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

Update #143 - Home Sweet Home!
about 8 years ago – Fri, Jan 26, 2018 at 02:27:55 PM

Hey everyone,  

This week marks an exciting milestone - this is the last week for us to finish off Arthur’s structural changes, so that we can playtest all of his content in its final form. We still have time to touch up Arthur here and there, but there will be no big changes after this point, which is why this is an important time to review and playtest what we have. As of next week, the team moves on to bug fixing for the playtest (removing quest blockers, fixing crashes, and tightening up things that slipped through the cracks) and shifting our focus over to Sally.  

As a change from the usual, this week we wanted to show what an international team we are, so we asked everyone to write their weekly piece in their native language (or in some cases, “language”). And so they went crazy. If you like to have a good read, then you’re in for a treat! If you guys would like to comment in your language, please do, and we'll Google translate with enthusiasm.  

Programming  

Lionel  

Les aminches m’ont dit qu’on pouvait écrire le bulletin de semaine dans la jactance qu’on préférait. Des grenouilles bien élevées y en a de partout ici alors j’allais pas le faire en francais. je me suis dis, tiens, pourquoi pas le language des tontons. C’est simple, imagé et ça a ce petit gout de reviens-y, celui de la cigarette et du pastis bu a 3h du matin dans l’arrière salle d’un bar de montrouge ou on compte les biftons négligemment.  

Cette semaine donc, c'était du complexe, du matériel à migraine. Dans notre petite affaire, on avait du souci avec nos îles. Elles se comportaient mal, du genre désagréables gratuitement. Et l’homme des grandes forêts est tolérant mais faut pas lui mettre un scorpion dans la botte. Ça le rend soupe au lait. Il devient impulsif. Il lui prend comme des envies de tout reprogrammer au marteau.  

Mais tu me connais l’ami, si les années derrière les claviers m‘ont appris qu’une chose, c’est que même avec des flingues de concours, tirer à l’aveugle c’est rarement efficace. Ça fait du bruit, ça amuse mais c’est pas du Patton . Bref, ca fait quelques semaines que je prépare le casse, j’ai simulé, étudié le terrain. Mais à un moment, ça passe ou ça passe.  

Et là ce fut Verdun, des trucs de code qui explosent de partout. La panique des troupes, la débandade comme jadis. J'étais défait, je voulais rentrer à Montauban. Alors, j’ai pensé à la grande Tata - celle qui faisait de la contrebande de gnôle et qui négociait au fusil de chasse. Elle savait y faire elle ! Elle avait la solution innovante, quelquefois à base d’explosifs mais toujours de bon goût. Alors, inspiré par la grande dame, j’ai repris un verre de ce remède polonais qui fait tousser même les voitures et j’y suis retourné.

Je voulais éviter que le sang coule, je voulais être diplomate mais faut avouer j'étais plus d’humeur. C’etait la distribution de noël, version bourre-pifs dans le bug, avec toutes les couleurs de l’arc-en-ciel. Un fes-ti-val de psychologie.  

Et du coup, tu vois, maintenant nos îles sont plus polies. Oh, elles ont encore du mauvais caractère mais elles font dans le sucré. Elles cherchent pas le problème, elles embêtent pas le péquin, elles risquent pas le conflit. Le joueur pourra naviguer de l’une à l’autre comme un bourgeois sur la Marne le Dimanche. Tout en relaxation Pompidolienne et en satisfaction dans le velours.  

Voilà, c’est le dejeuner sur l’herbe et Stalingrad en une seule semaine. C’est le beau temps après la tempête. C’est : j’ai changé les îles dans WHF.  

Maarten  

Ne goeiendag! Ik zou gene Vlaming zijn moest ik de kans laten liggen om hier es wat Nederlands in te krijgen - è giën Ninovieter ak er ni een bekken Ninofs bauj zo smaujtn, mo k zant ier mo bau auven of ter versto mau giënniën!  

Deze week heb ik het leven van mijn art & sound collega's wat makkelijker gemaakt. Zo heb ik net een systeem afgewerkt waarbij de level artists heel eenvoudig een soort van ondertitels aan hun artwork kunnen hangen: je kan ingame een beschrijving zien van bepaalde art assets, wat meteen ook gebruikt kan worden voor de vertaling van de vele plakkaten of opschriften in Wellington Wells.  

Onze sound engineer Valentino weet ook altijd leuke programmeer-taken te verzinnen, zoals zorgen dat de Bobbies niet praten terwijl ze op hun fluitje blazen, dat z'n meeuwen ongestoord kunnen blijven kwelen ongeacht waar de speler gaat of dat, wanneer je oude vrouwtjes in brand steekt, ze stoppen met schreeuwen eens ze gesneuveld zijn. #typischewerkdag  

Michael  

Cor blimey, bruv! How do you do?  

I’ve been working, this week, on clarifying information that is displayed through the UI for the player. This has included stuff that we want to try out in the upcoming user playtest and helping Antoine with his excellent work on the new starting island. One of the tasks was updating our new suspicion icons so that there is a difference between “you are doing something bad, people will ask you politely to stop” and “if anyone sees you doing this, they will freak out immediately, and attempt to stop you with all their might”. Lock picking, for example, is not something people will just accept “Oh sorry i didn’t realise this wasn’t a normal thing to do to my neighbours house” as an explanation for. Nope, that behaviour is prime cricket-bat-to-the-head material. The information of what causes instant-aggro was already available “under the hood” so it’s just a case of reflecting that from code so we can wire it up to the UI scripts.  

I also added a little arrow for the 3D waypoints, for when it is offscreen. Sam liked it a lot, he said so many times. It’s been a good week.  

I worked with Antoine on some tutorial moments for our player menus. We don’t want you to get halfway through the game and not know that you could have been upgrading your skills, in the skill tree, or using the quest tracking feature to help guide you around. We also don’t want to be intrusive with tutorials, so we’ve found some ways to convey the knowledge when it’s needed without holding you up.  

