Update #133 - Remember November
over 8 years ago – Mon, Nov 06, 2017 at 01:42:06 PM

Hey everyone,  

We can’t believe we’re already in November! Wait, who are we kidding?! It’s Montreal, and already freezing cold, so we have plenty of reminders of where we are in the season! Before we know it, it will be Spring, and--after 4 years of hard work--we’ll be presenting our game to the world. This is both scary and exciting!  

We received a lot of pictures from your We Happy Few Halloween costumes and thought they were all wonderful. Thank you for taking the time to make, wear, and share them! It warmed our twisted little hearts.

Production  

Sam  

After lots of hard work from the team, we're pretty much where we wanted to be with "content complete!". For us, this doesn't mean that content is done - it's not - but it does mean that we have every quest in the game, with its objectives, journals and VO. That's an exciting milestone, because we can now review the entire game, and entire story, to make sure that it works. That work begins next week, along with localization, more finaling, responding to UX tests, bug fixing, and all the final tasks that we have on the project. The team has worked really hard to get here, and it's really shaping up to be a lot of fun.

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

Adam  

Holy Hell has this been a productive week. I’ve been working with Cary and Remi to blow stuff up. Big stuff. BIG boom... And you’re going to love it when you see it. That aside, as most of you know, I’m in charge of the Mad Scotsman in its entirety. I finished up plugging in all the dialogue last week, and this week I’ve been focusing on realization (making shit believable), and blockers (bugs which halt your progression). I have to say, I’m super proud of the Mad Scotsman’s playthrough… and I also find myself adopting a scottish accent from time to time. Gonnae git back tae it, ya weapons!

Roxanne  

Lots of dialogue integration on my side this week. I also found some time to add five new “non-lethal” weapons, for those of you that want to avoid unnecessary deaths.

Eric  

Well, Alex wrote a mountain of dialogue for Arthur, and we got most of it into the build this week. Thanks to Hayden, Benji, Ben, and Roxanne for helping me put in something like a thousand different Arthur lines across 30+ quests. Take that Alex!

Narrative Team - Alex And Lisa  

Lisa  

I’m...done? We’ve locked content for 1.0, so mostly what I’m doing for the game now is just dealing with missing bits and bobs, and making suggestions for polish. Happily, I am also writing the How To Be Happy book that will be in the time capsule, so I still get to live in the joyful world of Wellington Wells a while longer!

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

Jules  

Hey, everybody! So this week I've worked mostly on the doctor! Especially on his resurrect and healing ability. And also I've made a new hit reaction for the player when he carries the bone saw.  

Somewhat Dangerous Mike  

Hey guys! So this week I worked on some more cutscenes like last week for something again I can’t tell you about. But I REALLY REALLY want to though! Cause it’s great! But alas I can’t. Guess you’ll just have to play the game to find out. I’m on to something far more exciting now though. I know I know, you’re saying to yourself: “Self, this seems impossible, with all the awesome.” And you’d be right. But really though it’s not impossible! At least not for me. It’s super exciting. But again it’s all hush hush. So that’s it for me this week, so tune in next week, same Bat time, same Bat channel!  

TL;DR: Super Awesome & Hush hush.

Engineering Team - Matt, Serge, Michael, Lionel, Rob, Evan, Maarten, Céline, Neil And Guillaume (Sometimes)  

Céline  

I’ve been working on the skills and skill menu with Evan, and we have a first working version! The team is also looking for the best skills that will improve and level the game experience. Additionally, they will be used to highlight some unclear gameplay features which are already implemented. It is progressing quite well and I hope you guys will like that new addition.  

Michael  

This week I’ve been taking a look at the conformity system to see how we can make sure the reasons for suspicion and detection are clear when we’re playing. I haven’t actually done a lot of work on it yet, it’s a big system and I need to get an understanding of how it all works before I start digging in and making changes. Thankfully, Serge has been patiently passing on his wisdom and teaching me the way the AI think.  

I have made one change, which is to add some new icons to the HUD to better explain how you are perceived in game. Previously Suspicion was represented by the colour-changing eye and the notification that tells you when you’re suspicious, but we felt this was inelegant and still not giving enough information, so we’re trying out having 3 icons below the compass which reflect whether you can be seen, heard, and whether what you are doing is suspicious. The advantage is they also help at this stage to debug what is and isn’t working the way we expect, so we can flag bugs to fix later, for example if you were sprinting down the street and the noise meter says you are silent, we’ll need to check why.

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

PH   

I continued my props series and this week, I’ve made some dynamite! I had the chance to work on a legendary item that I can’t wait for players to discover. And I also worked closely with the animators to provide them some small props. Pretty fun week for me!

Marc-André Voyer  

This week I have been doing a lot of organisation and testing for the following weeks. Two other artists and I are going to be refactoring all of the Garden District terrains that are connected to roads, to better account for height variation and to add gardens and stone walls that will give it much more the feeling of being a real place. I created a spreadsheet with the list of every level that spawns and delimited which ones will require the refactoring - and eyeballed the worst-looking encounters - so we give these more love. I also created multiple roughed up versions of the plots to test various elements such as the transitions between the terrain and the sidewalk and see if we can get some height variation in these while avoiding the pitfall of adding extra steps.

