It’s February already and we are feeling the love in the studio! If you are on our social media then you might have seen that we are reposting love songs from the 60s and all the beautiful fan art you’ve been sending us. Keep at them as we really enjoy watching all the peculiar and funny scenarios you are creating!
Fan art by X-Razorbeard
Engineering Team - Matt, Serge, Michael, Lionel, Rob, Evan, Maarten, Céline and Guillaume (sometimes)
Céline
Hi people ! This week I have been working on skills again, as the list got finalized at about the same time we finished Arthur's content. I can't really reveal more than last time I talked about them, but I can at least tell you, we're going to have character-specific, survival, combat and stealth skills. Highest-tier skills will make your adventure in Wellington Wells a lot easier/more fun. Of course when working on skills, you interact with so many features that you're bound to find plenty of bugs. So I also have been fixing plenty of bugs this week. And with that, I really think the game is coming together very nicely !
Michael
We're approaching the time when we have to send a build of our game off to Microsoft for them to approve of before they let it on their systems (technically this is called submission for certification). One of the features that is a big requirement for their sign off is achievements, and so this week my task was to go through and add these into the game. It's quite a fun adventure to visit all the different systems in the codebase to add the callbacks. Anyway, the logic is all there now. I won't spoil what the achievements are but I think there's a good mix of mainline progression rewards, and ones that push you to find the more interesting missable moments.
Lionel
This week was all about extending and integrating our new island system. Integrating took a bit of time because - as with any procedural system in WHF - we never simply replace one system by another, we keep the old system as well as the new one and add an options to choose which one is active. This allows us smooth transitions and extensive testing.
In this case, this was a good thing because while the new system has some interesting and important new features, it was lacking one from the old one. So, I extended it a bit to cover that. I also realized that our shore outline would have to be redone along the way. Doing that now.
Animation Team - JR, Rémi, Vincent, Mike P, Jules, Raph and Franzi
Mike
Sup folks, not much to report on my end. Worked on a bunch of Animation Chains for a whole whack of encounters this week. These are where we take our bank of animations, and chain them together inside conversations with NPCs. Mostly this week I revisited and polished up some of the chains so that they seem like a bit more normal conversations and interactions. That’s pretty much it. Exciting, I know. So that’s it for me, tune in next week, Same Bat Time, Same Bat Channel.
Narrative Team - Alex And Lisa
Alex
This week most of the LD’s moved from Arthur to Sally and our third character. So our intrepid and peripatetic Sally, [name redacted], and I, got into some sound studios – one in Montreal, one in New York, where she’s appearing in a play – and recorded 169 encounter lines and barks for Antoine’s revision of the Sally playthrough. I’ve also been writing lines for Adam’s revision of the third character’s playthrough. Fortunately we have to record Allan Cooke for a secret project next week, so we’ll get those done along with.
We’ve been getting a lot of feedback from playtesters over at Gearbox. It’s really exciting to hear people saying the narrative works, and they’re intrigued by the characters, and they feel real, and the dialog is convincing. You never know for sure until you hear back from players. Having access to Gearbox’s QA people and their playtesters has really helped us.
Lisa
This week, I’ve been making sure that things I’ve written over the past few years are actually in the game, and that environmental narrative is in the right places and makes sense. This means turning my mindset from writer to player.
At this point, I can probably reveal that SOME of you fans on the forum were 100 percent correct about the identity of Miss Thigh Highs. We were anxious to keep our secrets from getting out too early, so during the past year I seeded stories of other female characters in the environmental narrative, just to throw you off. I’m now trying to make sure that all those stories “pay off” and feel satisfying and meaningful when you play the game. A couple of the “red herrings” have actually turned out to be among my favorite Wellies. Hope you enjoy them!
Art Team - Whitney, Emmanuel, Tito, Marc-André, Sarah, Guillaume, Cary and PH
Marc-André
This week, I’ve been working on a myriad of small to medium to big tasks. I’ve been working with Cary to go over 7200 material instances in the game to write every sign in the game in text form. This will be super useful for people playing in other languages than English. They’ll be able to understand the signs scattered across the world.