[ignore the programmer art/writing]  

For the crafting menu for example we don’t want people to miss the fact that there are multiple categories of recipe lists, but as soon as the player switches category we know that this information is understood, so we just display a notice to direct attention to the category buttons when we know the player is looking for a specific recipe, and hide it when they switch categories, we don’t need to pause the game or throw up a big graphic, and we teach it when the player needs to know it. If you can’t tell, I love a well-made tutorial.  

Also, Montreal weather update, apparently when it gets cold, the snow gets armour, something called freezing rain. It’s beautiful and weird. Anyway, that’s enough rambling for this week. Pip Pip Cheerio!  

Megillah  

Alex and Lisa  

Oy, such tsuris has the Arthur playthrough been, but we’re almost done, ayn kaynhoreh. The Parade District was missing a few tchotchkes, particularly the Department of Senseless and Idiotic Research. So it shouldn’t be a shanda, I rewrote.  

The usual schtick is I write all sort of shpiels for the player character. At this point, new shpiels would make the LD plotz, so I’m trying to be a mensch and only rewrite individual lines we already got.  

Why? With a rewrite, only the audio boys and me have to schlep. The level design specifies the name of the file containing the line – say GD0_006_PC_Art_Well_That, “Well, that’s terribly romantic, isn’t it. They had each other until the end.”  

But, I can rewrite the line so Arthur says, “Oh, heavens, that’s horrible,” then record it. Adrien edits it out of the recording session and Valentino puts the new sound file into the GD0_006_PC_Art_Well_That “bucket.” Now when the level design calls up GD0_006_PC_Art_Well_That, we hear “Oh, heavens, that’s horrible.”  

You might think it’s a pain in the tuchis, but necessity is the mamaloshen of invention, nu?  

Also, a new bridge we made from Eel Pie to Maidenholm, and we needed the gants megillah yesterday, so not to be a putz I jumped in to help our environmental narrative maven, Lisa.  

Meanwhile, Sam has been proposing some ferkakta idea about how we should design levels and narrative “rationally” in the DLC (don’t worry, we won’t be starting on this until we’re done with the game). It sounds meshugenah – what, you don’t like flailing and yelling? – but he’s mishpocheh, so we humor him. Not so much would you like him when he’s angry.  

Gey gezunterheyt!  

Animation  

MikeP  

Sup! As the great Don Rickles once said:”Some people say funny things, but I say things funny.” That’s kinda what I’m trying to do. So this week I continued to work on some cutscenes for you guys. When I work, I try and makes things a bit different for you guys, give them a bit of a twist, something you weren’t expecting. Hopefully when you guys finally get to play, you’ll notice that and it’ll make playing the game that much better for you! Nothing else of note to speak of this week, just wanted to share that little tidbit with you. So that’s it for me for this week, so tune in again next week, Same Bat Time, Same Bat Channel! (Also if you’re wondering why I haven’t written anything in my native language, it’s because I’m born in Montreal and speak English. Nothing interesting about that. In fact, it’s kinda just like I’m writing here. Pretty Vanilla)  

Franzi  

Hallo liebe Leute, hier ist Franzi, die andere mysteriöse Animatorin!...Moment...Franzi wer? Was sagt sie da? Und vor allem wie???  

Ja, Ze German kommt jetzt auch mal dahergeschlittert (ich sag nur Eis in Montreal) und schreibt euch ein paar Zeilchen. Ihr habt bisher noch nicht viel von mir gehört, aber es ist Mutter- sprachenwoche bei Compulsion Games und ich lasse es mir nicht nehmen, euch meine Arbeit zu erklären. Und das auch noch in Deutsch!  

Also, mein Revier sind die zahlreichen Encounters, sprich NPCs, auf die ihr trifft, wo ich entweder bereits bestehende Dialog Animationen zusammenschneide oder für spezielle NPCs neu erstelle. Es geht darum, den Charakteren Leben einzuhauchen und dabei die jeweilige Emotion und Intention zu unterstreichen. So kommt es, dass z.B. ein Romantiker auf die Knie geht, ein Wellie euch ein Geschenk überreicht oder ein wütender Wastrel auf den Boden stampft.  

Und diese Woche habe ich wieder einige solcher Dialoge mit Animationen versehen, aber was genau, werdet ihr selber sehen. So weit so gut, das wars auch schon. Traurig, aber wahr, es ist auch meine letzte Woche bei Compulsion Games und ich fühle mich geehrt an einem so coolen Projekt mitgewirkt zu haben. Machts gut!  

Jules  

Salut à tous ! C’est un avec un grand plaisir que je vais vous raconter ma semaine mais cette fois-ci en français. Pour changer j’ai encore et toujours travaillé sur le combat ! Ça tombe bien c’est ce que je préfère. Donc comme je vous le raconte depuis plusieurs semaines je “polish”, où disons plutôt raffine les animations que j’ai réalisées il y a plusieurs mois auparavant. Cette semaine c'était au tour des attaques au poing. Dans un premier temps pour nos chers Wellie et ensuite pour les Wastrel. Donc concernant le combat, les attaques sont prêtes. Mais il reste encore beaucoup d’autres animations telles que les provocations ou encore bien d’autres animations de communication durant le combat. Comme promis je vous partage quelque GIF de ces attaques ! La première correspond à l’attaque légère des Wastrel, et la seconde à l’attaque lourde des Wellie. Bon week-end à tous et à la semaine prochaine.  

Design  

Eric  

Alrighty there folks, this week is talk in yer native language dont’cha know. Well, this week was all aboot finally Arthur. We have a really big play test coming up that we’re super excited aboot. There going to play all the wicked new content we made for the intro areas of the game. Arthur’s playthrough has gotten surprisingly good over the past few weeks, and it’s nice to be able to finally show some people and see what they think. Well, that’s all I got, so uh, have a super weekend eh!  

