Update #148 - March Hare
about 8 years ago
– Fri, Mar 02, 2018 at 09:36:41 PM
Hey everyone,
Things are very busy in the studio right now. We are continuing polishing and wrapping up the final content. We received some very interesting results from the playtests and have decided to do some last minute changes. We cannot wait for you to see it all!
Narrative Team - Alex and Lisa
Lisa
You know how, when you take a trip, no matter how many lists you’ve made, you always remember something you SHOULD have packed after you’ve arrived at your destination? This week has been sort of like that. I’ve been going back through my “suitcase” of environmental narrative and adding signs and small details for clarity. I’ve also gone through the last bits and bobs of certain characters’ dialog, because we’re approaching the last recording sessions. Hopefully I will have packed everything you need for your journey to Wellington Wells!
Design Team - David, Hayden, Antoine, Adam, Ben, Eric, And Benji
Adam
We are 1 week away from complete content lock on the Mad Scotsman. It has been a bit hectic, considering the many many ideas flying back and forth right now to fix or tweak situations. Ultimately, “time” has the final say, so simple is best. That said! I’m super proud of having lead the entire Mad Scotsman playthrough, and I’m pretty damn sure you’re all going to think of him as your favorite ;p
Eric
This week has been a very productive week I think. First half of the week was polishing off levels, but about mid week we got some great feedback from a playtest we held a little while back so I went straight onto fixing that. Smoothing out the intro of the game and making sure our crazy world is understood and as clear as it can be.
Engineering Team - Matt, Serge, Michael, Lionel, Rob, Evan, Maarten, Céline, Neil And Guillaume (Sometimes)
Lionel
This week, I worked on making the roads less straight. Breaking the sightline is one of the ways to make the Village and the hamlet more organic. So our city/village/hamlet generator had to be extended. It looks simple in theory but as they get packed with content, it is as you can imagine, harder in practice. Only the parts of the roads that are connected to non static houses can move. It is not finished yet but it looks promising.
Serge
This week for me was all about support and bug fixing tasks related to a paradigm that we use for performance. What I mean by that is there's non-playable characters whose brain is reduced to the bare minimum until the player interacts with him. The challenge was to fix conflict between the different piece of code that call for animations on these characters. Reusing code allows us to prototype the feature faster but once the data has been created we discover edge cases that need to be supported (like a paired animation of lovers on a bench for example). That's it, polish and bug fixing until we release the game!
Art Team - Whitney, Emmanuel, Tito, Marc-André, Sarah, Guillaume, Cary And PH
PH
This week was full of little tasks for me, but I worked mainly on the different suits that you can craft. I refined the textures, reworked fabrics and patterns and added some details (stitches, buttons, seams,etc..).
Carilitz
Had a break from small stuff and got into some level art for some days! It was a rollercoaster of changes, trying to achieve the perfect feel for one of the last levels. I can't show it but, if you ever get to the end of the game you’re gonna be able to see it :D. Beside that, I have been also doing small fixes here and there like the past weeks.
Marc-André
Optimisation, optimisation, optimisation. Been grating away polygons of the buildings of the last biome. Saved a good 5 million triangles… out of 91 500 000. Also been helping Emmanuel with the refactoring of the wilderness area. We are moving the encounters closer to the streets which helps reduce the size of the islands and make them less hidden so they scream “look at me” to the player.
Animation Team - JR, Rémi, Vincent, Mike P, Jules, and Raph
Vincent
This week has been mainly filled by reviews! Lots of meetings with people from all the departments, looking at whole playthroughs (with some cheating in the middle, that game has got quite big!) and taking notes of what’s left to tackle… There’s still quite a bunch of stuff. Panic! Erm. I mean, everything is 100% under control, nothing to see here, move along!
In between reviews are the usual feedback, and sometimes even a bit of animation!
I started work on a funny animation for our beloved Bobbies!
Also, I went back a bit on the giant Mother TVs, as we now need them to track your altitude, which I didn’t plan for back when I scripted/animated it! If some of you are interested, it now uses a 2D Blendspace, which blends 4 different ‘idle’ animations depending on the relative position of the player!