Emmanuel 

This week I continued the village refactor while also doing a major lighting pass by disabling auto exposure to get more control over every lighting scenario and specially reduce the skylight intensity to get less inside buildings. The contrast are much better balance and we’re really getting toward the final look for the game!

Publishing – Steve, Jeff, Mike C, Mike R, Austin, Meredith, Elisa, Kat, Kelly, Nicole, Sean, Brad, And Erick (And More)  

Hey everyone!  

I’m Austin, Gearbox Publishing’s PR Manager. This week has been a particularly fun week in PR, as I’ve been doing some story brainstorming!  

During a game’s marketing campaign, there are a lot of major moments (announcement, gameplay trailer, story trailer, launch, etc.), but it’s beneficial to keep the conversation going between those moments; that’s where feature stories come in. By feature stories, I mean fun and in-depth looks at specific features in the game that different media outlets would be interested in covering.  

We teamed up with PR agency Evolve to get some ideas down on paper. Some of the ones we’re excited to take further are:

• Overview of improvements and changes made from community impact 
•  Art direction for a procedurally generated world (Whitney did a talk on this earlier this year at GDC!) 
•  A deep dive into Uncle Jack – inspirations, direction, actor interview 
•  An in-depth look on the music of the game (can’t say too much more yet about this one but it’s exciting!)

Ultimately, our goal is to come up with features that will pique the interest and curiosity of you, the We Happy Few community! Feel free to let us know what in-depth features interest you!  

Thanks y’all!  

Compulsion Games

Update #132 - The Ballad of Foggy Jack
over 8 years ago – Fri, Oct 27, 2017 at 09:03:44 PM

Hey everyone,  

We hope you are having a good end of October. There are a lot of cool games coming out, shows to watch and Halloween is right around the corner. If you are dressing up as anyone from We Happy Few, send us some pictures!  

This week we’ve been posting some fun stuff on our social media such as some pumpkin stencils and a little bedtime story by Uncle Jack.

We also posted a tutorial on how to make your very own Bobby mask thanks to the amazingly talented cosplayer DeAnna Davis.

Production

Sam  

Reviews continue this week as we look more closely at player progression, world setup (the procedural generation) and balance. Looking at the user research reports from Gearbox (who have added a piece below explaining who they are and what they do), one of the pieces of feedback that matched community feedback was that many people were taking a while to get to the Village and start taking Joy. As you guys know, these are critical parts of the game world, and many early reports from players have been “I don’t get it, is this just a survival game?” because they never got to the more colourful parts of the world:

These reports are cool because they’re independent - they’re similar in a way to the feedback all of you have given us over the past few years, but are focused on the story playthroughs. These aren’t editorial suggestions, they’re (as much as possible) objective evaluations based on player feedback. They’re a way to help us gain perspective, because it can be very easy to get tunnel vision during development. With this specific issue, we have a range of solutions.

One thing that has become apparent the past two months is that we have huge power with the procedural generation to make big changes very quickly. One option to solve the problem above is to use the generation system to change the layout of the world, introducing these areas earlier. While the generation system has caused issues for our art and level design teams in the past, it is much easier for us to make changes like this than it would be for a traditionally built game. We’re really starting to see the benefits of it at this stage.

For most of the team, content work continues well, and we are able to finalise our ratings submissions. Brazil has been submitted (it is the region with the longest analysis time), and we’re now beginning work on Japan and Malaysia! We do have a couple of last minute cinematics coming in today (including one highly suggestive and comical scene), but as of today that means we have now built the raunchiest, goriest, most full-of-expletive, parts of the game. It’s very fun to review! One more week until “content complete”.

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

Adam

Over 1000 lines needed to be plugged in for the mad scotsman… and that is now finished… hooray! After that, animators go through all the conversations and put together idles/animation chains for conversations. This is a double-edged sword because it opens up the floodgates for a bugs and problems, but it’s an important part in helping give life to the dialogue and story.  

Bugs and problems are pretty much daily life during development. If we have a bug with animation, we’ll need to either fix it through script, or ask for a better tool from programmers. Both solutions can potentially break with subsequent changes, although script fixes are more volatile. For example, in the Technicolour update we remade our AI systems. That system continues to be iterated on, but that can cause problems and break encounters that worked correctly beforehand (eg if we add a new conformity rule, our quest NPCs may not know that they’re supposed to ignore that rule until we fix it).

Early Access was fun for that, because each update meant we’d need to fix encounters that were working previously! Good times. That being said, we’re almost at the point where major systems stop getting significant changes, so we are looking forward to doing the final “finaling” pass and making things run super well. In the meantime, *opens beer bottle*.

Eric  

Integrated VO mostly. Had to fix bugs to be able to do this, so it was a twofer this week. 

Roxanne 

This week I worked on the new loot system and populating our loot lists. I also made some burning status effects for people stepping in campfires. Tons of VO integration otherwise.  