Roxanne  

Bonjour les amis! Cette semaine, j’ai rajouté pleins de conversation ambiantes pour nos chers Wellies. J’ai également travaillé à améliorer les objets que l’on peut trouver dans le jeu. Voilà ! Rien du super palpitant, mais oh combien nécessaire ! :)  

Audio  

Valentino  

Ciao a tutti !  

Per la prima volta vi scrivo in italiano. :D Questa settimana ho integrato un sacco di nuovi effetti per i "Wastrel/Wellie/Bobby etc." (circa 600 linee). D’ora in poi potrete sentire delle nuove parole quando si interpella il giocatore.  

Ho dovuto giocare un sacco e completare tantissime missioni per assicurarmi che si sentano bene le voci, i suoni e la musica. Poi ho creato un nuovo ambiente con la pioggia! Ora si potranno sentire le gocce che battono sui tetti delle case, il rumore dell’acqua quando si cammina e in tante altre situazioni. Non vedo l’ora di vedere le vostre reazioni quando ci giocherete. A presto !  

QA  

Alexina  

Hey guys! So my first language is France’s worst nightmare - la joual. So I’m just gonna skip on that and avoid all the billion spelling mistakes I would make.  

This week we’ve been in super high gear for the upcoming playtest and all collectively complaining at least twice a day about how awfully icy the sidewalks are (except Sam - Sam never complains). There’s also new features that are being tested and there’s also some older features we’ve been reviewing such as the bobby whistle. I’ve been doing a stealth pass for Arthur this week and the usual QA work stuff as well as nonsense.  

On a side note: Kumusta kayong lahat na Pilipino naglalaro, huwag ninyong kalimutan ang iyong kaligayahan sa pag "tune in" kada simana!  

For now, keep warm and do a weird foot shuffle every time someone gives you scotch. (Please someone, give me scotch to survive - please.)  

Art  

Carylitz  

Que onda raza! Escribiré en español, pero Mexicano (y del norte). Mucho jale en las últimas semanas, he estado en todos lados como de costumbre acá uno tiene que ser todologo, asi que, estuve trabajando en variaciones de personajes, locaciones de encuentros secretos, unos callejones que servirán como variantes para las islas de las pequeñas ciudades y uno que otro prop que se nos cruza como urgencia. Las semanas que vienen estarán algo pesadas porque tenemos que finalizar todo el arte del juego, así que estaremos enfocados 100% en eso. Hay mil pequeñas tareas por todos lados, así que habrá mucho movimiento entre departamentos, pero ya es viernes tiempo de ponerse impertinentes. Bueno nada mas que decir por aca, que tengan buen fin y pasenla bonito!  

Marc-André  

Cette semaine, l’on est presque tombé à bas dans la street à cause de la température glaciale mais nous pouvions quand même nous rendre à la workplace. Le travail a avancé de façon effrayable: beaucoup de layout et un peu de modeling et de material tweaking. Le bridge entre le garden district one et le village un arrive full prêt pis ready to go et le progrès est encouraging. On a pas slacké!  

Whitney  

Howdy doo! Vermont here!  

Jeezum Crow it's chilly out there! Let me grab my favorite flannel and some craft brew before tellin' ya how my week was. If only I could describe it to ya with a vegetable diorama or day-glo painted junk art sculpture.  

This week I reviewed play-through notes, drew a new location, and chugged along on remaining environmental narrative. So. Much. Environmental. Narrative.  

Enjoy this painting of our Weird Sisters:)  

PH  

Salut à tous, Cette semaine c’était la fashion week car je me suis occupé de modéliser des chaussures et des bottes. Toujours super intéressant de s’occuper de props pour We Happy Few car il y a toujours une excellente phase de recherche à effectuer avant de démarrer. Après avoir récolté tout ce qu’il me fallait pour coller au mieux aux années 40/50, Whitney m’a aidé à valider des designs et je viens de passer ma semaine dessus.  

Ninja Department  

Clara  

Wesh les gros, bien ou bien?  

Aujourd'hui j'ai l'autorisation de vous la faire comme on se les balance dans le 9-5, façon "susu la famille" et "mais m'dame j'ai rien fait"! Alors big up à tous les banlieusards qu'on traite de parichiens, aux gangstas et leurs frocs sous le cul, aux meufs à leggings, et plus généralement, aux utilisateurs du RER D. Et mes darons, s'ils me lisent.  

Cette semaine, c'était beaucoup d'aller retour entre google drive et ma timeline de montage. Le machin ressemble à la fermeture du marché de Goussainville : gros bordel ambiant mais ça sent bon les épices. Ca consiste à mater des pages et des pages de doc excel et à essayer beaucoup de trucs avec Cord, notre directeur marketing. On essaye de pécho les meilleurs moments narratifs et les lignes de dialogue qui nous paraissent les plus intéressants pour un projet top secret pour le moment.  

Tá an chuid eile de mo sheachtain tiomnaithe do UI athbhreithnithe. Go leor oibre ag teacht. Ná iarr orm é seo a fhuaimniú. Hi to our irish players.  

Slàn!  

Thanks for tuning in!  

Compulsion Team

Update #141 - Production Update and Story Teaser
about 8 years ago – Fri, Jan 19, 2018 at 08:00:30 PM

Having recently reached our “content complete” milestone, the team has conducted a thorough review of the game, beginning to end. You can listen to Guillaume and Sam chat about it in the accompanying video, but bottom line: the team has built some amazing content, but we need more time to polish than we anticipated.  

As a result, we will now be releasing the game this summer.  

We have also received feedback that some Steam players felt the new pre-purchase asking price didn’t mesh well with the game being categorized as Early Access. Given all the content we have yet to reveal to the public, we can see their point. That being said, we’ve done a huge amount of work and the scope of the game is substantially increasing over what’s there right now, which is a very unusual situation for Early Access games, especially as we have a retail release on the way. What you guys see right now is definitely not what we see internally.  