MikeP (AKA: lesser danger Mike)
Sup folks! This week in the thrilling life of an animator, I made a bunch of little cutscenes for the game. One of which you can see in the gif. Dropped those rocks like it was no one’s business! Plus got some cool VFX from our VFX guy Weili to finish it up and voila! Some rock falling goodness! Sweet falling rock, eh! Also did a few little animation chains to round up the week. Nothing terribly exciting, but productive nonetheless! Well that’s it for me this week, tune in next week, Same Bat Time, Same Bat Channel!
Jules
Hi everybody! So for me this week I started on the soldier’s animations and in particular their search animation. Here is a gif of it.
During the rest of the week, I switched to a super exciting task, Sally’s stealth takedowns! But it is still a work in progress. I might be able to show you a gif of it next week, if the censors allow it. See you next then!
Thanks for tuning in!
Compulsion Team
Update #147 - Moderately terrible people
about 8 years ago
– Fri, Feb 23, 2018 at 01:18:57 PM
Hey everyone,
This week, the team continues on final content integration and the beginnings of polish and bug fixing. We have received the results of the playtest from two weeks ago, and are really happy with the improvements we have made, particularly on the onboarding and the comprehension of Arthur’s story. The extra time we have spent on these aspects of the game has really paid off.
That doesn’t mean we’re done, though. We have a list of issues to deal with on this front, so as we finish up the content, we’ll also be tweaking things here and there to respond to the issues raised. Playtests are so important, and we’re very glad to have the team at Gearbox here to help.
Narrative Team - Alex and Lisa
Lisa
As part of finishing the game, Alex and I are running around trying to make sure that we have everything written that we need.
This week, I’ve been writing “pensive barks,” which are things our characters say to themselves while you’re playing the game. The idea is to give you a deeper sense of who the characters are and how they feel -- without having to stop the action for a cut scene. With Sally, pensive barks are a fun challenge, because the face she presents to the world isn’t necessarily the same as how she feels inside.
The danger is that we have promised you characters who are “moderately terrible people,” so I have to avoid falling in love with characters so much that I make them too good.
Design Team - David, Hayden, Antoine, Adam, Ben, Eric, And Benji
Eric
The level design team is a collection of busy bees this week, integrating, fixing and finaling the level content we have in the game. That means a lot of polish, but also a lot of meetings to review the content we’re finishing up.
As for what I did this week, I fixed some Arthur main story bugs and blockers, worked with Alex to make sure VO and narrative was both present and made sense, and the rest of my time I spent finishing some levels that came in late and just weren’t fully finished. Plus I got to hook up a sweet Arthur shower scene. So that was fun!
Engineering Team - Matt, Serge, Michael, Lionel, Rob, Evan, Maarten, Céline, Neil And Guillaume (Sometimes)
Michael
We've been working on upgrading the HUD elements. Some of it is revising old pieces that need some new polish, or presenting in better ways. The rest is finding ways to represent important information that was previously hidden from the player, for example we want to make a bigger deal of when curfew starts and when you enter a trespassing zone. (Everything is optional, for those who want a clean screen).
So after Sarah has finished doing her mock-ups in Photoshop over a screenshot from the game, we take an element and break it down into it's moving parts ( for things that fill up and move ) and then I create a widget object in Unreal's widget designer and hook it into the game so that we can review it, and iterate on it further. Often with a good deal of programmer art filling in the gaps and making the artists cry.
Céline
Hi everyone ! The bug season has started so this week for me it was mostly the following : finding a long-existing bug which questions everything, fixing it, observing that related features are broken/need rebalancing, supporting level designers, adding a skill which questions everything, adding it, observing that related features are broken/need rebalancing… etc. Hopefully the game will end up more fixed than broken at the end, I am confident!
Animation Team - JR, Rémi, Vincent, Mike P, Jules, and Raph
Jules
Hi everybody! So this week for me I mainly worked on the Doctor. I've finished polishing his different heal and resurrect animation. As you can see on the Gif... if you want to interrupt him during his resurrection you better have enough stamina for a run or be ready to be hit by his bone saw! See you guys next week!
