Update #128 - Rorke's Drift
over 8 years ago – Fri, Sep 29, 2017 at 05:31:32 PM

Hey everyone,  

We are about to roll into October! Which means we are 4 weeks away from content completion...and Halloween!  

We are planning some fun and creepy content on our social media for the month of October. Ever heard of Foggy Jack? Us either.

We also announced this week that we are partnering up with McFarlane Toys to bring our beloved Bobbies to life!

Production  

Sam 

The team is busy as bees recording and integrating VO, finalising the level art, adding major changes to procedural work, animating all those little moments that piece everything together, and really just working super fast and well. Of particular note is that this week our conformity mechanics have finally been integrated to the new system, so all those weird Wellington Wells rules are back in, including the old favourite of “have you had your Joy today?” 

As content comes in, we also continue reviews to make sure that the playthroughs make sense, and we begin looking at which parts we want to focus on to make them really shine. That’s exciting and nerve wracking - there is a reality in game development that parts of the game need to be “good enough” but may not make perfect. It’s like trying to decide which one of your kids gets the hug. But it’s very important to make sure that we have moments that you guys will love and hopefully feel touched by.

Other than reviews, the production team is beginning to collate information for ratings like a full and final script (which is a hefty, hefty beast that we’re currently estimating at between 100k and 150k words), videos of particularly gruesome moments, foul language (yes but HOW did the person say fuck?), and some things so awful you’ll have to discover them for yourselves (spoilers). T-4 weeks until content complete (in theory)!

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

Eric  

This week has been fully dedicated to the new introductory island. It’s coming along fairly well. Just stitching together the quest flow, and fixing some strange issues that crop up, that and a loot pass. But it’ll shape up nicely after a few long nights of figuring out why things don’t work properly. Also, Emmanuel started on the new bridge from this island (Barrow Holm) to the old first island (Eel Pie Holm), take a look.

Roxanne  

This week I and most of the rest of the level design team worked on fixing progression blockers in the story mode for upcoming user research tests in a week and a bit. These are tests where we bring people in to play and evaluate: do they know what they need to know, can they complete everything, and many more things. Besides that, we did a lot of line integration (adding VO to our encounters) and updated our level scripts based on this new content.

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

Danger Mike (So much more dangerous than last week) Editor's note: Not dangerous at all.

Hey folks! Hope you’re all doing great this week. So far so good, haven’t burned the office down yet, or broken the game yet. So that’s a good sign :D It was a productive week. Started out by planning out some custom animations for some encounters with the level design team. All except for Eric “Smoopy Bear”, he’s doing other stuff. Then finished up a weapon animation set, then did another weapon animation set, then did some NPC reactions to the weapons and some retargeting of that animation, then did some angry lady animations, then did some statues and now finally I’m back on the custom narrative stuff. So yeah… it’s been an eventful and productive week! Tune in next week, Same Bat Time, Same Bat Channel!

Jules  

Hi, this week I finished the combat animation! Fighting is now a bit more strategic. We enjoyed building this a great deal, and I hope you will like the improvements.  

This is the new medium attack for 2 handed weapons, a double swing! If you don’t dodge the first hit, you probably will be hurt by the second one:

Here we have the heavy attack for the 1 hand weapon; this attack is from the top so watch out for your head if this NPC hits you:

So that’s it for me. If you want to see more about the other new attack I will give you a rendez-vous next week. Just here, for another weekly journal :).

Narrative Team - Alex and Lisa  

Lisa  

Do you ever wonder where Uncle Jack’s broadcasts come from? Of course you do! This week I’ve written environmental narrative with behind-the-scenes tidbits about The Uncle Jack Show. I’ve also written environmental narrative for the HQ of the Powers That Be in Wellington Wells. While it’s fun to write all this lore, I’m trying to not to spoon feed too much, so that you Downers can have fun piecing things together for yourselves.  

Like our dear Uncle Jack, I just want you to be happy.

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

Michel  

It’s cold. At the start of the week it was too hot, I don’t think weather is supposed to change this fast… anyway that, it seems, is Montreal.  

I have been continuing to work with Jules to improve the movement of our fighting NPCs, and also helping fix up and make tools for the level designers to use as they very busily script the rest of the game. One example is a nice event that will tell them when the player is carrying a corpse (naughty player), or NOT carrying a corpse (good player), they can use that event to trigger scripted moments or update quests and just generally finish making the game.

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

Marc-André  

This week, I have been doing some work on two story locations (adding environmental narrative elements such as plaques and paintings and modifying materials/objects after 

I’ve gotten feedback from Whitney). I have also been working on getting the interior of yet another house completed. It’s not there yet, but almost. It will be finished by the end of the weekend. Here’s a picture of the pool table I created for the games room in the house

PH  

I modeled a chalice! Wink,wink to the Quebecers! Antoine, one of the awesome level designers, asked me to fill it with an unknown liquid. Soon you will discover why. Then I had lots of fun modeling an old British parachute from world war II. When I was gathering references, I discovered that those parachutes were firsts of their kind. Paratroopers surely had to put trust and faith into their gears O_O

Sarah  

Hey lil' Downers! This week was nuts, and it's only going to get crazier until content lock!! Defying the odds, somehow ANOTHER player menu screen was designed: SKILL TREEEE! The design was approved with a surprisingly minimal amount of retching from David and G. When their feedback does not include phrases like "my eyes are unhappy" or "this screen makes me want to kill myself" I know I've done a good job! More to come on that end, it's going to need a bunch of sweet, sweet icons, so I'll keep you posted! I also made some posters for a secret location that describe what Wellies believe will come to pass in the FuTuRe!*~!*!*!  