So, we find ourselves caught between Early Access (where it’s important to have a price that reflects the current game) and the eventual release of the full game with increased scope (which we believe reflects a traditional retail game). We had anticipated that Steam players would be okay with pre-purchase still granting early access, but since we won’t be offering any additional early access updates beyond August’s “Life in Technicolour”, we think having this labeled Early Access and charging the price of a larger game caused more confusion than we had hoped.  

We want to make sure everyone who plays the game is happy, so alongside our revised release date, we are doing two things:  

1) Enabling refunds for all players who purchased on Steam, past and present, regardless of playtime. We’ll continue working to make sure 1.0 is great and something you’ll be happy buying.  

2) Temporarily disabling the buy button on Steam as of February 1st,, 2018. We don’t want new players to have the same frustration, so we’re temporarily disabling the option to buy on Steam, and will re-enable the buy button once we’re closer to launch when more info and materials on the game will have been released, giving players more clarity on what they can expect in the full version of We Happy Few.  

So, that’s it for today. We’re going to get back to making We Happy Few. Thank you once again for all your ongoing support.

Compulsion Games

Update #142 - Release schedule update and introducing Sally
about 8 years ago – Fri, Jan 19, 2018 at 05:04:25 PM

Hey everyone,  

In case you missed it, this morning we released an official announcement that we were delaying We Happy Few to Summer 2018 and as a thank you for being so patient we also teased the new female character player. You can see the video and the announcement we posted here, along with a little taste of the story. We also talk about it in more depth in this week’s production update below.  

Otherwise, it’s onwards to release for us! This week we wanted to make it a good one, so it’s a bit longer than average.

Production

Sam

Hi folks - if you haven’t already watched the video about the new release window, these next few paragraphs will probably make no sense. Here it is again if you haven’t seen it. We hope you like meeting Miss Thigh Highs.  

G, Whitney, Alex, Matt and I have been on the project for four years now - we started January 2014. The rest of the team have joined us since then, bringing together their enthusiasm, skill and determination to create a game we’re very excited about. Regardless of whether we’ve been on the project for 4 years or 3 months, today’s decision is a tough one, as is any that involves critically assessing the work you’ve done.  

To elaborate on what I said in the video, once we finished getting the major content into the game, we reviewed how it felt when it fit together. In particular, we noticed that the game had a good pace throughout Arthur's story, except the beginning - that was some of the first content we built a long time ago, and after refining our tools and world, it just didn't cut it any longer. It wasn’t structured well, and we were not doing a good enough job of introducing the world (the lore behind the Wastrels, the Garden District, Arthur, and all that good stuff). We also weren’t sufficiently introducing the game’s mechanics. In retrospect, this is something we should have done better on the Early Access launch too, but hindsight is always 20/20.  

In any event, we didn't think the early game was shippable (among other things), and looking at what we're building now, we are confident that was the right decision. The new intro island is shaping up to be just as weird and wonderful as the rest of the game, as it should be.  

The review was a little while ago, which is why you have seen weekly updates mentioning the revised tutorial island for the past few weeks. It has taken us some time to come to conclusions about what to do design wise, line up funding, organise a new production schedule and release window, in order to be able to make this announcement. Gearbox has been supportive all the way along - I appreciate some of you have had some skepticism about our partnership, but we can only reiterate that they have been excellent partners, and are doing a fantastic job at supporting us while we make We Happy Few the best it can be.  

To look ahead, 2018 is still a very exciting year for us. We’re in finaling mode, so no more new things, just polish and bug fixes to go. I’m very proud of the team for creating something so unique, and we’re all very much looking forward to getting the game in your hands as soon as we can.

Art Team - Whitney, Emmanuel, Tito, Marc-André, Sarah, Guillaume, Cary and PH

PH  

This week, I continued the work on the posters and graffiti for the Garden District. Early tests were quite good, now I will have to place them everywhere.

Then I started to remodel some old rubble piles for the player to loot. Those piles have been there for a long time and we want another look for them. Pipes, shiny things, rubbles, dirt, bricks... these have to be intriguing for the player to pique his/her interest. I’m working with David and Whitney towards this goal. Here’s a sneak peek at some chunk of mortared bricks I’m working on.

Animation Team - JR, Rémi, Vincent, Mike P, Jules, Raph and Franzi

Mike  

Hey folks! As the great Groucho Marx once said: “One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got into my pajamas I'll never know.” It’s been an interesting week. Been working hard on cutscenes for you guys. Still working on the same one from last week, which is part of Arthur’s first island, so there is that. Now I know what your thinking to yourself. You’re saying: “ Self, why does Mike take so long to make cutscenes? Shouldn’t this take, like… I dunno, like 2 hours tops!?” And although I don’t disagree that I could slap together something in two hours, I’m pretty sure you’d want to slap me back if you had to suffer through that while playing our game. So until they invent a magical “Animate” button, you’re all just going to have to bear with me while I try to work my magic for you. Well this post kind of reminds me of Seinfeld for some reason. <Stares off into the distance with empty eyes>... Well that's it for me folks, tune in next week, Same Bat Time, Same Bat Channel!

Vincent  

Well… It’s finalling time! That means a lot of reviews and spreadsheets filling, to keep track of all the polish we need to do. I won’t lie, there’s a lot… We really want the baby to be pretty!  

Other than that I’ve been working on a sort of ‘light NPC’, to put spectators in the background of some encounters. Real AI characters are super versatile, react to all sort of stimuli and, you guessed it, take a lot of processing power! Sometimes we just need to have some sort of crowd with very basic behaviour, and using generic NPCs for that would be a bit of a waste. So I’ve been putting together a simple object that only can look at something and ‘cheer’. Actually, cheering can be any kind of animation, it’s all customizable. So you can use that object to have a crowd of wastrels that cheers on demand when you get punched in the face, or a crowd of posh wellies taking pictures and taking notes! The script only has to call a function and they all ‘cheer’, with some random offsets and animation speed, so that they don’t look (too much) like robots!  