Art Team - Whitney, Emmanuel, Tito, Marc-André, Sarah, Guillaume, Cary And PH
PH
We have a huge spreadsheet where the designers have gathered all the pickups, crafting recipes, wearables, weapons, components,etc… It’s huge! There are 900 entries in it. So this week was dedicated to pickups for me (pickups are the 3D models of items in the game, when you drop an item on the ground). I worked with the Level Designers to provide them the last ones for the game, and they’re now almost all ready to go. For example, I’ve done texturing work on different versions of a canteen and some modeling work to create key cards.
Guillaume
It’s been a while since I showed you guys what I worked on, as it has been mostly story locations that I don’t really want to spoil before the game ships. But this time I have a little teaser for you.
This location is specific to Sally’s playthrough and some scary surprises are waiting for you there.
Marco-André
This week I’ve been finalizing work on the new special bridge and, for the most part, doing a bridge refactoring. This purely aesthetic change means that some bridges will now look as if they are dirt paths alongside a cliff, making them more interesting and more unique. I modified the levels and also created new modular pieces that will repeat to create the “bridge”/cliff path.
Thanks for tuning in!
Compulsion Team
Update #146 - New journal structure coming soon!
about 8 years ago
– Fri, Feb 16, 2018 at 08:41:23 PM
Hey everyone,
It’s been a really fun week for us at the studio! As you know, love was a really big theme in the 1960s and we certainly felt it with all of your beautiful fan art and great love songs that you sent us, so thank you for that! On our side we released a recipe for some Victoria (ha!) sponge hearts that the lovely folks from the community team at Gearbox Publishing put together. You can get the recipe here!
And because we love our community so much we wanted to share something special. This is a new concept art piece of a new bridge in the game, which we created as part of Arthur’s restructuring. By our Art Director, Whitney Clayton.
We also released the lyrics of a traditional Wellie drinking song written by one of our writers extraordinaire, Lisa Hunter.
Production
Sam
Hello everyone! As we have mentioned over the past few weeks, we are in the final stages of tightening up, polishing, and finishing the content in the game. It is coming along well, and it looks like we’ll be moving onto pure bug fixing in 3-4 weeks.
Last week was our first week-long playtest, run by the folks at Gearbox. The initial feedback has been great, with both some really helpful suggestions (eg suggesting we reduce grinding for ingredients half way through the playthrough, because that’s a rubbish way to spend an afternoon!), and some very positive reinforcement (good news: they really like the story). We will be incorporating as much of this feedback possible over the next 3-4 weeks, as this is our last chance to tweak before locking things down for real.
As we continue onward, the new content we have available to show in weekly journals will slowly dry up. We can only mention “fixed XYZ bugs this week” so many times before you guys will get bored. So, when we get to that stage, we’re going to be looking for some interesting content to focus on, with maybe a look back in more depth at specific features (eg how the UI has changed over the years). If you have any suggestions on what you’d like to see, please let us know in the comments.
Narrative Team - Alex and Lisa
Alex
Well, this has been a fun week.
We’ve been iterating on the story trailer, which is fancy dev talk for reworking it. Because lines have been moved around, we were concerned that they didn’t follow emotionally. So I re-recorded a scene between two voice actors, to try and get the feeling right. (They weren’t in the same studio at the same time – I played one character for actor 1, and the other for actor 2.) In the end, we only used two lines from the session in the story trailer, but they are the last and the first, so they make a difference; and it was worth it to confirm that we had the best performances I know how to get.
Much more fun has been editing some unique audio-only moments that you will hear as part of Sally’s playthrough. (Because why not?) You can pick them up and hear more about the world and her if you are so inclined. The immensely talented young actors Harry Baxendale and Bradley Henderson voiced Young Arthur and Percy in Arthur’s playthrough. Lisa wrote most of Sally’s scenes, being as she has much more experience being a teenage girl than I have. I recorded Sally’s voice actress last week, and got all of these moments; I’d already recorded the other characters who appear in them, some of whom are in the game elsewhere, and some of whom are not. It’s huge fun to put together separate performances into a coherent dramatic scene.
Amelia Tyler, who voices Sally’s mum, told me “This woman is literally my mother, by the way,” in the session. I consider this the highest possible compliment.