(Sam note: we haven’t spoken much about the skill tree yet, but it’s a system we have decided to experiment with to give players better rewards for completing side encounters, and to give a better sense of progression for your character(s). These are two things requested by you guys, and it’s really nice to be able to figure out good ways to respond to feedback. We’ll talk more about this at a later point.)

 

Ninja Department  

Clara  

Hello all! As we were focused on the player menu until now, we didn't have yet the occasion to make a pass on fonts and get rid of old assets still laying around after a few years of production -- and which used to make Sarah's eyes bleed.  

So this week I played around with the HUD (Head-Up Display, basically all the visual information displayed on screen) to make it fit with our new UI aesthetic! I also added the tab design for the player menu.

The rest of the week was about going through UI design bugs and trying to juggle between design efficiency and player/team member feedback received.  

It's always a bit tricky because we all have our own logic or a certain opinion on how a game should represent (and has represented) certain types of information, and it's all about finding that fair middle while trying to be innovative and getting everything ready on time for content lock.  

It's a good thing we have good coffee and donut breaks!

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

Meredith  

Hey all! I’m Meredith, the Community Coordinator here at Gearbox Publishing. This week, I worked together with Community Manager Naila to come up with some cool social content for the next few months. We’re going to be focusing on some fun and spooky elements of the game in October, and I’m really looking forward to seeing some of our planned assets come together. Thanks for the ideas, Naila!  

In more immediate news, Nicole (one of our Marketing Artists) whipped up this really cool ’60s-inspired Wellette paper doll! I never thought I’d ever work at a place where “cutting out clothes for a paper doll” was a legitimate part of my job, but sometimes working in social media can be fun in ways you didn’t expect.  

To see more cool stuff, follow the We Happy Few social channels on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram!

Thanks for tuning in!  

Compulsion Games

Update #127 - District 0
over 8 years ago – Fri, Sep 22, 2017 at 11:53:15 PM

Hey everyone,  

Another crazy week in the studio. We welcomed 3 new members to our team, we tore down a wall and our level designers have finished blocking all of the levels! It is of course far from being finished but this is a very cool milestone.  

We are also in the fun phase of designing merchandise which is really tricky because not everyone has the same tastes. Do you design something that you like or something you think others will like even though it is not your style? Both? Subtle or more on the nose/fun designs? We would love to have your opinion on this. In our opinion, as long as it is classy.  

What is District 0? That is our new tutorial area which the team will explain below :)

Production  

Sam  

Now that we have everything blocked in (aka all our levels are in the game and mostly functional), this week saw David and G conducting reviews of our playthroughs with our level designers. This is an exciting time, because now we can get more accurate information on how long playthroughs take, how they feel, where the player direction issues are (eg does an encounter tell you enough about what you need to do), etc. It’s the time where we really begin the assessing/polishing, as we decide which parts of the game deserve more love, and which parts are good as is. For example, while we are not building new encounters at this point, we are creating a new area to help introduce players more gradually to the procedural world (see Eric’s post below). The goal is that players will no longer feel abandoned at the beginning of the game, and will have a longer introduction to the game world.  

We can also now test the playthroughs for blockers and beginning to ramp up the QA team at Gearbox. Because the game is quite complex, with a procedural world, 3 characters, multiple platforms, different game modes, different playstyles etc, we need a pretty big QA team to look at it. We’re ramping up to 25 people, who will be full time on the project until we ship. We also brought on two more QA people internally here at Compulsion, meaning that we have a solid team now to help us ship the game.  

Finally, the team remains as ever in a frenzy of integration. Audio, UI, animation, art, design, tech, it’s all a hectic machine. T-5 ish weeks until content complete.

Oh, and we opened up the wall and expanded the office late last Friday! Here’s a picture of the new narrative/QA area. It needs some love, but at least we can breathe.

Before

 After

Narrative Team - Alex and Lisa 

Alex 

Busy week today. Working till sleep time most days. Recorded 220 lines with Miss Thigh Highs, about 120 with the brilliant Joe Sims doing a variety of voices, and about 45 with an older gentleman with a menacing voice. 

Actors are funny critters. There are all flavours of good actors. Some are easy to work with and give you what you want just by reading the line. Some get where you want with just a line or two of direction. Some are hard to get where you want, but when they get there, they are very, very good. Some will never give you what you thought you wanted, but they have so much charisma that it kind of doesn’t matter. They just steal your character and run off, and if you’re wise, you let them. 