Of course this has to be used in a controlled environment, where the player can’t interact with those fake NPCs, or they’d just look at you very insistently, looking like the complete idiots they are.

Jules  

Hi! I’ve started this week by doing some animation for the Jubilator. After this task, I moved to our POI (point of interest) animations, which are the random activities that Wellies and Wastrels can do about town. We had some issues with the animation and now it’s fixed! So our NPCs can pick their nose/ear, cough and sneeze in total tranquility in Wellington Wells. During the time I had left, I went back to polish combat animation, especially the fist attack! I will share some GIF of them next week for sure. See you then!

J.R.  

Hey guys. After recovering from the plague that's been slowly knocking down Compulsion team members over the past month, I was back and ready for a week of reviews and meetings! Not the most glamorous of all things, but very productive as it makes our goals very clear. Aside from that, I've technically been finishing the last cinematic I owned except for one special case... which is crazy! Sure there's other shots to fiddle with (still secret!!) and a little bit of polish and fixes to be done here and there, but looking back and to think that I went through all of those scenes, it makes me really happy and proud. Hope you enjoyed the little sneak peek in the announcement today ;) ......Sally who?

Engineering Team - Matt, Serge, Michael, Lionel, Rob, Evan, Maarten, Céline and Guillaume (sometimes)

Céline  

Hello ! Lots of fixes were done in the last two weeks concerning Stealth. There was a funny bug where asleep NPCs could see you even if their eyes were closed. Additionally, when spotting you, they were so surprised that, most of time, instead of just falling from the bed like a normal person, they would fall through the floor and disappear in the abyss of the world. I'd never thought Arthur could be that scary. Jokes asides, we also fixed some weird NPC behavior when throwing objects. Now they’re properly distracted, leaving the path clear for you to progress. There are still a lot of tweaks and fixes to make the stealth experience nicer but it is progressing quite well.

Michael

Happy Friday Ladies and Gents. I’ve spent a good deal of time this week sitting in meetings with a large number of the team and reviewing all our mechanics for combat, conformity and stealth in order to see how “done” we are. Fortunately the feedback is “just balance and polish” for almost everything, which seems like a good stage to be at. One thing that has been given a bit of additional love is the Quickslots, which are very important to the game and have received a lot of valid criticism from players and the team. So this week I have rejigged this design and implemented a new system which allows you to have 4 slots assigned to use at all times, and the list of things that can be assigned is a lot larger and more up to you.

Serge  

Hello world! The goal for me this week was to polish a special fight with the Jubilator by implementing a custom behavior for it when the player leaves the arena. For that I needed to implement a new mechanism to acquire position from a level in order to feed the behavior of a NPC. That effort will also serve to polish another encounter as the goal is to support specific realization (aka NPCs doing unique things) while still running systemic characters. Rapid iterations with a gameplay animator has been key to achieve that within a week which makes me particularly proud!  

If you are curious to see how what I am talking about looks like in the editor, here is a screenshot of the new subtree that handles that fight with the Jubilator:

Design Team - David, Hayden, Antoine, Adam, Ben, Eric, Roxanne and Benji

Adam  

I’m back from Christmas vacation, and it’s straight back into overdrive here. We’re continuing our blitz to finish up Arthur’s story mode, and being really careful about whether we REALLY need this thing, or whether we can live without it. Personally, I’ve been reworking the flow for the 3rd hour of the game to clear up confusion, and streamline the player to his objectives. I’ve also been playing with this awesome tool that Matt made (draw road shapes and it appears on the overworld map). As you can probably guess, my test case was to draw a giant dick.

Eric  

What Adam said, but for different parts of the game. Although similar parts of the anatomy.

Ninja Department  

Clara (Do I have to state my name everytime? I’m the only one in this department for Christ’s sake) Editor's note: Yes you do.

Hey guys,  

The ninja department is alive. Working in the shadows, as always. (Literally. My screens are blocking the lights from the windows. It's dark in there. For the better.)  

Since I've been back from Christmas holidays, I went back to editing for my greatest pleasure and to put together the short Sally sneak peek that you probably saw earlier today. I love doing those. Not only do I get to explore storytelling and tease you guys, it makes for lovely collaborations within the team; I get to work with people that I actually rarely work with:  

Benji was nice enough to spend some time adding console debug for me to go to specific cinematics (and avoid a lot of swearing on my part), Celine looked over builds, Emmanuel did his Emmanuel stuff and made everything look amazing, Valentino handled sound recording, Cord wrote and talked and threw ideas to my head and we played that pleasant game of bouncing ball with the edit ("won't it look better if? Shouldn't we try this? What about that?")  

Those little pieces of videos work pretty much the same way we make this game. With a lot of people, coffee, Digestives(cookies) and collective effort. Hope you enjoyed it. See you!

Thanks for tuning in!  

Compulsion Team

Update #140 - Happy New Year!
about 8 years ago – Sat, Jan 13, 2018 at 12:14:27 AM

Hey everyone,  

Most of the office is now back at work after a much needed holiday break and we are ready to take on 2018!  

Production

Sam

Hi everyone, happy new year! From everyone here at Compulsion, we hope you’ve had time over the new year period to relax and check out some great games.

Since November, we have been reviewing game mechanics, playthroughs and all of the nitty gritty details that go into making a game. Many of us on the team have been in almost constant review meetings, going over everything with a fine toothed comb, deciding what’s working well, what isn’t, and what needs improvement. One initial decision we made was to improve Arthur’s first two hours, which we have spoken about in the past few weekly journals.

We’ve now progressed into different type of decisions, for example, which features to keep and which just aren’t interesting enough. For example, we just don’t think the gifting function is great as it is currently implemented, and the time we would need to improve it is better spent elsewhere. So, we’re restricting gifting to Bobbies only (which already have good realisation), and probably renaming it as “bribery”. We will post more about what we’ve been doing on this front, and the big picture calls we’ve had to make as a result of all of these changes, next week.