Lisa
We are in the thick of working on Sally’s playthrough. I’ve been writing pensive barks (things Sally says to herself) to give you a better sense of her internal motivations and fears. I can’t wait till you get to meet this character! Don’t tell Arthur, but she’s my favourite.
Design Team - David, Hayden, Antoine, Adam, Ben, Eric, Roxanne And Benji
Eric
When not wrecking my car by driving into piles of snow and nearly beaching it in the process I was working on Antoine’s lovely Doctor HQ map. Mostly this was implementing a fun little narrative audio/visual ‘ride’ thing. Originally I was worried it didn’t have the ‘oomph’ that it could, so we jazzed it up a bit and I think it’s turning out pretty well now.
Art Team - Whitney, Emmanuel, Tito, Marc-André, Sarah, Guillaume, Cary And PH
Carylitz
Tons of small and medium things that I have been doing lately! I can't show anything, but I think in general 80% of my weeks lately has been to close small tasks. A lot of “move this object 10 units… and its done” and things like that. Monkey work mostly but every now and then a prop comes along or a small location, which is really nice! So I have been as usual everywhere fixing, helping, supporting, moving, dancing, singing around and having fun.
PH
This week I worked essentially with designers to model the last wearables for the game. I also had the opportunity to visually upgrade the old lootable rubble pile we had in the game from the beginning of the development. Main difficulty here: add some mortared bricks that wouldn’t appear lootable for the player. We don’t want the player to think he can loot an infinite amount of bricks on this pile to start a brick war in Wellington Wells. After few iterations here’s the result compared to the old version:
Animation Team - JR, Rémi, Vincent, Mike P, Jules, and Raph
MikeP
Sup folks! This week I worked on some animation chains for encounters, fixed some animation chains that weren’t working, polished some NPC animations, worked on falling rocks and integrated an explosion. Been a mixed bag as they say. Well that’s it for me for this week, tune in next week Same Bat Time, Same Bat Channel!
Jules
Hi! This week I continued to polish the animation I made a few weeks ago. So all of the feints, taunts, and other communication animations during combat by the NPCs are done! Now I move on to the Doctor. I've made a few tweaks to his attack with the bone-saw, it now looks totally crazy and scary. Also, I reworked the animation for when he heals himself because it was not clear enough in the game who was the target of this heal. As you might know, the Doctor can heal himself or heal another NPC. So we need to make it obvious who receives his heal. I really hope that you enjoy it as much as I had fun making it. See you next week for more news about the Doctor!
Vincent
Ahoy! This week has been mainly about planning… lots of reviewing of the last two characters playthroughs with the Level Designers (mainly the newly revealed Sally, have you seen that?), entering Jira tasks and discussing what we can manage in the time we have left. In the meantime, some bug fixing, technical stuff, the usual help here and there and feedback... Not much animating going on for me this week, sorry!
Engineering Team - Matt, Serge, Michael, Lionel, Rob, Evan, Maarten, Céline, Neil And Guillaume (Sometimes)
Michael
More work on Achievements this week, but all back-end stuff. Working out how to send events to Xbox Live and Steam, and why those events aren’t working. It was a great moment to see the little indicator pop up for the first time, to see that I’d Achieved something (very meta!). That happy feeling was gone when the rest of the achievements unlocked immediately after it, their happy chimes telling me that I had failed in some way.
Thanks for tuning in!
Compulsion Team
Update #145 - Sunshine of your love
about 8 years ago
– Fri, Feb 09, 2018 at 04:43:34 PM
Hey everyone,
It’s February already and we are feeling the love in the studio! If you are on our social media then you might have seen that we are reposting love songs from the 60s and all the beautiful fan art you’ve been sending us. Keep at them as we really enjoy watching all the peculiar and funny scenarios you are creating!
Fan art by X-Razorbeard
Engineering Team - Matt, Serge, Michael, Lionel, Rob, Evan, Maarten, Céline and Guillaume (sometimes)
Céline
Hi people ! This week I have been working on skills again, as the list got finalized at about the same time we finished Arthur's content. I can't really reveal more than last time I talked about them, but I can at least tell you, we're going to have character-specific, survival, combat and stealth skills. Highest-tier skills will make your adventure in Wellington Wells a lot easier/more fun. Of course when working on skills, you interact with so many features that you're bound to find plenty of bugs. So I also have been fixing plenty of bugs this week. And with that, I really think the game is coming together very nicely !