Then there’s range. A certain terrific actor we have cannot sell a joke. Another cannot play stupid. 

I once saw Pierce Brosnan say, “Some actors can carry off almost any role. The rest of us have this one thing that we hone, and hone, and hone. I, for example, can wear a suit.” 

Sometimes an actor will just not get a line no matter how much direction I throw at them. Sometimes you can just tell that the words don’t make sense to them -- intellectual sense, of course, but they are not understanding the emotion driving the character. In that case, I rewrite. It helps that I’m the writer, the voice director, and the editor. A very fine award-winning actor was having trouble with the line “You know the way out.” When I changed it to, “I think you know the way out,” it clicked. Go figure. 

We are also refining our barks system so people will be much clearer why they hate you. This will integrate with refinements we are making in our conformity systems so that you will, hopefully, always feel like you’re hiding in plain sight in enemy terrotory. 

I think I meant to write “territory” above, but I’ll leave it as is. 

Lisa 

This week I wrote environmental narrative that reveals the surprising backstory of a character you’ve already met. (Don’t you want to know who? Of course you do!) I also worked on a jaunty little guide called How to Be Happy, which Wellington Wells distributes to all its citizens. Then I wrote “death screens” for both Miss Thigh-Highs and the Mad Scotsman, so that when your character dies, you’ll see cheeky articles about how and why they went on holiday. Each mode of death gets a different article. (Collect ‘em all!) And, of course, I wrote other things that I can’t tell you about until 1.0. We’re working very hard on story, yet I see folks on Reddit who wonder if the game will have a story at all. It feels sort of like planning a surprise party for someone who thinks you forgot his birthday. Can’t wait till April, when you’ll all get to see what we’ve been up to! 

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

Jules  

This week I worked on combat animation! So now our NPCs have their 3 different levels of attack integrated. The light which is already plugged in the game. And now the Medium attack with a medium windup and two strikes (like a double swing for example). Also, we have the Heavy attack, bigger windup, one only strike but watch out. You must parry it if you want to survive ! So that's my week, tweaking animation timing and posing. Test it again and again into the game. Really exciting stuff, and the greatest point for me is that it highlights our parry and block system. With this update, you can't just full spam your left mouse click and think you’re going to survive.  

Mike AKA. Danger Mike (In some regards less dangerous than last week and in others more)  

Where to start. This week has been a whirlwind through the trying to finish some animations and get them integrated only to find out there are some complications, then spending a day in spreadsheet land and ending in a takedown animation. Oh and now back to trying to fix and integrate animations. Yep, I think that’s about it. Learned a lot :D It’s going to be great though! Tune in next week, same Bat Time, Same Bat Channel.

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

Eric  

This week has been fun. It has been mostly bug fixing the main Arthur playthrough, and doing some story content for that. One of the things I’ve been working on is a new island. Thanks to Roxanne for helping me with these bugs on the core story playthrough, there were a lot, and my task list was scattered across many high priority things this week.  

Welcome to Flat Holm! It’s... er… not as flat as you’d assume? Or maybe it is!  

One thing to note about the pic, that’s debug map art, it’s not final.

This new island is meant to be a little bit of an introduction to the game, its mechanics, and also to transition from the intro into the larger more open part of the game. All said, it should make the introductory bits of the game much smoother and more intuitive. Right now it’s barely stubbed in, but all next week I should be tackling this pretty hard.

Antoine didn’t write anything because he’s busy working on feedback, but he’s been fixing bugs on the core playthrough he’s working on, and now he’s working through feedback to make it extra good. Antoine is a beast. Just, uh, fyi.

Adam The Mad  

I have been hounding Alex and Valentino to write/record/import like… 500 lines I need for my part of the story. They have come through swimmingly, and I’ve plugged in 4 or 5 missions worth of dialogue. After finally doing that and playing through the missions, I realized a lot of shit just didn’t make sense anymore, so… a few tweaks and redos here and there, and we’re finally getting somewhere.

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

Michael  

I have been helping to integrate some new attack animations from Jules which are part of a design pass on the combat experience. NPC Attacks will now have different strengths: Light, Medium and Heavy. The new animations should make it obvious what is a stronger attack, and also have a longer “tell” before the attack lands giving you more time to block, dodge or parry. It’s early stages right now, but it’s already looking like it will add a nice amount of depth to one of the game mechanics which us non-conformists playing the game are spending a lot of time doing.  

I have also been working on adding in support for tweaking the abilities of the different player characters in the game. For one thing, they’re not all as strong as one another, so we need to be able to differentiate this by allowing them to throw things further, take more damage from the same attacks, or have less effect using the heavier weapons.

Céline  

Hello lovely people ! I am Céline, a new programmer who just started on Monday, and I will be helping the gameplay team. I am very excited to work on We Happy Few and I am ready to tackle features and bugs ! This week, I built my desk, played the game, fixed small issues (eg, now when you respawn after death, we refill your health/hunger/thirst up to a minimal level, so that you won’t get stuck in a repeating death loop), and have been observing a ghost which likes doing weird trajectories just to enjoy a longer stroll.  