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

Michael  

A bit more combat and a bit more stealth this week. The content complete deadline looms and it’s starting to feel more panicked. The goal for content complete is to have a representative version of the game ready to fix and polish. So any features we want in the game should be in before this deadline, and for me it feels like packing for a holiday the night before; chucking things into the suitcase and hoping you haven’t missed something you really need. Also, with the end in sight you start to be even more judgemental of the game you’re making, and see all the things you want to improve, so it’s a vicious cycle. Fortunately, I’m also still seeing new bits of the game that really impress me, and we’ve still got many months to polish up the work that has been done, and to keep improving and improving the features we’ve got to make the moment to moment gameplay as brilliant as possible.

Lionel  

The world generation impacts two different aspects of the game, the gameplay and the visual. On the first hand, the length of the roads or the distance between “interesting places” are directly connected to the way the world generates. On the other hand, the suspension of disbelief depends (among other things) on the coherence of the world generated. I worked the last week on the first aspect (gameplay) and while there is still room for improvement (there always is), I worked this week on adding subtle (or not so subtle) visual stuff to the hamlets and villages. Things that you would miss if they weren’t there but that makes the world more natural.

Neil  

In the past few weeks I have been working on implementing very different things that Miss Thigh Highs and the Mad Scotsman need to take care of over the duration of the game. Both of these features rely heavily on the flow of time (coincidentally like the looming content complete deadline)! Much like my previous task, this has helped me learn more about the many different systems that are in play in our game. It’s been an incredible adventure to content complete, and I hope this translates into an experience you’ll all enjoy.

Narrative Team - Alex and Lisa

Lisa  

When you play 1.0, each character will have audio flashbacks that let you hear moments in their past that defined them. That’s what I’ve been writing for Miss Thigh Highs this week (in addition to writing the last bits and bobs of environmental narrative). It’s going to be very hard for me to say goodbye to Miss Thigh Highs when we lock content next week. I’ve poured a lot of my own experiences into her character (though of course I never lived in a 60s dystopia where A Very Bad Thing happened). 

I hope you’ll love her as much as I do! In Halloween-related fun, Naila asked me to write a Foggy Jack poem for our Twitter last week. This one that didn’t quite make the cut (we went with a limerick instead), but perhaps it could still serve as a useful warning for all you Downers...

The Ballad of Foggy Jack

On Halloween Eve, in Wellington Wells,  

The church bells knell, and yet all is not well.  

When all good Wellies should be in their bed,  

Comes a nameless fear and a leaden dread --  

If you’re out past curfew, you’ll end up dead!  

For out on the heath, under night’s velvet sheath,  

Whistling cuts through the mists like a scythe!  

Do hurry back home if you value your life,  

Or the last thing you’ll see is the gleam of his knife!

You may have noticed there’s actually a bunch of verse in the game -- we have bawdy army songs, a Rupert Brooks-style soldier poet, pop-star lyrics, and even a couple of modernist diary-entry poems. It’s fun to have a job that lets me write in lots of different literary styles -- from cheeky magazine articles to faux-Shakespearean witches’ dialog. This week I even got to write a riddle in rhyme. I’m trying to squeeze in as much as I can in the last week before content lock!

Alex  

When Lisa and I were taking Kenneth Koch’s writing class at Columbia a long time ago, we learned two things: (a) develop a writing style by writing in other people’s styles (b) you will never run out of words. Writing a game is a master class; I’ve got to write in different voices and different media.

Originally we were just going to have audio flashbacks for Arthur, because Arthur’s main issue is someone who never comes on stage in the present, while Miss Thigh High’s issue is clear and present, and the Mad Scotsman has a special friend to talk to. But Sam asked for audio flashbacks for them, too, so I wrote the Mad Scotsman’s memories this week. They’ll have to go into the game in robospeech or temp voice or something, as the fellow who voices the Mad Scotsmen disappears Monday to the wilds of Alberta till just before Christmas; apparently where he is, there are not high quality sound studios. (Everyone now carries a pretty decent microphone in their pocket; but you still need a professional quality sound studio to get clean audio without a “boxy,” “roomy” quality of reverb.)

Other work: figuring out how to bring the player up to speed on the Garden District faster; writing clever journal entries and objectives in the game’s voice for about half the game; and editing Arthur’s nightmares. Oh, he will have nightmares. He was going to have cinematic nightmares, but with our animators working their fingers to the bone and Clara frantically editing Uncle Jack, now it’s audio nightmares. 

  

I actually love editing audio.  

Lisa and I are giving a talk at MIGS this December on the various forms of narrative we’ve put in the game. Back in the day, if you’d proposed to tell stories via randomly collected letters, signs, graffiti, and gin bottle labels, in an artificial environment, they’d have given you a degree for experimental writing. Now it’s not so experimental, but it continues to be strange fun.

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

Slightly less dangerous Mike  

Hey folks! So this week was cutscenes,cutscenes, cutscenes!!! Was working on them like they were going out of style! These little snippets are there to make you laugh, cringe and add to the flavour of the world we are making for you. This week I worked on one of our characters that I can’t mention, buuut… so if you’ve ever seen a circus act where a guy’s shot out of a cannon.. Well it’s pretty much like that. Except there are no soft landings in store. And I started working on a shot heavily laden with some wink, wink, nudge, nudge, know what I mean, know what I mean type stuff going on. (For you Monty Python fans out there) Except in this situation it’s probably not as exciting as you might think it is. Plot twist! So that’s pretty much it from me this week! Tune in again next week, same Bat Time, same Bat Channel!