Narrative Team - Alex and Lisa

Alex

We’ve all been scrambling to rebuild the first two hours of Arthur’s playthrough so it functions as a better tutorial while also being more spectacular and “sticky.” We’ve also rejiggered the order of islands you’ll have to cross, and fixed the logic of your interactions with a certain very important person. So for me, that means writing and recording about 500 new lines of encounter dialog.  

Meanwhile we’ve been recording barks to clarify why exactly NPCs are pissed off at you. Altogether, let’s say I recorded about 1100 lines of dialog in five recording sessions with actors in London, LA, and somewhere in New Zealand.  

Also, in my copious free time, I’ve been reworking the scripts to Top Secret Project #1. I realized that it was impossible to get into the head of Top Secret Person #1, so I gave her a troublesome person to talk to. This really has opened things up.  

Wot I Did Over My Winter Vacation: I suck at vacation. Lisa is much better at it. But either way, over the break, Lisa and I did a lot of research and kicking around ideas for Top Secret Project #4. Some of this is quite a bit in advance. But we like to have time to write, then realize the writing is broken, then reformulate. As all pro writing monkeys know, writing is rewriting. We think you’ll be really excited ... sometime ... in the future ... forget you even read this.

Design Team - David, Hayden, Antoine, Adam, Ben, Eric, Roxanne and Benji

Eric

Well, this week and the last few have been 100% dedicated to making sure Arthur’s playthrough is the best it can be. We restructured some things, changed a bit of the narrative, fixed a ton of bugs, rearranged some things, made a few schedules, excel sheets, had some meetings, and got fat(ter) over Christmas. So far it’s turned out a lot better than where it was 2 months ago. It’s starting to shape up into the game we wanted to make. So that’s cool. That all said, I think every game I’ve worked on has scared me until the last like 3 to 5 months of production. It’s like a broken mess, until it’s not. Then it’s like, “oh hey, this is cool!”.

Roxanne

This week, I added quest rewards to all Arthur’s playthroughs quests, including adding skill points everywhere, and added a bunch of recipes so all our new clothes and weapons are spawning. I also worked on our ambient civilians (what we call “AI Decorators”), to make sure Wellington Well is full of life.

Animation Team - JR, Rémi, Vincent, Mike P, Jules, Raph and Franzi

Mike

Hey folks! Hope you all had a great holiday. I’m back and working on some sweet ass cutscenes. We are working hard to make your immersion into our games as wicked as possible and so this week I’ve worked on a little cutscene that’ll make getting bullied in high school because you were wearing the wrong clothes, look like a walk in the park. Like one of the instructors on my Basic Training said, “If you want to stay out of trouble in the army, look at everyone else is doing, divide by half and do that.” I still don’t really know what he meant by that, but save it to say that we will try our bestest to prevent the locals from playing whack a mole with your skull! That’s it for me, so tune in next week! Same Bat Time same Bat Channel!

Jules

Hi all! I’m starting this new year with a task I haven’t done in a long time, polishing my animation. I’ve done the majority of the NPC attacks and I must say, it’s looking great! I am sharing some of them with you today and will bring you more next week. I hope you will like them!

 

 

 

 

Engineering Team - Matt, Serge, Michael, Lionel, Rob, Evan, Maarten, Céline and Guillaume (sometimes)

Michael

I’ve been getting back into the swing of things after the holidays with some easy repetitive bug fixing. It’s nice to have some quick tasks to complete to get you back into the working mood. I also picked up a task to give some love to our special pickups, and create some effects that activate when you have the pickup in your inventory. The mission rewards for certain big encounters; the Simon Says Medal, Holy Yam, and the Adulator pickup you get from the Newspaper office quest, all now have a lasting bonuses to help you on your journey through Wellington Wells.

My favourite was the Holy Yam. Once you have the Holy Yam, you will magically start finding more yams than you would before. Were they always there and you were just not seeing them, or does the Holy Yam have the power of creation in its starchy grasp?

Serge

Happy new year everyone! This week, I’ve been working on the Jubilator : that big machine that cleans up the Village over the night. Be ready to run if you get caught by it during curfew! I also spent time with the level and game designers for the fight that occurs within an arena where you learn how to beat them.

Lionel

I was moving islands around this week. The current system wasn’t as stable as we wanted, and on a few rare occasions islands could collide, producing very strange worlds. So I went back to the whiteboard, armed with a pen and math, I tried to find a solid way to place the islands, and then I built a prototype to see if my thinking was correct (spoiler : it was not). Still, after a few back and forth, I converged on something and the new system seems promising. Picture (warning : programer art.).

Note that not all of these are islands, nor are they necessarily representative of the size of an island.

QA Team - Lee, Stephanie, JP and Alexina

Alexina

Hello folks, this week I’ve been mostly working on compiling a tracker in our database and a test plan to keep track of blockers, conditional blockers and crashes for some upcoming playtests that we’re doing this month. Besides that, the usual QA shenanigans of bugging/vetting, testing new features and helping players on our support forums. I hope everyone had a wonderful holiday and a good start to the new year.

Jean-Philippe

Hello folks, back from Holidays and back to work. Much of this week was spent preparing for upcoming Playtests. Not much else to add beyond that. Typical QA stuff as mentioned by Alexina consists of 70% of our work.  

Enjoy the attached image; this animation is not in the public version but now the Wastrels go to the bathroom. Of course it wouldn’t be real game development without bugs so here is a funny one.

Art Team - Whitney, Emmanuel, Tito, Marc-André, Sarah, Guillaume, Cary and PH

PH

Hello,  

This week I modeled some kind of giant TV show set inspired from the 50s. I worked with Level Designer Eric to get something that will be fun and interactive for the player. Then I worked with Level Designer Benjamin on a wrecked car that the player will scavenge to collect special loot. Then I started to implement some posters and flyers into the levels that Sarah and Whitney have beautifully created. Trust me, they are amazing! These pieces of environmental narratives will help a lot to give backstory and context for players. Adding these details here and there is really time consuming but the results are without doubt worth it for the player experience!  