Neil  

Hello World! My name’s Neil and I’m also a new programmer proud to be joining this team! My very first task was to learn the systems behind… vomiting. There were issues in the past that would make the player character get stuck if they began to throw up at the wrong time. These issues were quickly patched up at the time, but I have the honour of ...cleaning it up. As I’ve said to my team, it’s been nothing but warm welcomes here at Compulsion, and I can’t wait to see what else they have in store for me!  

Maarten  

Things are looking good in Linux-build-land! Those third party libs sure were a blast - especially the ones that are basically older versions that come without Makefiles or equivalent (not looking at anyone in particular *cough* PhysX). I also hit a roadblock trying to set up a cross-compile toolchain that matched UE4's toolchain versions. Luckily I found an old Fedora 13 image that did the job nicely - 2010 to the rescue! I'm happy to announce that today I finally have a running game on Linux, running smoothly and with no (platform-specific) issues. Next up I'll try to streamline the cooking process for Linux - no ShaderCompilerWorker should need 12GB RAM to compile anything ;)

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

Marc-André 

This week I kept working on… guess what? Story stuff I can’t show! I’m pouring all my heart in creating the best house interiors (and exteriors) possible, and I’m sure you guys will be very happy playing the <Redacted for 1.0> and <Redacted for 1.0> story missions. I particularly enjoy doing <Redacted for 1.0>‘s huge mansion-house, since it has a different style from the houses I worked on before: more victorian - and very gold. 

Carylitz 

As usual a little bit of everything, have been working in some character variations, textures variations, new props, fixing old props, making new machines, and playing with layout for some of the locations of the other characters. Again can't show anything ): , but it has been super fun to work on all these things! 

Guillermo 

Recently I’ve been polishing different Story Missions by adding meshes the level designers needed and doing some lighting pass. At the end of this week I started blocking the art for one of the last story missions. I think you guys are gonna have a ton of fun playing this one thanks to the gameplay mechanics Antoine created and the story/atmosphere of it. 

PH 

This week, I made some british style umbrellas. Lots of talk with the team because they will have a very special purpose for the player. Then I moved on to a doctor’s bag and as always, I like to collect a lot of references to create something very accurate. I’m actually working on the leather of the bag to match We Happy Few art style.

Sarah  

This week was mostly a UI focused effort for me, but it did involve some environmental narrative work as well! Here's a groovy Newton poster I made for a special location. ;)

Editor's note: Here is another gif of Sarah. This is her face after I yell at her for sending me her pictures for the update at the wrong address, EVERY FRIDAY. 

QA Team - Lee, Stephanie, JP  

Jean-Philippe  

Hello! I am a new QA guy here at Compulsion. This week I started acclimating myself with the game and getting my kit set up. I found and added a few bugs, but otherwise my week was focused almost entirely on beating my first Sandbox playthrough on Wednesday, and I began my first Story Mode playthrough.

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

Sean  

Hey! I’m one of the artists on the marketing team here at Gearbox Publishing. This week, the team and I went out to a printing supply and production facility to explore ways to enhance the physical copies of the game. We checked out some cool packaging ideas that we could use to add a unique touch to the physical copies, and ran through some options for enhancing the material of the game case. That could mean anything from adding a sleeve over the game case, to using different materials beyond cardboard or plastic to help emphasize elements on the cover.   

Thanks for tuning in and see you next week!  

Compulsion Games

Update #126 - Almost content complete!
over 8 years ago – Fri, Sep 15, 2017 at 06:11:14 PM

Hey everyone,  

Really busy week here at the studio as the team is finishing most of the content for the game. We are also adding 3 new members to the Compulsion family next week! Which is really exciting but it also means the office is currently really noisy due to all the desk building. Today’s journal is a bit special as we are showing a little snippet of someone we’ve never shown before!

Production

Sam  

Annnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnd we’re blocked! Well, almost.  

By the end of the day today, or maybe squeaking into Monday next week, all of the levels (gameplay areas) will be blocked inside the game. This means, for the first time, we are able to play through all the stories of all three playable characters - all main quests, all side quests, all bridges, all houses, etc - basically, all of the encounters we have in the game. There are no bells and whistles - these are just the basic building blocks - but you can play everything (in theory).  

We still have a few things to do - eg bits and pieces of Arthur’s story that aren’t able to generate in the world yet (they’re too big so they blow up the world generation, meaning we have to specially test them) - but by and large this is a very exciting milestone. After 3.5 years, we’re very, very happy to be here!  

The next step for the project is content complete: aka, integrating all our cutscenes, VO, art, animation and sound/visual effects. We have six weeks, in theory, to go until we’ve got all of this done, and it’s going to be a whirlwind. It’s exciting, because this is the time where it all starts coming together.  

In other news, we are extending the office on Monday - cutting a door into what previously was a wall and adding 25% more office space - and doing a lot of rearranging of desks and teams today. We’ll post up some pictures next week.