I’ve also been polishing up multiple locations and tying up loose ends. I’ve also spoken to Maarten about the possibility of having volumes inside buildings that affect the amount of light visible (with a transition) and thanks to his magic coding skills I already started to implement it across the game.
That’s it for me! Polishing work from now on. A lot of small tasks and details that will make the overall experience better.
Whitney
Hey folks! This week I did a bunch of environmental narrative for some up and coming seeeeecret locations! So secretive! So exciting! That's all I'll say..:)
Thanks for tuning in!
Compulsion Team
Weekly Journal - How You Play is How We Polish
Hey everyone,
Now that Arthur is done, we all wait with great anticipation for next week’s playtest sessions, where people will have the opportunity to play through the whole of Arthur’s story for the first time. It’s very important for us to witness players’ reactions to the new flow and to check that what we implemented resonates well with what players expect.
You’ll see that most of the team has spent the week on either final bug-fixing for Arthur or polishing for the other characters. Well, the part of the team that has not been hit by a mysterious plague (ain’t winter grand?), that is.
Art Team
Marc-André
This week I did polishing work on the Doctor Headquarters. I laid out a bunch of objects to make it feel less empty and more like a place. I also did some lighting tweaks and bug fixing pertaining to that, and created some new meshes such as an operation table.
PH
Hi! This week I’ve got a good time on weapons. Team gave me the opportunity to imagine 2 flaming weapons. So I quickly sketched some crazy ideas and I assembled pieces in 3D to get a first look. Since it’s heavily gameplay, there’s lots of back and forth in the design. I’m trying to get something cool that the player would love to use and feel powerful. But what’s the definition of “cool” in video game? What is “cool” in We Happy Few? It’s more complicated than expected.
In the end, I think it will need additional work to come up with awesome flaming weapons.
Animation
Jules
Hi. So this week I’ve continued to polish our combat animation. All of the final tweaks are done for the attack of the NPC. It’s looking great and I’m really happy about that. I think we reach our goal, the wind-up is clear and the attack is appropriate for our wellie and wastrel. What I mean by appropriate being, when you start a fight in the street of Wellington Wells, you have the real feeling of being attacked by a crowd of random people who want you dead. What we didn’t want was during the fight, you have the feeling of fighting against some people who are experts in combat.
Also, I’ve started to polish the taunt animation for the NPC when they engage in the fight. This week I am sharing with you the wastrel heavy attack. See you next week!
Mike
Sup folks! Not much to report this week, I’m done with cutscenes for now and am back to animation chains. Trying to make your encounters/conversations with our lovely folks as interesting as possible. It’s a nice little respite for the hectic schedule from the past two weeks. Well that’s it from me, tune in next week, Same Bat Time, Same Bat Channel!
Vincent
Ahoy! This week has been mainly about polish and realisation. That’s when you take a functional scene or encounter, and try to make it flow a bit more and look more natural. All that without breaking it, hopefully.
I also did some more general tweaks and bug fixing, like retargeting the sleeping pose for female characters. Up until now, they used the same animation as male, and as both genders models are not made quite the same, the result was quite bad. That’s the kind of obvious but non-essential things that get to be tended to at the end of projects. It is super satisfying to finally take care of those little matters, that, as a whole, will make the experience a little bit more immersive.
Programming
Michael
The priority this week was the playtest build, which means making sure that we can provide a version of the game for people to play all the way through Arthur’s story, without getting trapped by bugs or broken logic. This means tasks like: debugging why some quest rewards aren’t given, and some quests aren’t showing up when they should be active, or making sure you can’t shove an important NPC through a wall while you’re fighting them. In between the firefighting there was time to focus on less pressing matters like why the throwing arc visualisation doesn’t work for heavy items. The possibility of having to look into the physics system is always a terrifying contemplation. Fortunately, after drawing lots of debug lines and dots on the screen to show the difference between the arc and reality I was able to track it down to something in the game code. Seemed we were adding extra gravity too early, physics code blackhole avoided for another week.