Michael
We're approaching the time when we have to send a build of our game off to Microsoft for them to approve of before they let it on their systems (technically this is called submission for certification). One of the features that is a big requirement for their sign off is achievements, and so this week my task was to go through and add these into the game. It's quite a fun adventure to visit all the different systems in the codebase to add the callbacks. Anyway, the logic is all there now. I won't spoil what the achievements are but I think there's a good mix of mainline progression rewards, and ones that push you to find the more interesting missable moments.
Lionel
This week was all about extending and integrating our new island system. Integrating took a bit of time because - as with any procedural system in WHF - we never simply replace one system by another, we keep the old system as well as the new one and add an options to choose which one is active. This allows us smooth transitions and extensive testing.
In this case, this was a good thing because while the new system has some interesting and important new features, it was lacking one from the old one. So, I extended it a bit to cover that. I also realized that our shore outline would have to be redone along the way. Doing that now.
Animation Team - JR, Rémi, Vincent, Mike P, Jules, Raph and Franzi
Mike
Sup folks, not much to report on my end. Worked on a bunch of Animation Chains for a whole whack of encounters this week. These are where we take our bank of animations, and chain them together inside conversations with NPCs. Mostly this week I revisited and polished up some of the chains so that they seem like a bit more normal conversations and interactions. That’s pretty much it. Exciting, I know. So that’s it for me, tune in next week, Same Bat Time, Same Bat Channel.
Narrative Team - Alex And Lisa
Alex
This week most of the LD’s moved from Arthur to Sally and our third character. So our intrepid and peripatetic Sally, [name redacted], and I, got into some sound studios – one in Montreal, one in New York, where she’s appearing in a play – and recorded 169 encounter lines and barks for Antoine’s revision of the Sally playthrough. I’ve also been writing lines for Adam’s revision of the third character’s playthrough. Fortunately we have to record Allan Cooke for a secret project next week, so we’ll get those done along with.
We’ve been getting a lot of feedback from playtesters over at Gearbox. It’s really exciting to hear people saying the narrative works, and they’re intrigued by the characters, and they feel real, and the dialog is convincing. You never know for sure until you hear back from players. Having access to Gearbox’s QA people and their playtesters has really helped us.
Lisa
This week, I’ve been making sure that things I’ve written over the past few years are actually in the game, and that environmental narrative is in the right places and makes sense. This means turning my mindset from writer to player.
At this point, I can probably reveal that SOME of you fans on the forum were 100 percent correct about the identity of Miss Thigh Highs. We were anxious to keep our secrets from getting out too early, so during the past year I seeded stories of other female characters in the environmental narrative, just to throw you off. I’m now trying to make sure that all those stories “pay off” and feel satisfying and meaningful when you play the game. A couple of the “red herrings” have actually turned out to be among my favorite Wellies. Hope you enjoy them!
Art Team - Whitney, Emmanuel, Tito, Marc-André, Sarah, Guillaume, Cary and PH
Marc-André
This week, I’ve been working on a myriad of small to medium to big tasks. I’ve been working with Cary to go over 7200 material instances in the game to write every sign in the game in text form. This will be super useful for people playing in other languages than English. They’ll be able to understand the signs scattered across the world.
I’ve also been polishing up multiple locations and tying up loose ends. I’ve also spoken to Maarten about the possibility of having volumes inside buildings that affect the amount of light visible (with a transition) and thanks to his magic coding skills I already started to implement it across the game.
That’s it for me! Polishing work from now on. A lot of small tasks and details that will make the overall experience better.
Whitney
Hey folks!
This week I did a bunch of environmental narrative for some up and coming seeeeecret locations! So secretive! So exciting! That's all I'll say..:)
Thanks for tuning in!
Compulsion Team
Update #144 - How You Play is How We Polish
about 8 years ago
– Fri, Feb 02, 2018 at 03:29:41 PM
Hey everyone,
Now that Arthur is done, we all wait with great anticipation for next week’s playtest sessions, where people will have the opportunity to play through the whole of Arthur’s story for the first time. It’s very important for us to witness players’ reactions to the new flow and to check that what we implemented resonates well with what players expect.