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

“Dangerous” Mike (kind of still new, but with just enough experience to be dangerous)  

Hey there! So this week I wrapped up the animations for a quite cringeworthy way of getting things out of the inhabitants of Wellington Wells. Think of going to the dentist who’s only got 3 fingers on each hand, has the shakes and doesn’t believe in anesthesia. An interesting experience for all I’m sure! Check out the GIF for the full experience. So yeah, that’s about it from my end of things. See you next week, same Bat Time, same Bat Channel!

Jules  

Hi, folks! For me, I spent my entire week on an awesome task! I created a few new attacks for our NPC's combat system. So now all of our NPC's have 3 different levels of attacks. The "light attack" which is already in the game. The "medium attack" and the "Heavy attack". As you can imagine the medium and the heavy attacks are slower, but they do more damage. But an animation is worth a thousand words.  

Unfortunately I can’t share something now, because all of these animations are very rough. This is very exciting, see you next week for more news (and gif) about it.

Narrative Team - Alex and Lisa    

Alex  

I’ve been out of commission on the weekly a bit, because I’ve been a bit too much in commission writing lines. As the Level Designers rush towards content lock, they are finally spitting out the heaps of encounter lines they need, which I am turning into dialog, and then recording. So that’s a lot of writing and a lot of recording.  

That’s a full time job. Another full time job I have is testing the story playthroughs. They are still not 100% complete, but they are complete enough that a fellow can play through them... and make copious notes on all the things that are missing, or scrambled. It took three days for me to play through Arthur, even cheating to give myself lockpicks and power cells and such, even not doing side quests. When we started out, the idea was a playthrough was four hours. Hah.  

Odd writing note: sometimes you come across illogical things in the game. For example, for design reasons, Miss Thigh Highs currently can’t go out her back door, even though Arthur, in his play through, goes in that way.  

However, you do not necessarily need to justify them. Sometimes it works just to “hang a lantern on them.” If Miss Thigh Highs says, “What is wrong with this door, it’s always jamming on me!” then it feels like there is an in-world reason why she can’t use that door, even if we don’t get a terribly good explanation for it. By addressing the problem, it doesn’t feel as much like a logical inconsistency.  

Oh, and, we’re working on a new trailer. So there’s a bit more writing.  

Back to it!

Lisa  

Ever wonder what the Doctors do in their spare time? Well, you’ll soon know! This week I wrote environmental narrative for their house, which interestingly used to be a house for something else -- something else that no longer exists in Wellington Wells. Shhh! Can’t wait until you folks see the entire game so I can stop talking cryptically!

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

Eric  

Well, last week to stub or rough in encounters and everything seems to be going mostly ok. Have been working on story missions I can’t talk about, but the big one I am doing atm I think is going to be really cool. Some Evel Knievil type stuff.

Art Team (This is Cary’s BDAY, happy biiirthdaaaay!) -  Whitney, Emmanuel, Tito, Marc-André, Sarah, Guillaume, Cary and PH

Marc-André  

I have been working the entirety of this week on the new house that is going to be very special and fancy. While I can’t show the level (since it’s linked to the story), I can show you a picture of the wood paneling I have created for the interior ceilings. We usually do something very simple for ceilings, but for this location we wanted something more fancy and elegant. It can be tweaked in-engine so good/gold colors and reflections can be completely different (even independently) depending on the effect we want to achieve.

Emmanuel  

This week I redid entirely the Shell Menu map and character selection with the new buildings, props and also it’s a great opportunity to rework the look and feel of the village we want for the final release! So far so good!

Sarah  

Hey y'all! This week I focused on the Shell Menu (that's the very first menu you interact with when you launch WHF). The efforts here will probably escape most people's notice (or interest, tbh), but on the off chance there's a little weirdo out there who's into this sort of thing, this update is for you! The Devil's in the details, as they say, and the Shell Menu is no exception. If I've done my job right, the design will be visually consistent with the rest of the UI, and will help the player navigate into sweet Wellington Wells dystopia smoothly and clearly, with minimal swearing and keyboard slamming. Everything from colour palette, to fonts, to button placements need to be done carefully and consistently, at which point I can lob this over to Clara for implementation and animation. Emmanuel has been building the background shot in 3D while I work on 2D bits n' bobs, so props to Emmanuel for taking abuse from Clara and I all week about the precise placement of bunting and mailboxes. <3

Editor's note: This gif of Sarah perfectly illustrates her journey towards perfecting the Shell Menu. Do not tell her.

PH  

Hi all! Props week for me. I made some electronics for a special place in the story. It was very cool to model these big buttons, Vu Meters, knobs and handles they used back in the 60’s.

Ninja Department  

Clara  

Hello all ! This week, pretty much like last week, I’ve been derushing the Uncle Jack shoot (reviewing the footage and pulling selects) and going over that-episode-we-can’t-talk-about-just-yet.  

I also worked closely with Whitney, Sarah and Emmanuel on the revamped shell menu. Right now I am more of a moral support, and should be getting more helpful when we get to the implementation -- I am slowly getting accustomed to speaking programmer. 01101000 01100101 01101100 01101100 01101111? (nah just kidding, they actually speak klingon.)