And one more thing, I did it! I managed to finish The Witcher 3 during the holidays, 3 years after the release. But I’m not totally over with it because I’m now playing the expansions. Will see if I can finish them before the end of 2018.  

Marc-André  

This week, I am back from Christmas vacation! The harsh weather I have been experiencing made me question why anyone with a sane mind would decide to come live here in Canada. -37° Celsius (-35° Fahrenheit) is freezing cold.  

The entirety of my week was aiming toward finishing the tutorial island and tweaks/bug fixing of other areas of the game.  

I’ve been shuffling a lot of minor tasks that, together, add up to a lot. I did some polish on the grass, houses and hooligan camp of the tutorial island, did tweaks to the Mystery House & [a spooky redacted] encounters, fixed terrain SFX issues, did some new flag variants, added environmental narrative and fixed minor collision in bugs in some encounters such as The Church of Simon Says. I also did some new optimised materials that will be useful when placing posters on the Garden District buildings.

Basically, I was everywhere, doing the much needed task of finishing up a lot of small important details in order to mark stuff as “Finished”.  

Sarah  

Heyo! New year, new art (same Sarah)! I hope you had a restful, happy holiday. This week I worked on brand new posters, graffiti, and propaganda, all for the tutorial island! There's lots of new opportunities to push the story in this place, and to get familiar with the world. We explored some long forgotten ideas that Alex drafted ages ago (including the attached image text below! A bad apple spoils the bunch, don't cha know!), as well as new concepts and scribbles, thanks to Lisa! And of course, as ever, lots of Wastrel graffiti. Here's a little doer I made this week! Have a great weekend!

Publishing – Steve, Jeff, Mike C, Austin, Meredith, Elisa, Kat, Kelly, Nicole, Sean, Mike M, Elliot, and Simon (and more)

Mike R

Hello Everyone! My name is Mike. I am the Creative Director of Marketing at Gearbox Publishing. I spend my time leading and collaborating with artists of many specializations, bringing marketing content to life. You may have already seen my work – the We Happy Few Re-Announce trailer was the first trailer I directed since joining the team in June. You can also find me for a split second playing a guitar in the Trailer Audio Behind the Scenes video. Fun fact: They used that clip in reverse, so that’s me playing… but backwards!  

On to the update - Whew! Fun break! I hope everyone had a fun and safe end of the year. December was very productive, planning for the development of some exciting trailers and other marketing assets in the coming year.  

With the aforementioned planning finished, we are well prepared for the best part of the process – MAKING COOL STUFF. I can’t wait to turn these paper ideas into something you all can see. 2018 should be a fun year!

Thanks for tuning in!  

Compulsion Team

Update #139 - Happy Holidays!
over 8 years ago – Fri, Dec 15, 2017 at 02:41:19 PM

Hey everyone,  

It is finally the holidays and we are more than ready to take a break and recharge before 2018 kicks in! But no rest for the wicked just yet, we still have a lot of work to do before some the team heads off to visit their families. We wish you all a very happy holidays and may you work your way through your backlog! We asked each team member to write what game they were looking to play over the holidays and we would love to hear yours as well. 

We also released some print-outs of We Happy Few paper snowflakes to add a little extra Joy to your holiday decorating!

Narrative Team - Alex and Lisa

Alex

This week, Lisa and I gave a talk at MIGS on “Dirty Narrative” in We Happy Few. Dirty narrative is my term for making the game into a bit of an unreliable narrator. There will be inconsistencies. There will be absences. There will be mysteries. There will be translucent lies -- lies that tell you as much about the liar as they do about the truth. Characters will tell you things you need to know only tangentially -- they are not there to serve your story, they are the heroes of their own stories.  

Our theory is that pushing information at the player pushes you away; we only want to answer a question after you’ve asked it. That way, you pull yourself into the story and the world.  

You may judge for yourself whether we have been successful in this approach.  

I’m also writing dialog for the great effort to rework the first two hours of the game. Right now it’s all robo-speech, which is horrifying to listen to, but works for the designers. Probably after the holidays I’ll turn that into recorded temp speech in which I do all the voices, which gives us a more accurate sense of how the encounters play out. And then, once everything is nailed down, I’ll bring our actors back and turn it into recorded final dialog.  

Now that we’ve given our talk, things as home have returned to normal (or, normal for us, anyway), so I can get into Horizon Zero Dawn: The Frozen Wilds and Witcher 3: Blood and Wine. There is also a Crusader Kings 2 game that I’ve had on hiatus for months, and if I give in to temptation, I might re-install CK2 and disappear from reality for a week.

Lisa  

Same as above, but over the holidays, I will be playing CUPHEAD!

Design Team - David, Hayden, Antoine, Adam, Ben, Eric, Roxanne and Benji  

Cuddly Eric  

After a few weeks of restructuring some things, planning, schedules, meetings, chats, bug fixes, design schtuff, and whatever else I was up to I’m back making some new content. I’m making a new bridge that is supposed to be a bit of an event. Think it’ll be cool, and hopefully pretty weird.  

Adorable Adam  

I’ve been working on a new transition quest for Arthur’s story. It involves some new areas, and some areas that you may have come across in early access builds. Also, I made a bobby spawner that bobbies actually return to when their alarm is over.  

So, if you guys haven’t heard of this game, it’s effing scary. Terrific sound design, and some genuine “oh f*ck” moments:  

http://unforgivinggame.com/

Antoine  

Hey there good people ! So the level design area is getting a tiny bit invaded. I’ve got two new neighbors (Emmanuel and Marc André) that are both doing a pretty hardcore job of arting up the sections I’ve created for the very first Garden District island. We’ve gone through a lot of iterations on those, trying to route the player into interesting locations, accentuate certain things in the environment. Having them closer made the whole process a lot easier. Trying to make sure the world is creepy enough, I’ve tried to push a little the creation of more “Wastrel art” into our garden district islands. What’s interesting about them is that, they are trying their best to be normal again (words from Alex our narrative director). So that’s why when sometimes they set up tea parties with mannequins it’s just a way for them to do something normal but with the wacky side effect of a brain messed up by Joy (if some of our early access players remember the giant cat with a hat sitting at a table with a bunch of tea cups it’s definitely coming back with more stuff).