Jules  

Hi everybody ! So this week, I worked on combat animation! I've made some new attack for the bayonet weapon. I’m sharing you the new heavy attack of this weapon.  

 

At the middle of the week, I worked on the Doctor! As some of you find, the only NPC who can carry the powerful bonesaw is the Doctor! So the doctor can heal other NPC during a fight, he can resurrect them and heal himself. Yes, he can do a lot of things and reverse the situation during the fight! So during the last part of the week, I've also made some Heal and resurrect animation for the NPC and the doctor.

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

Whitney  

Hey folks,  

It's been a while! The last couple weeks have been a whirlwind. We've been developing the parade district and figuring out what we can do to improve the look of the procedural world on the art side. I've also designed a new version of The Plough Boy (concept soon to come), and the nighttime gas mask for The Doctor, inspired by a medieval plague doctor. Somewhere in there I got the plague myself and had to take a couple of days off, but that's over and I'm back to organizing, prioritizing, reviewing environmental narratives, and concepting:) Speaking of which another thing I've been up to is figuring out ALL remaining art tasks to be done and ALL art related bugs to prioritize, and the underlying conclusion is it's not going to be too terrible! Yay!

PH  

I had the chance to made a really cool plague doctor gas mask based on Whitney’s concept, our Art Director. So I gathered some old leather and vintage gas mask references and I started to sculpt the general shape. The challenge was to give some personality to the mask. Looking at the concept, you can see the frowning eyebrow, the aggressive shape and how everything fits very well with the Doctor’s face. So my main goal was to give strong attention to this. Texturing was a critical process and I spent hours refining the overall leather look. I’m quite happy with the final result. Then I moved on to weapons. I was in charge of creating a set of variation that the player will be able to craft to get a specific weapon ability.

Marc-André, Guillaume, Cary  

This week, we’ve kept working away on level art for the new wonderfully handcrafted biome that is the Parade District. After completing the mid-level blockout of the areas (polishing the layout of the streets, the buildings and creating the rough shape of the terrain), we have been placing all of the decorators such as leaves, vines, puddles and signs on the buildings. We’ve also been placing streetlights to set the ambiance.

Publishing – Steve, Jeff, Mike C, Mike R, Austin, Meredith, Elisa, Kat, Kelly, Nicole, Sean, Brad, and Erick (and more)  

Jon, Michelle, and Kyle

Hail, and well-met!  

We are the Gearbox Publishing User Research Team. Our jobs involve conducting user tests and analyzing data from players for nearly every project at both Gearbox Publishing and Gearbox Software. We work primarily out of our User Research Facility, a dedicated testing lab in Frisco, TX. We recruit participants from the Dallas/Fort Worth area to come to our labs and playtest content for us. Prior to moving over to Gearbox Publishing, the team operated under Gearbox Software since 2008.  

This month the team has been focused on a large multiday user test for We Happy Few; this is the kind of test where our participants come back to the lab for a second day of content and feedback, and we can really focus in on critical areas for analysis. While we can’t divulge the details of the test or the data we collected, we can say that the test itself went very well. Our partners at Compulsion and our Publishing QA groups were fantastic allies throughout the preparation and execution of the test, and all parties were pleased with the report that was delivered. We are looking forward to the next round of testing, and we will be planning that out in the next couple of weeks.  

Until next time!  

Compulsion Games

Update #131 - Parade District teaser
over 8 years ago – Fri, Oct 20, 2017 at 01:12:27 PM

Hey everyone,  

Lots to share this week even though the team is knee deep in work and in story related content. Enjoy!

Production  

Sam  

As we near the end of content complete, we come a bit closer to understanding our estimates, and what we can/can’t accomplish in the time we scheduled. The level design schedule is looking tighter than we’d like for the final week, as it has taken a bit longer to record VO than anticipated, so rather than ask everyone to work super crazy hours we’ve made the call to extend content complete by an extra week. This won’t affect street date as we had built in time to the schedule for exactly this kind of situation. So, still roughly 2 weeks to go until we can say “this is the content we’re shipping with”.  

In the meantime, the team continues integrating content and getting us to the point where we’re ready to submit to ratings. One area of interest right now is the Parade District. Some of you may remember that we had planned to add this in the last Early Access update, but we removed it because we felt it was too intertwined with the story (aka, there was really only story content there, and much less systemic gameplay). Once we made that call, we were also able to make another one: we are creating this area by hand, rather than using the procedural system. This should give the Parade District a very distinct feeling, and provide an experience that is a bit more hand crafted. However, that means a lot of art team time, so almost the entire art team will be working on this for the next two weeks. 

Narrative Team - Alex and Lisa

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

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

As you can see with this weapon, you will be able to realize real carnage in a short amount of time! But when you equip it, you are restricted to only walking. This weapon is too heavy for you, so you can't run. It's the same for blocking the attack of your enemy. 