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

Serge  

I'm really happy with the progress I made on the combat system this week. We added a cheering behavior for passive NPC that would get caught within a fight without reason to engage the player. I also iterate on its token mechanism to allow a far attack (like throwing rock) in parallel with a melee attack (their frequency and quantity will be tweaked during our polish phase based on difficulty).  

Finally, I started the prototype of what we called the annoyed-conformity rule which was really lacking in our last update! Many of you noticed that citizen won't aggro to you for crouching or sprinting in streets without reasons (which is part of the whole conformity gameplay so precious to our game). I apologize for that regression but that's such a powerful rule that it needs to be properly set before being shown, otherwise it can create many side effects on the whole experience. Don't worry, that will be back in the final game with even better feedback than before!  

Michael  

I have been looking into how the animation networks for our NPCs work particularly in combat, so that I can help out Serge and the animators getting the fights in the game looking and feeling a bit more solid.

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

Steve  

Hi folks! I am Steve Gibson, and I run Gearbox Publishing, a sister company to those folks at Gearbox Software who are working on a few other games with a bit more of a famous president. Our company is working on making sure as many people as possible get to see and play We Happy Few.  

This week we visited Compulsion to brainstorm on when and how they would be ready to show off the story campaign, as well as ideas for future videos heading towards launch next year. Hopefully you enjoyed the first video we created in conjunction with the Compulsion team.  

Also we're going to rename the Collector's Set to be called the "We Happy Few Time Capsule” before it becomes available to order next month. This thing is really intended for many of the We Happy Few fans who have already paid for the early access version, so it seemed a bit redundant to put in another copy of the game but the name, as you guys pointed out, kinda felt like it might. Don’t ask for my advice on naming your future children.  

As our team does other things in cooperation with Compulsion perhaps a few others of us will pop in here sometimes. I don’t think we'll want to bore you guys though with things like how we're managing the logistics of boxes and stuff, but if you are interested in that, let us know! Please don’t tell Erick I said his job is boring (it is).

Thanks for tuning in!

Compulsion Games

Update #125 - Production update and regional price adjustment
over 8 years ago – Fri, Sep 08, 2017 at 10:43:27 PM

Hey all,  

This week’s development has been focused on finalising encounter blocking for the last stretch of the story, along with finally recording those additional Uncle Jack kickstarter shows! It’s great to finally complete these recordings, as it means there will be even more Uncle Jack as part of the final version of the game.

It’s a busy time for our level designers as they create the remaining building blocks of the game, and we work to lock down all the features in the game.

We also spent additional time with Gearbox analyzing the regional pricing for the game after several discrepancies were brought to our attention. Here are revised price points for several regions, effective immediately:

Production 

Sam  

Hi folks! From now on until we ship, I’ll be adding weekly production updates so that you can keep up with our progress towards finishing the game.  

To start with, I want to explain where we are in the production cycle: in 7 weeks, we are aiming to be “content complete”. This is the point where we effectively “lock down” what’s in the game, to submit to ratings. After this point, we can touch things up, fix bugs, and add in missing pieces (eg recorded VO for which we used robo voice previously), but can’t create new things.  

In order to get there, the first step is to make sure that all of our levels are “blocked” - aka the point where the levels can be played, but the supporting things like VO, animation and journal text are not final. We will not be blocking any new encounters after the end of next week. That means this week, and the past 2-3 months, have been all about blocking encounters.  

To give you context, we launched the Early Access version of the game with around 50 encounters. As part of the quest rework, the Clockwork Update shipped with 61 remade/reworked encounters. 94 encounters were in the game by the Maidenholm Update, and 110 in Life in Technicolour. These range from big encounters like the Butcher, or smaller encounters like bridges or Crazy Legs, but does not include things like interactive houses. Once we have finished the current content creation, we will have significantly more encounters, which should make for a much richer world.  

As part of this, Alex is furiously writing VO to be recorded, and we will be having probably 1-2 dozen recording sessions over the next month and a half.

Narrative Team - Alex and Lisa

Lisa  

Wakey, wakey! In addition to writing environmental narrative for the Parade District, I wrote a fun scene in which Uncle Jack’s Fan Club breaks into a melee, arguing about whether his 1951 Christmas Special is part of The Uncle Jack Show’s canon.  

I’ve also been coordinating with the art and level design teams to make sure the amount of environmental narrative feels right for the newest locations. (For instance, if someone is trying to kill you when you’re in a certain room, that might not be the best place to hide lots of diaries and letters.) I usually start with my own list of character-related documents I want to put in a location, but honestly, some of the most fun stuff happens when another department tells me, “Figure out what this room is used for.”

Ninja Department  

Clara The Great Cheese  

Hello everyone, So much news this week from the ninja department!  

Last Monday we gathered our film gear, scripts and Wellie masks to shoot more Uncle Jack shows with the amazing Julian Casey. It went really well!  

