Update #17 - Pre-alpha recap and weekly development update
over 10 years ago – Mon, Jul 27, 2015 at 05:59:21 PM

Hello all,

This means that we are likely to send out the surveys on Monday! You’ll get an invite to BackerKit, and inside that you’ll be able to choose which versions of the game you’d like, along with other rewards. You’ll also be able to enter and update your shipping address.

For those of you who have pledged on BackerKit already, it is normal that you haven’t yet received your code, as we are still setting up the backend. However, you will receive them shortly. From now on, any new backers that pledge to the pre-alpha level on BackerKit will receive their codes right away :)

Weekly Update 

Here is what the team has been up to this week:

Programming Team  

Marc  

• The beginning of the week was mostly focused on fixing problems for the patch:  
• Fixed issue with combat collision at low FPS  
• Fixed ragdoll issues on takedowns. There may still be some (it's the nature of ragdolls) but the more glaring problems have been solved.  
• Audio settings now work.  
• Various crash fixes  

Then I started reviewing the combat system, it is clearly too easy for most people. Making it hard is not difficult but making it fun and challenging is what's interesting. We will prototype and review adjustments to the combat in the following weeks.

Vince  

We pushed update 6.2 and that meant a lot of testing and bug fixing.

Next on my list was laying out a base for new starting zones because we're looking at implementing a more robust game progression in the next build. One that will feature more areas and the difficulty will ramp up as you progress towards the exit.

Lastly, I started designing a new building scenario for the Village of Hamlyn called "Happy Birthday Richard", where something went awfully wrong at his birthday party. Tough luck, Richard, at least you still got to eat some cake... right?

Art Team

Deven  

This week I made some military props!

Gameplay Team/Narrative Team  

Josh

A bundle of my week consisted on working on content and designs that we're not quite ready to talk about. Sorry aboot that. Other than the classified stuff I've been assisting in the performance hotfixes and working with Vince to help him design his own scenario from the ground up.  

On top of that I've created a Content Generation & Scope document that will help clearly explain all the content, systems and mechanics we're going to have at a generation level for the complete game. This allows all the team to be on the same page as far as where development will be going and what we plan to tackle next. This is to aid in the overhaul of the player progression of the game, which is something that we're aiming for in our next big update.

The rest of the team has been working on a super secret project that unfortunately we cannot show yet. However, we are really excited for it and will be able to share the news in a few weeks.  

To prove we are not pulling your leg, look who came by the office today!

Have a fantastic weekend!  

Compulsion

Update #12 - Mac and Linux, Stretch Goal 1 Achieved, New Uncle Jack Video!
over 10 years ago – Tue, Jul 07, 2015 at 11:21:47 AM

Lovely day for it!  

3 days left in our campaign and we are now at + $269,000 thanks to over 6000 backers! We have reached our very first stretch goal, Drug Paradise!    

Reaching the Drug Paradise stretch goal means that we will enhance the drug feature in the game, such as more effects (visual, audio, functionality), more drug types and all around have more time to focus on fun and creative drug designs.

New platforms!

We are very excited to announce that we will be bringing We Happy Few to Mac and Linux! Now the citizens of Wellington Wells will be able to be suspicious of fruit and aquatic mammals as well.

This took a bit of time for us to consider, so thank you for being patient. We hope that you guys will help us spread the word to your friends in Mac and Linux gaming communities, as we’d love to have them join us! Some additional answers/details:

Will we get Mac or Linux versions in the pre-alpha?

No. As you guys know, we’re not a huge team, and we really want to focus on making this game the best it can be. We are planning to deliver the Mac and Linux versions on or shortly after full release of the game. We will not be creating Mac or Linux pre-alpha versions - the pre-alpha through Steam will be Windows only. If we go into Early Access at some point, we won’t be creating them then either.

What tier do I pledge at for a Mac or Linux version?

Any tier you want - but bear in mind that you’ll need a Windows PC to run the pre-alpha, if you pledge at that tier.

How will we get access to the Linux or Mac versions?

The same way you get access to the Windows versions: through Steam and DRM free. Exactly how we distribute the DRM free builds we haven’t confirmed yet (you do have to get retailers to agree to this), but hopefully it will be GOG.

We would like to run the pre-alpha on Wine or Parallels, or through Virtual Machines.

Cool! While we’re not going to spend a great deal of time supporting this, let us know how it goes on our forums and we’ll be happy to sticky a thread to help keep support/solutions in one place.

New Uncle Jack video!