So you are not strong enough to do that, but maybe another person can... yes some other NPCs can carry the bone saw. And this transforms them into powerful opponents.

Do you have you an idea who?

Remi  

Hello people! This week, I was still on cinematic animations. Progressed quite well and did lots of back and forth with the rest of the team for a complicated scene. And when I say the rest of the team, I mean the WHOLE rest of the team. I got some feedback from programmers, artists, concept artists, writers and other animators. I find it quite important that you ask everyone for feedback. Everybody has a different background and knowledge that can apply to your animations. They might not be able to tell you that your animation lacks weight or why it needs more anticipation, but in the conceptual phase, anyone can tell you how they feel about the scene. Everyone has already played a game or seen a movie. If a non-animator notices there’s something off, maybe it’s worth listening to him ;).  

Sadly, we were not able to fly to Texas with Alex for the Mocap session, but still managed to be in a conference call and watch them from Montreal. They did an amazing job and Alex was great to direct the actors. The only times we had to communicate is for the initial setup of the scene. Where the characters should be at the beginning/ending of the scene and providing them with the right dimensions of the environment.  

I can’t wait to get my hands on this data and start playing with it!

Vincent  

Ahoy lads and lasses, the rest of the animation team is not quite dead, despite what you would think, reading the previous updates. We’re still hard at work on the cinematics, as well as all the little scripted moments that can’t be done with simple conversation animations. Tackling those smaller events is a nice change of pace, especially when you’ve been animating 4000 frames long scenes (Alex quite likes to write, in case you haven’t noticed yet!).  

We also welcomed yet another new animator to help us in the final stretch, Franziska. She’s gonna give us a hand on the conversation animations, along with Raph who just arrived a few weeks ago. That makes eight of us, and we all have quite ‘du pain sur la planche’ (did I mention Alex writes a lot?).

J.R.  

Greetings! Aside from integrating several scenes into the game before content complete, I spent the week on the end of the game… yes, you read that right! WHF actually gets a complete story with a beginning and an end. Who would have thought. And let me tell you, it’s short, sweet and totally satisfying. It’s also a technique we haven’t used a whole lot of in the past. Our cinematics are all in first person, but at some point in the game we make a cool transition into a new point of view.  

I don’t want to tell you more, because we think the whole thing is a very nice moment in the game and I wouldn’t want to spoil it. After all that, I’m very happy with the story, where it got to and where it’s getting. In the end, it truly is a lovely day for it!

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

PH  

Rock’n Props for another week. I’m still trying to help everybody here with the last minute props before content complete. Unfortunately, this week I can’t really show them to you folks. A lot of them are too much related to the story. However, here’s a little walky talky I made:

Carylitz  

Hi people! This week it was all about the Parade District, and trying to make it look as pretty as we can, so Marc, Guillaume and I are working on the island, each of us have a section assigned and our work is to decorate with props, lights and give it the feel of a real place.

Sarah  

Another day, another sign. Hey lil' babies! We're busy busy busy filling all the environmental narrative gaps, and that means lots of signs in the Parade District, where all the trendy Wellies go to get their fab goods, you know. Marc-Andre's going to plug these doers in, and make them look amazing (as he so often does). Can't wait for you guys to see the Parade for yourselves!!!

Emmanuel  

The Village is undergoing major changes! After two years of creating story encounters and FX, I’m finally back on WorldGen!! Things are moving fast and some big decisions have been made in term of gameplay and final look of the procedural generation; we’ll have more control over it and will be able to predict how levels spawn, therefore being able to effectively art them up and place them into the world, no more gaps! The idea is also to compact the world and being able to predict and control the series of events the player will be facing. All of this is extremely exciting and signifies the final steps for bringing a powerful and coherent experience at anytime and anywhere in the world of We Happy Few!

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

Serge  

I have spent the week working on the Doctor, which can now revive someone that you killed during combat. Plus an effort on his signature weapon, the bone saw, has been done with Jules. His unique ability to smell someone that is not on joy allows him to chase you more efficiently than any other archetype (so take your drugs when you see him). We also continue to iterate on conformity rules to increase the pressure on the player while ensuring that the whole experience stays fun.

Michael  

Getting creepy as we approach Halloween, as I am working on stealth! Specifically this week I have been doing little bits and pieces to get distraction objects working. We want the AI to be so addicted to the sound of smashing and crashing that you can lead them wherever you want with enough empty bottles and rocks. Before this week the citizens of Wellington Wells were really uninterested in using their ears, but with a few tweaks they are getting better.  

Hopefully we will continue to improve this, and other stealth gameplay, up until launch, because personally I prefer having the sneakier, less lethal approach to our encounters. After all, they were once your neighbours.