Animation Team - JR, Rémi, Vincent, Mike P, Jules, Raph and Franzi

Mike P (Diddy)  

Sup folks! So this merry week I have been working on a cutscene that has taken on a bit of a larger scope than I originally intended. It’s one of the first narrative beats so I figured it needed a bit more love. As it turns out, if any of you get the reference: “Pitcher la vache” from Monty Python, then you’ll probably like this shot. Hehehehe… So yeah, I think it’s hilarious and when you guys get around to it I hope you have a chuckle too! That’s it for me for this week, so tune in next week, same Bat Time, Same Bat Channel!

Jules  

Hey everybody! So during this week, I've worked on few different tasks. Like I shared with you last week, we are currently working on a new death reaction. Previously for the NPC’s death, we played the hit reaction animation and we turned on the rag doll at the end of the animation. Now it's a special animation and they finish on rag doll.  

My second task was to make some placeholders for stealth. After that I worked on a few reaction variations for our NPCs before they join the fight. Previously we had just one and it was much too repetitive. I finished my week working on a few issues with feet sliding during combat and some animation fixes. We have reached roughly where we want to be on combat and made huge progress over the past couple of months. It is much more fun and more technical to fight the NPCs now. In the new year, it will be time to polish all of those animations. 

Art Team - Whitney, Emmanuel, Tito, Marc-André, Sarah, Guillaume, Cary and PH

PH

I’ve done a second art pass for the Garden District fillers. I’m really happy with the early results because we are getting something more and more organic. It takes time, though. I have to go through every filler and every encounter to check if everything is pretty and navigable for the player. Collisions are often working against me and I have to do lots of back and forth to make sure that the walking experience in the Garden District is as smooth as possible.

Concerning video games, I’m still motivated to finish The Witcher 3. I’m getting near the 100 hours and still enjoying everything about it. A masterpiece I can't leave unfinished for sure!

Carylitz  

I got the worst cough of the year, but I’m back. I have been working on some maps helping Emmanuel with the refactoring of the Village. I have been doing a lot of tests to make sure everything spawns the way it should. It’s really impressive to see the improvements in the world and see how the work of everyone is finally coming together and showing up in the maps! So I have not much to tell but that. Since this is the last weekly of the year, that means that next time it will be a year since I began working here, which is pretty awesome! And that also means that I'll have some time to play some video games during the Christmas break so I'm looking forward on finally finishing Outlast and probably going through the Witcher if I don't lose the motivation.

Engineering Team - Matt, Serge, Michael, Lionel, Rob, Evan, Maarten, Céline and Guillaume (sometimes)  

Lionel  

We are upgrading our foliage system and it means upgrading two things, the big and the small (or automatic) parts. The big part is the stuff the player will be interested in, like a ring of trees with a chest in the center. The small/automatic part is everything else: the grass, the bushes even the trees, all the vegetation that have no role in the game but would be missed if it wasn’t there (actually some bushes have a role gameplay wise but bear with me there).  

I am working on the big part. To make the patterns more easily defined and more diverse, I built a tool to visualize them and to allow real-time editing. You define a shape (circle or diamond for example), choose an object, the number of times it should appears, and add some perturbation to the placement and you can create some very natural looking patterns, which you can then edit in real time. In the capture below, you can see the basic shape in blue, the candidate positions in red and the preview for the final placements, that includes some pushing.

Real time editing is very useful for procedural systems as it reduces the number of iterations to get what we want. In a word : nice.  

That brings me to the end of my part for this last 2017 weekly. I wish you a very happy Xmas. On my end, I will now start sleuthing to see who is my secret santa in the team. See you in 2018 for new procedural explorations and crazy contraptions.

Céline  

Hi ! I've got some updates on stealth. We now have stealthy high bushes in the game! When crouched while in them, you're basically invisible if no hostile NPCs noticed you before. That offers new stealth options for the Level Designers, and being hidden so close to the enemy is very enjoyable.

Next we're trying to figure out if adding more UI feedback will help you guys more to know if/why you're detected. It is a big discussion at the office as the UI can break the immersion and make the players ignore the other audio/visual cues we worked on. We’re also considering adding a Lean mechanism, but this is under discussion as well.

On another note, I wish you a great Christmas and a happy New Year celebration ! One week of holiday might allow me to finish Xenoblade Chronicles 2 and start Dishonored: Death of the Outsider. Maybe.

Michael  

It’s my last working week of the year and I’ve been continuing to look at combat primarily, but it’s also the season of goodwill so I’ve been handling some requests from the other team members, and fixing up some bugs. For combat I’ve been hooking in some more animations and I did a quick prototype of a feature we discussed last week for a quick throw that could be used in combat, without having to unequip and swap weapons. It worked but it’s not necessarily solving any problems that are very big, so it’s still under consideration. Next week I’ll be heading back home to England, to relax, see family and play games. I enjoy playing with the PlayStation VR with my family, and there’s been quite a few new games and experiences to try out since the last time I saw them; looking forward to meeting Trico from Last Guardian in (virtual) real life.

QA Team - Lee, Stephanie, JP and Alexina

Jean-Philippe Leighton  

This week has been spent vetting and regressing many issues. A few developer support tasks were also completed in order to help them evaluate specific areas of the game. Christmas Holiday is coming up fast and I am looking forward to spending some time with friends and family. Throughout my Christmas Break I’ll most likely be gibbing it up in Quake Champions, exploding things in Space Engineers and playing some Terratech in my spare time.  

Thank you for tuning in everyone and see you soon!  

Compulsion Team

PS: We swear this weekly was not sponsored by CD Projekt RED