Team

Alex

I’ve started editing the audio for our second playable character in Pro Tools; I’ve finished the first scene and started the second.

For gameplay reasons, I need to move a slew of scenes in one of our playable character’s playthrough from the end to the middle, which means I need new connective tissue. So I’ve been working on that, and by working, I mean chatting with people on the team.

I’ve written barks (short lines the player says) for when the player sneak attacks NPCs. I’ve also just written a slew of new barks for when Arthur is trying to pass himself off as a crazy person, and some new pensive barks which won’t be released until the narrative is in.

We’re implementing a couple of mechanics where the player can keep stashes across shelters and across playthroughs. I came up with a way to justify these in the world’s lore.

Finally, I spent a surprisingly long time tracking down, selecting and editing NPC barks that hadn’t been integrated yet.

Art Team  

Whitney

The last couple weeks I've been designing props for a new biome, working on some signage, going to lots of meetings, designing some new architecture (which isn't ready to show), doing a bunch of research and organizing assets. Oh, and I concepted some iconic English trees :)

Marc-André  

This week I worked on the following props:

 That is all for this week folks, have a great weekend everyone!

Compulsion Team