Publishing – Steve, Jeff, Mike C, Mike R, Austin, Meredith, Elisa, Kat, Kelly, Nicole, Sean, Brad, and Erick (and more)

Hey guys! My name’s Kat. I’m a recent East coast transplant to the Dallas area, and one the newest members of the Gearbox team. As the Publishing Project Manager, my days are spent working on thrilling things like Gantt charts, schedules, emails and spreadsheets (which I love)--basically making sure everyone has the most information possible to make awesome stuff! I’ve been working hard on the production of the Time Capsule (what we used to call the Collector’s Box), and currently have a prototype of the mask replica sitting on my desk! Caffeinated lifeblood in a can for scale:

I also helped with a motion capture shoot for an upcoming trailer with Alex yesterday, which was awesome to see. I’ve never been part of something like that before and I learned a lot! I look forward to being able to share more with all of you in the future!

Thanks for tuning in!

Compulsion Games

Update #130 - Two weeks until content complete
over 8 years ago – Fri, Oct 13, 2017 at 08:27:23 PM

Hey everyone,  

A bit of a short journal this week as we are now more than ever in the middle of the super secret content and finishing the last bits of the game!  

Production  

Sam  

Hi everyone! Continuing on from last week, we’re now approximately 2 weeks away from content complete. I think we’ll need just a little bit more time on this than we have previously planned for, because in our playthroughs we’ve been making changes based on things we have missed - eg adding in the new opening island, noticing gaps in player direction, etc. This means that the work slated for right now has been pushed off a little bit. That being said, we’re still on track to hit our ratings deadlines.  

However, we have hit at least one important milestone this week: we have, essentially, 99% complete narrative material for the game! All the scripts, encounter dialogue etc for the game is now essentially done, barring some journal entries for encounters and the inevitable touchups we’ll make as we keep reviewing the game. We’ve collated this (thank you Alex!) and sent it off to Gearbox, so they can submit this to ratings agencies. Think of the children, everyone.  

In other news, this week we had a series of playtests over at Gearbox, and early feedback is that we’ve made some good improvements on the issues raised in the previous report. Hopefully next week we’ll have the guys at Gearbox provide a bit of an excerpt of the report, so you can see the kind of information we’re looking at.

Ninja Team  

Clara  

Hello all,  

We had a very interesting week. After a few months of being pulled out of the weekly videos for production reasons, we remove the dust on our film gear and went out to shoot the next Blade Runner movie. Well, that's what we told Sam anyway. What we really did was shoot a series of interviews with a few willing victims (aka select members of the team), talking with them about numerous subjects that we didn't have the chance to touch base yet on previous weeklies... It resulted in two full days of shooting, a great number of rushes and a fully-packed media drive which we can't wait to go through and properly edit.  

These shoots always represent a lot of efforts in terms of planning, research, and obviously time spent by our fantastic team, who is taking time outside production to help us build all this cool content for the community. That said, it's always super rewarding and super motivating to hear them talk about what they love doing, creating and working on. Makes us appreciate their passion and efforts even more.

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

Jules  

Hey ! So this week I continued to work on the new combat animation. The animations now work well with our new process! But these animations are not yet totally finished. We need to tweak the timing during the windup to achieve good balancing. After all, we don't want to transform the NPC into an all-powerful killer! We want to use these new attacks to add depth into the combat and make it more tactical for the player. This is the new heavy punch, because I know you guys like gifs!

Next I take a break from combat animation to work on another super exciting task: ("drum roll") The Bonesaw weapon! That's our new weapon, it's very powerful and bloody (mouhaha). To activate this weapon you need two power cells and an activate card. I know that's expensive, but imagine being able to run into Wellington Wells and attack things with what amounts to a chainsaw made of spoons. Like really dull ones. Carnage! I think it’s a fair price, isn't it ? Next week I will able to show you the animation about this Bonesaw !

Mike  

Hey folks! So this week was a short one due to the proper Canadian thanksgiving. I finished polishing up the transition cutscene from last week and started work on some custom animations for another one. Again can’t say much about it other than in the immortal words of Marvin the Martian: “There was supposed to be an earth shattering KABOOM!” Hehehehe. Also I animated a few obscene gestures. So that’s about it from my end folks, tune in again next week, Same Bat Time, Same Bat Channel!

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

Roxanne  

On top of working on some content, I’m starting to go through all of our items and categorise them, this will allow us to balance them and handle their repartition on each island.

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

PH  

Hi all! At the moment, I’m trying to help as many people as I can by doing small assets. That gives me the opportunity to work with all the departments and that’s awesome. Everyday is a new day with completely new art to make. Absolutely no time to be bored. This week for example, I made some crutches, various papers and letters with the awesome artworks of Whitney and Sarah, new clothes variations, a gate...

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

Lionel  

So with world generation, the thing is that despite all its advantages, it is hard to test. And the QA people are nice, but they don’t like untestable stuff. So they invited me to a meeting. Once we all sit, they just stared at me with a nice, silent pacino vibe and I stared back… for a while. I kept my poker face approximately 5 sec. In the end, I just built a better logging system for them to check the worldgen. Also hunted down bad data that was making the system barf. Of course, not everything is true in the above paragraph but who would read programmers’ reports if it was ?