We managed to shoot about 12 shows which will add even more diversity on all the tellies and radios of Wellington Wells… plus a special episode which I can't talk about just now. Secret secret, you know the drill.  

A hundred coffees later, I also started syncing footage and cleaning everything for the team to review, while going back to my daily tasks of retouching the UI, planning the next weekly video and reworking some of our loading screens to make them fit even more seamlessly in the world of Wellington Wells.

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

Mike (Kinda not the new guy anymore)

Hey gang! So this week I did some work on some atmospheric conversation stuff and started animation on a new takedown for the player. Can’t mention anything specific, but if this thing doesn’t make you shudder just a bit, you might be a robot. It’s a little on the terrifying side of things. Unfortunately you’ll have to wait till 1.0 to see it! But it’ll be worth the wait!  

That’s it for me, see you all next week, same bat time, same bat channel!

Jules  

Hi, folks! So for me during the first part of the week, I finished another POI (point of interest) animation. As you can see it's a poke fire animation. 

Now the NPCs have another interaction with their fires, I'm going to take a break from the POI animations and move to an exciting task, updating combat animations! The goal of this is to improve the feeling of intensity during the fight for the player. We want more variety for the attacks and really want to make the player feel how much the NPCs hate them (because you are a Downer...).

Vincent  

Hoi! This week, I joined the Ninja Department for a bit, and switched my animator hat for a driver hat! Then I quickly returned under my secret cinematics animator hat.

J.R.  

Greetings my mates. Another secretive week under the belt! Trust me, if you’re getting impatient about the story, I am equally if not even more eager to show you bits of narrative. Again this means I don’t have much to show you, but it keeps moving forward.  

This week I finished working on the longest scene in the game, it was a lot of fun and took me a couple of late nights. Otherwise we are getting underway with effectively closing the shots. This means we’ve been scrolling through every completed scene, making sure everything is nice and tidy in order to sign off on the final animations and mark them audio ready.  

Adding check marks and colouring the sheet in green is exciting!

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

As is now customary, the design team is working on story quests/encounters, meaning that most of them have to be very secretive.

Eric The Fantastic  

Last week or two has been story encounters. Mostly bridges. Waaaay too many bridges. Mostly just making the existing bridges work for all 3 characters. Plus some more department of science quest stuff #secrets. Cary made a sweet computer console, and hooking up all the buttons so they work in game is gonna be fun.

Antoine  

Still well, alive and scripting! My head is 100% dedicated to deliver the playthrough of the second character (miss fancy pants). She’s got some very surprising mechanics, probably things that you don’t see a lot in video games. I’m currently going through her playthrough from beginning to the end and cleaning up any blockers that I come across. Progressively coming out of blocking phase. I wish I could openly talk about the story in the same way we talked about the sandbox but… of course we want to have a surprise effect (with a side dish of jazz hands ?).

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

Carylitz  

I have been doing really small changes everywhere so I feel like I haven't done much this week! I have mostly been fixing problems here and there, alongside lots of meetings with Remi to implement new textures on old models (gotta make the old stuff look as good as the new stuff) and finally I started working on secret new stuff.  

Whitney  

Hello everyone! This week was a bit of a blur. I'm helping out on some environmental narrative for some fun new locations that I REALLY wish I could talk about! Here's a little teaser image:

Another thing that I can finally share is this concept of Arthur Hastings. I rarely have time to spend getting images up to my liking, but I allowed myself that luxury for this one. I was really trying to get the feeling of the classic, slightly neurotic, bureaucratic Every Man. As you can see he's got a lot on his mind :)

Marc-André  

This week, I have been working on modifications for a story level to align better with narrative. We have cinematic flashbacks occurring in the level and they were too close to one another. So design has been adapted to lengthen the size of an area - and I’ve been doing an art pass on top of it.  

Afterwards, I was able to go back to the special house I’m working on. It will be the biggest in terms of detail and work involved - and will be very iconic. Can’t show pictures for both locations since they are story related.

Programming - Matt, Serge, Michael, Lionel, Rob, Evan, Maarten, and Guillaume (sometimes)

Michael  

This week I convinced the sun to move in the correct direction. There’s been quite a few of you who noticed that the sun does not rise in the east and set in the west. This was not part of a deeper conspiracy in our world, compass makers are still as trustworthy as ever. It was just a bug, which has now been fixed.

After that I added some new events into the code for the weapons to allow Ben to create some cool gadgets, including the bee cannon. Unlike our other weapons you can charge it and fire it, instead of just swinging it at your enemies.

Lionel  

This week it has been mostly surgery of my creatures. Some encounters were not spawning correctly. Well, not spawning *sometimes*, it would have been too easy otherwise. For example, in the new worldgen, crossroads were a rare event, but were mandatory for some new part of the scenario. So, I kidnapped a game designer (thank you Antoine ! ) and with his help, we did some good sleuthing, and found what the problems were. Good times. And yes, I let him go.