We are tremendously happy at the reception of part one of Uncle Jack’s show Nighty Night: The Pied Piper of Hamlyn.

We couldn’t leave you all hanging any longer, so here is part two of Uncle Jack’s Nighty Night show, The Pied Piper. Good night, sweet princes and princesses, and we do hope you make it back from the forest.

In addition, we have been thinking about creating an audio book of Uncle Jack telling bed time stories (maybe some more Grimm’s fairy tales), that we’d send out to all of you. While they might be slightly nightmare inducing, we just can’t deny how enchanting Julian Casey is. If you like the idea, let us know below :)

Sam and the team at Compulsion

Updated #11 - FUNDED!
over 10 years ago – Wed, Jul 01, 2015 at 10:49:55 AM

Thank you!

We Happy Few has officially reached its goal! We are at $263,000 and 5900 backers! All of us here at Compulsion would like to sincerely thank all of you for your incredible support. From the moment we announced the game, we received so much love, and now thanks to all of your encouragement, we will be able to bring it to you.

You guys made all the difference in getting us to the finish line - as you will see below! As a maturing independent studio, we don't have the same kind of public reach as big developers, but we felt that - if we presented a strong game to the community - and worked hard at spreading the word, then people would come.

Since this is our first Kickstarter project, and we weren't sure how to make it successful, we simply tried everything. We reached out to press outlets, reached out to our community on FaceBook and e-mailed everyone we knew in the videogame industry to help spread the word. This gave us a nice initial surge, and built some excitement around the campaign, but compared to the stuff you guys did? Small Potatoes.

 This graph is a combination of three things: how many people checked out our page (Google Analytics), how much money we raised per day (Kicktraq), and a timeline with major activities that happened during the campaign.

Our initial spike was really solid, so it looks like going to PAX East, creating a good Kickstarter campaign and video, and spreading the news as best we could before the campaign was actually quite effective (as we’d hoped). There were some early champions in the community, such as Jim Sterling and the /r/games AMA we did, but we started to fall off pretty quickly. And by quickly, we mean really quickly.

We suspected this might happen. E3 happened during the week of 15 - 19 June, and traditionally the week before that is really, really slow as the hype builds for E3 (the wisdom is, never try to do a damn thing in the public sphere in video games during these two weeks, unless you’re Blizzard, Valve, or another big dev). We went to E3 knowing that the campaign would be slow that week, but we didn’t anticipate exactly how slow it would be the week before.

Thankfully, something happened: you guys continued helping us spreading the word on social media and things just took off again. As you can see, the spikes in the campaign coincide perfectly with one of you nice people discussing or posting about the game on public, social forums like Tumblr, Reddit or Imgur. Funny that :) As we’ve said a couple of times, which we’re now backing up with data, we really could not have done this without you. While we may work hard at providing you with updates, reaching out to the press and through our own social channels, nothing compares to you guys spreading the word directly.

So thank you. Thank you for believing, for helping, and for being so supportive from the get go.

Now, onto some housekeeping!

Pre-Alpha

As we’ve had a lot of people asking, we want to reiterate what’s going on with pre-alpha keys. As we have said in our FAQ, we’ll be able to send out pre-alpha keys shortly after the campaign ends. This depends on two things:

1) the campaign actually finishing (ie, Saturday this week), and  

2) us investigating the best way of sending keys to you.

We have to send out over 1000 keys, so email is going to be very unreliable. We’re looking into this, but once we have it ready to go, we’ll post an update and get the ball rolling. Hopefully we’ll be able to do this in the week after the Kickstarter ends, but if step 2 takes longer than expected, then it may take more time. We know you guys are eager to get playing, and obviously we’re looking forward to your feedback as well.

Status of Pre-Alpha Build

We’re currently hard at work preparing the build for those of you who have backed the Pre-Alpha tier. We are releasing an initial update this week for testing with our friends & family, in preparation for the Kickstarter backer pre-alpha build. If you would like to read the build notes, you can check them out here! And don’t worry, we did not preemptively release some keys before the end of the campaign - the only people that have access to the build right now are our PAX contest winners, our friends and family, and a few Youtubers and media who helped us get the word out.

For the next two weeks, we’ll be working on a technically focused update, to optimize the game to run better and on more of your machines.

PayPal

We’ve received a lot of questions about the possibility of using PayPal for donations, and we are looking into it.

Stretch Goals!

And finally, we are closing in on our very first stretch goal! Hurray! Let’s keep this train going until the end :)

Naila and the team at Compulsion