Céline  

This week I have been working on Miss Thigh Highs’ exclusive items. Physically, she may be a weaker character but she has particular talents that make up for any lack of brawn. These items are quite interesting to work on as they can involve several areas of the games (animation, AI, …etc.). I hope you guys will enjoy using them ! :D

Publishing Team – Steve, Jeff, Mike C, Mike R, Austin, Meredith, Elisa, Kat, Kelly, Nicole, Sean, Brad, and Erick (and more)  

Elisa  

Hi! I’m Elisa, the New Media Manager here at Gearbox. New Media is the umbrella term for all the cool new ways folks are creating content, such as podcasts, streams, and video. Right now, I’m starting prep for TwitchCon next week. At TwitchCon, I’ll meet with Twitch staff, streamers, and other game developers and publishers to learn as much as I can about putting together livestreams and working with streamers to make sure they can deliver a fun experience for their audiences. As a streamer in my (limited) spare time, I’m always curious to know what tips and tricks broadcasters have to make their streams unique, high-quality, and entertaining. I’ll eventually translate what I’ve learned to the streams we produce from our own space here at Gearbox Publishing. I’m also looking forward to meeting with broadcasters that are a perfect fit and would have a blast showing off We Happy Few to the world!Feel free to come say Hi!

Thanks for tuning in!  

Compulsion Games

Update #129 - Eye of the storm
over 8 years ago – Sat, Oct 07, 2017 at 12:20:33 AM

Hey everyone,  

We are pretty much in the eye of the storm of the project right now. The purpose of these updates is not to always show the pretty side of development but to be transparent and right now it is hectic, busy and a bit tense. If it's difficult, and challenging, but that's not a bad sign at this stage. The challenge keeps us engaged, and help us make a better game.  

Last week in Montreal, the Metropolitan Orchestra paid tribute to Montreal made games during a video game symphony. It was beautiful and our previous game Contrast was part of the show along with many other local games, like all 137 Assassin’s Creeds.

Production  

Sam  

As we approach content complete (now three weeks away), we’ve been looking at the full game and making the last major adjustments to content that we can.  

One of the challenges in game design is that it’s rarely ever “done”. The artistic nature of it means that there are always improvements; always parts of the game that you want to put more into. However, you also need to ship the game, and that often conflicts with wanting to make changes (as I’ve mentioned before, finishing a game involves locking down parts of the game, allowing us to do things like bug fix, optimization and polish). Balancing production realities with creative desires is most difficult at the end of the project, and not always an easy task. But, we’re getting there!  

This week sees the last major changes (eg Adam’s work below, structural changes to the final island, structural changes to the stories, etc) coming in, as we prepare for a playtest of Arthur’s full story next week. This is being done by Gearbox’s user research team, and it’s exciting to get independent verification of whether we have improved on the issues raised by the previous report (and also on all the issues raised by the community!). Hopefully once that information is available, I’ll be able to share some of it with you all.

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

Adam  

Surprise surprise, we’re all working on story stuff, BUT some exciting news. I’m redoing the first level of Character 3’s story to give it a boatload more action. What else… a lot more VO has been recorded and imported, so.. that’s me for the next 3 weeks.

Roxanne  

I have been working on fixing some blocker bugs and lots of VO integration. Most importantly, I just started helping on balancing weapons. We will do massive tweaks to them, so they stop feeling all the same and are actually interesting to acquire. More on that soon! ;)

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

Narrative Team - Alex and Lisa  

Then there is the unplanned list. After Agincourt, Shakespeare has King Henry V read a herald’s note detailing the dead among his enemies, the French:

King Henry: This note doth tell me of ten thousand French  

That in the field lie slain. [...] 

The names of those their nobles that lie dead: 

Charles Delabreth, high constable of France; 

Jaques of Chatillon, admiral of France; 

The Master of the Crossbows, Lord Rambures; 

Great Master of France, the brave Sir Guichard Dauphin; 

John, duke of Alençon; Anthony, duke of Brabant, 

The brother of the duke of Burgundy, 

And Edward, duke of Bar. Of lusty earls: 

Grandpré and Roussi, Faulconbridge and Foix, 

Beaumont and Marle, Vaudemont and Lestrale. 

Here was a royal fellowship of death. 

When most actors get a list, they tend to read it like a grocery list. They know they’re reading a list. Each word they speak is part of a list. It becomes singsong. If you perform Henry’s speech like that, it has little power.

Take a moment, and read the above like a list.  

Now, read the list, but each time you come to a name, pause for a moment, and imagine someone you know. Now imagine them dead. Only then move on to the next name.  

Seriously, do that.  

See what that does?  

It becomes an unplanned list. Short planned lists have power. Long planned lists are tedious. Long, unplanned lists have power.

It is a challenge to get actors to perform unplanned lists, because they can see the damn list right in front of their eyes. They know how many names are coming up. Yet you have to knock them off that, derail that train, or it sounds like a planned list. You have to remind them that their character doesn’t know what they’re about to say until a fraction of a second before they say it.  

(In Meisner technique we were taught to practice lines at the highest possible speed, without affect: “Whatapieceofworkisman hownobleinreasonhowexcellentinfaculty etc.“. That way the words would be there when I needed to say them, but wouldn’t be associated with an emotion. So the emotion would come fresh and surprising, even though the line was memorized.)  