You’ll see that most of the team has spent the week on either final bug-fixing for Arthur or polishing for the other characters. Well, the part of the team that has not been hit by a mysterious plague (ain’t winter grand?), that is.
Art Team
Marc-André
This week I did polishing work on the Doctor Headquarters. I laid out a bunch of objects to make it feel less empty and more like a place. I also did some lighting tweaks and bug fixing pertaining to that, and created some new meshes such as an operation table.
PH
Hi! This week I’ve got a good time on weapons. Team gave me the opportunity to imagine 2 flaming weapons. So I quickly sketched some crazy ideas and I assembled pieces in 3D to get a first look. Since it’s heavily gameplay, there’s lots of back and forth in the design. I’m trying to get something cool that the player would love to use and feel powerful. But what’s the definition of “cool” in video game? What is “cool” in We Happy Few? It’s more complicated than expected.
In the end, I think it will need additional work to come up with awesome flaming weapons but here you are some 3D concepts :
Animation
Jules
Hi. So this week I’ve continued to polish our combat animation. All of the final tweaks are done for the attack of the NPC. It’s looking great and I’m really happy about that. I think we reach our goal, the wind-up is clear and the attack is appropriate for our wellie and wastrel. What I mean by appropriate being, when you start a fight in the street of Wellington Wells, you have the real feeling of being attacked by a crowd of random people who want you dead. What we didn’t want was during the fight, you have the feeling of fighting against some people who are experts in combat.
Also, I’ve started to polish the taunt animation for the NPC when they engage in the fight. This week I am sharing with you the wastrel heavy attack. See you next week!
Mike
Sup folks! Not much to report this week, I’m done with cutscenes for now and am back to animation chains. Trying to make your encounters/conversations with our lovely folks as interesting as possible. It’s a nice little respite for the hectic schedule from the past two weeks. Well that’s it from me, tune in next week, Same Bat Time, Same Bat Channel!
Vincent
Ahoy! This week has been mainly about polish and realisation. That’s when you take a functional scene or encounter, and try to make it flow a bit more and look more natural. All that without breaking it, hopefully.
I also did some more general tweaks and bug fixing, like retargeting the sleeping pose for female characters. Up until now, they used the same animation as male, and as both genders models are not made quite the same, the result was quite bad. That’s the kind of obvious but non-essential things that get to be tended to at the end of projects. It is super satisfying to finally take care of those little matters, that, as a whole, will make the experience a little bit more immersive.
Programming
Michael
The priority this week was the playtest build, which means making sure that we can provide a version of the game for people to play all the way through Arthur’s story, without getting trapped by bugs or broken logic. This means tasks like: debugging why some quest rewards aren’t given, and some quests aren’t showing up when they should be active, or making sure you can’t shove an important NPC through a wall while you’re fighting them. In between the firefighting there was time to focus on less pressing matters like why the throwing arc visualisation doesn’t work for heavy items. The possibility of having to look into the physics system is always a terrifying contemplation. Fortunately, after drawing lots of debug lines and dots on the screen to show the difference between the arc and reality I was able to track it down to something in the game code. Seemed we were adding extra gravity too early, physics code blackhole avoided for another week.
Serge
This week has been all about population management to increase the density of characters in the village's streets! The challenge here is to have more NPC without creating performance issue so I started by pushing the system to its limit in order to stress the mechanism that choose which characters should be updated or paused. That decision is based on many factors like the importance of a character related to the gameplay or his visibility on screen (to only name a few of the information we use to score its relevance).
With the help of our quality assurance team and game designer, we will tweak the size of the targeted population to find the best equilibrium between realization (for which more is better) and performance (which is quite the opposite, less is better). That's just a hint at the kind of technical challenges we have in real-time entertainment industries!
Design
Roxanne
This week I worked on balancing the loot in cellars and other uncovered places. I also did some balancing on the weapon side and made the wastrels and wellies able to block attacks. Mostly, bug fixing and balancing! :)
Thanks for tuning in.
Compulsion team.
You can discuss it here.