Serge  

Since last week, I've been working on the combat system in order to improve the whole experience. The first step was to fix some issues related to navigation that were preventing our AIs from working as a group. Then, with design, we iterated on the formation they should aim for, meaning that while some characters will keep you busy in close combat, others will throw stuff at you from farther away. On top of that, we will also implement people that cheer the mob but I'll come back to that in a later post. The idea is that combat will be more threatening, and more varied.  

Toward our polish phase, we will have more attack variety so ensuring that our system can support that in an efficient data-driven approach is also at the heart of my efforts. Working closely with the animators in order to reach the design intention is a big part of being a gameplay programmer and that is so fun because they are highly creative persons (and I love that, isn't it why I do game in the first place? or because I'm a gamer myself, hard to tell).

Thanks for tuning in!  

Compulsion Games

Update #124 - The Ravens Have Gone From the Tower
over 8 years ago – Fri, Sep 01, 2017 at 11:44:55 PM

Hey all,  

Welcome to a new weekly journal! This week we released the second hotfix for PC and the combined hotfix for Xbox One (both patches into one). If you are still having issues, feel free to post on the forums or to email [email protected]  

It is a long weekend over here, so response time to some posts might be a bit slower. But, they will come!

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

Marc-André  

At the beginning of the week I finished a brutalist building interior for the Parade District. After that, I started working on a very special victorian house that’s going to be very grand and girly. There will be gold accents everywhere and new architecture pieces! So far, I’ve adapted the level design blocking for art and have started adding wallpapers and tweaking rooms per color palette, as well as adding props and tweaking their materials.

Can’t show anything because it’s related to story, but progress on the new locations/encounters is going faster than ever.

Emmanuel  

This week I’m doing a final art pass on what is by far the biggest level of the game and maybe our most iconic piece. It looks already pretty amazing but I’m aiming for “mind blowing”. It’s also a secret for the time being, as it’s a core part of the story of Wellington Wells.

PH  

This week, I tried to catch up with the artistic team since I’m new here. I learned a lot of technical stuff and super interesting things about shaders. Then, I started making some props that will be used for the story.

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

This week we have all been working on additional story content, but Adam and Antoine in particular have been working on the main path. Good news, we can now play through all stories for all characters! (hypothetically)  

Here’s a fun screenshot that I can actually show for one location. In one character’s story, the store is open, in another character’s story it’s broken:  

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

Jules  

Hi! This week I made a few new POI (point of interest) animations for our NPCs. After the picking ear and the sneezing, it was time for the picking nose and a soft variant of coughing. I had a lot of fun making these animations. I can’t wait to see them in the game.

Mike (less of the new guy than before)  

Sup folks! So this week I finished up that character animation I have been droning on about for the last few weeks but couldn’t tell you about. Well that situation hasn’t changed so…. Guess you’ll have to wait to play the narrative. In any event I have now moved on to helping the level designers with encounters. So yay! Breathing some life into narrative is FUN! But again, mum’s the word, cloak and dagger kinda stuff. Like a nerdy Ninja. That pretty much sums it up for me this week. It’s been a slice, tune in again next week, same Bat Time, same Bat Channel!

Rémi & Vincent  

Amongst the usual top secret cinematics animations, Rémi has been working on a little scripted event in which the player destroys a wall in order to circumvent a recalcitrant door. He broke the walls to pieces and then simulated the behaviour of the exploding chunks.  

Once this was done, the only thing left was to get all that mayhem in Unreal. Unreal kind of prefers skinned meshes, so I gave him a hand to make a small python script that puts a bone on each piece and transfer the objects motions to the bones, then skin the pieces back on the bones. Hope you’re still following. After some hair pulling (because Maya has its very unique and ‘charming’ way of doing python), we managed to get it working, and that’s how it looks:

As you can see the art is not quite done yet, the hole doesn’t have ‘thickness’. Of course there’s gonna be some extra effects added, like smoke, particles, cam shakes and co!

Programming - Matt, Serge, Michael, Lionel, Rob, Evan, Maarten, and Guillaume (sometimes)

Lionel  

When you’re mad scientist, sometimes, you let your creatures in the world and they come back broken. So it was with last week new city layout : something unexpected happened and things broke (specifically, a whole bunch of necessary features stopped spawning in the world with our new urban layout). So I investigated what exactly happened and spent quite some time on the blackboard to improve it. At the same time, a few improvements were added to city layout to make it more structured.

Maarten  

Hey guys! I've been working in the shadows for a while now, but since this is my first weekly: Hi! I'm Maarten, working as a freelance programmer, mostly tasked with engine support. That means my stress levels are *slightly* lower than those of the other programmers, and I get to work on some fun stuff! :) You may know me from such features as Video Support or Community Localization, but this week I'm hacking away at the Linux build for We Happy Few. Good news for our Linux fans, we're making good progress there. We sorted out all compilation issues, and are now fixing third party lib per lib. It's a cumbersome process, between switching to/from Linux, toolchain mismatches, having to figure out each lib's build process, etc - but hey, the thrill of the challenge is what we're programmers for, right?  

[Ed note: this one’s for you Shmerl.]

Thanks for tuning in and have a fantastic weekend!

Compulsion Team