(The ability to let go of what you know is critical to many artists. An editor has to be able to say, “Who the hell is this character that just showed up?” even though in the 22 previous cuts of the film, that character was properly introduced, so of course she knows who it is. Same thing for a writer.)

One of our characters in We Happy Few has a problem:

“Beatrice says she loves me. But she loves everything! Me... long walks... sunsets and rainbows of course. Simon Says… big wristwatches on a man… wrapping paper… dandelions… a good night’s sleep… ribbons… Uncle Jack’s bedtime stories… six o’clock … commemorative spoons. I have to know if it’s real!”  

What’s funny about this list, I hope, is that it is (a) unexpectedly long (b) terribly specific (c) weirdly diverse. “Unexpectedly long” is only funny if the actor performs the list as if he does not know how long the list is. If the list becomes sing-song, it’s not funny. He has to perform it as if he is searching his memory for everything Beatrice loves. It’s funnier if it sounds like he’s done, and then he thinks of some more things. Ideally, to make it more comically upsetting, the actor should do homework: create a different imaginary circumstance in which Beatrice liked each distinct item on the list. Then each item comes with its own distinct emotion, and it will come out of his creative instrument sounding distinctly different.  

By the way, giving the actor a distinct imaginary circumstance is almost always helpful, not just with lists. With good actors -- and this deep into development we’ve got an amazing repertory of voice actors -- if you simply tell them something about their imaginary circumstance, the line comes out more distinctly. Even if they’ve said the line the way I intended it the first time, I’ll still tell them something about it sometimes, to see how that informs their delivery. They usually deliver the line sharper. Remember this is in a voice session where we’re doing a new line, on average, every 30 seconds. Our guys are Teslas: they go from 0 to 60 at ludicrous speed. Their ability to interpolate the imaginary circumstance I just gave them and deliver the line fresh is what makes us bring them back.

Lisa  

With the content-lock deadline looming, I finished the last few locations that still needed environmental narrative. People in Wellington Wells didn’t always take Joy. This week I wrote letters and diaries that show you what certain townspeople were like in the days before pharmaceutical pick-me-ups. Get ready for some dishy dark secrets!  

For fun, I also wrote a couple of Halloween limericks about Foggy Jack, who most definitely does not exist. (And because the muse does not adhere to the calendar, I also wrote a little Valentine’s Day ditty that I'll share with you in February.) Most important, I started planning my WHF cosplay for Halloween. Have you?

Animation - JR, Remi, Vincent, Mike P, Jules and Raph  

Jules  

Hey everybody! So this week I will talk you about combat animation! We continued our work on it this week. We edited the animation I showed you last week, to change how the NPCs will hit you. The biggest change is that now the NPCs step towards you to hit you. They will no longer move in front of you, wait, and then hit you. This brings our combat system to another level. The immersion is more intense and less repetitive. So now my challenge is to adapt my animation so it fits with this new process. It’s really exciting! Seriously when I started this task, I never would have imagined that we’d able to upgrade our combat to that level.

Remi  

Hello people, it’s been a while! Sorry for not keeping everyone up to date on what I’ve been working on in the past few weeks, but the truth is we’ve been working really hard on cinematics and story assets. I did some rigging and exploded a few more objects as well, but the main focus remains to deliver our best animation work for you all to enjoy. Have a good week and hopefully we’ll soon have some special things to share with you!

Mike (not so dangerous anymore)  

Heeeeyyyyy! So this week I worked on some custom animations for our level designers to try and make all of our encounters as special and unique as possible. Then I burned the midnight oil making a cutscene to transition you guys from the first island to the second, and help set the mood for the rest of your playing experience. I know it doesn’t sound like much, however I tried to put a lot of love and effort into it for you guys. So that’s it for me folks, tune in next week, same Bat Time, same Bat channel!

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

Carylitz  

I did a new character this week! I call him my little monster, because he is made of many other characters. Unfortunately he is story related so I can’t show him. After him, I did a bunch of different things, I destroyed a location, worked on one of the bridges, a house, and created some variations of textures for some characters. It has been a really busy week, and probably next week will be busier, but we are getting there!

Whitney  

Hey folks! Sarah and I are busting our butts to finish the 2d assets that support the environmental narrative in the game. All secret, juicy stuff for the release. I can show you something, though. Here's the Doctor rendered in a classic painting style.

PH  

Wow! This week I worked on a lot of assets, but mostly small ones. I did variations and I retextured various works. No time to be bored, I switched from environmental assets to character assets. Also, do you remember all the parachute stuff I made last week? I finally finished the parachute’s bag itself.

Emmanuel  

This week was a rollercoaster of disciplines, from bug fixing to arting up secret story levels, to rain FX, World Map visual FX or planning one massive section of the game! Good thing is it all ended up being pretty amazing, above all expectations! Here is a wallpaper of an “ideal” look for our country roads!

Publishing – Steve, Jeff, Mike C, Mike R, Austin, Meredith, Elisa, Kat, Kelly, Nicole, Sean, Brad, and Erick (and more)

We're super excited about what's in the final game, and we can't wait to make it available to the world!

Have a great long weekend everyone! (It’s Canadian Thanksgiving)  

Compulsion Games