Serge
This week has been all about population management to increase the density of characters in the village's streets! The challenge here is to have more NPC without creating performance issue so I started by pushing the system to its limit in order to stress the mechanism that choose which characters should be updated or paused. That decision is based on many factors like the importance of a character related to the gameplay or his visibility on screen (to only name a few of the information we use to score its relevance).
With the help of our quality assurance team and game designer, we will tweak the size of the targeted population to find the best equilibrium between realization (for which more is better) and performance (which is quite the opposite, less is better). That's just a hint at the kind of technical challenges we have in real-time entertainment industries!
Design
Roxanne
This week I worked on balancing the loot in cellars and other uncovered places. I also did some balancing on the weapon side and made the wastrels and wellies able to block attacks. Mostly, bug fixing and balancing! :)
This week marks an exciting milestone - this is the last week for us to finish off Arthur’s structural changes, so that we can playtest all of his content in its final form. We still have time to touch up Arthur here and there, but there will be no big changes after this point, which is why this is an important time to review and playtest what we have. As of next week, the team moves on to bug fixing for the playtest (removing quest blockers, fixing crashes, and tightening up things that slipped through the cracks) and shifting our focus over to Sally.
As a change from the usual, this week we wanted to show what an international team we are, so we asked everyone to write their weekly piece in their native language (or in some cases, “language”). And so they went crazy. If you like to have a good read, then you’re in for a treat! If you guys would like to comment in your language, please do, and we'll Google translate with enthusiasm.
Programming
Lionel
Les aminches m’ont dit qu’on pouvait écrire le bulletin de semaine dans la jactance qu’on préférait. Des grenouilles bien élevées y en a de partout ici alors j’allais pas le faire en francais. je me suis dis, tiens, pourquoi pas le language des tontons. C’est simple, imagé et ça a ce petit gout de reviens-y, celui de la cigarette et du pastis bu a 3h du matin dans l’arrière salle d’un bar de montrouge ou on compte les biftons négligemment.
Cette semaine donc, c'était du complexe, du matériel à migraine. Dans notre petite affaire, on avait du souci avec nos îles. Elles se comportaient mal, du genre désagréables gratuitement. Et l’homme des grandes forêts est tolérant mais faut pas lui mettre un scorpion dans la botte. Ça le rend soupe au lait. Il devient impulsif. Il lui prend comme des envies de tout reprogrammer au marteau.
Mais tu me connais l’ami, si les années derrière les claviers m‘ont appris qu’une chose, c’est que même avec des flingues de concours, tirer à l’aveugle c’est rarement efficace. Ça fait du bruit, ça amuse mais c’est pas du Patton . Bref, ca fait quelques semaines que je prépare le casse, j’ai simulé, étudié le terrain. Mais à un moment, ça passe ou ça passe.
Et là ce fut Verdun, des trucs de code qui explosent de partout. La panique des troupes, la débandade comme jadis. J'étais défait, je voulais rentrer à Montauban. Alors, j’ai pensé à la grande Tata - celle qui faisait de la contrebande de gnôle et qui négociait au fusil de chasse. Elle savait y faire elle ! Elle avait la solution innovante, quelquefois à base d’explosifs mais toujours de bon goût. Alors, inspiré par la grande dame, j’ai repris un verre de ce remède polonais qui fait tousser même les voitures et j’y suis retourné.
Je voulais éviter que le sang coule, je voulais être diplomate mais faut avouer j'étais plus d’humeur. C’etait la distribution de noël, version bourre-pifs dans le bug, avec toutes les couleurs de l’arc-en-ciel. Un fes-ti-val de psychologie.
Et du coup, tu vois, maintenant nos îles sont plus polies. Oh, elles ont encore du mauvais caractère mais elles font dans le sucré. Elles cherchent pas le problème, elles embêtent pas le péquin, elles risquent pas le conflit. Le joueur pourra naviguer de l’une à l’autre comme un bourgeois sur la Marne le Dimanche. Tout en relaxation Pompidolienne et en satisfaction dans le velours.
Voilà, c’est le dejeuner sur l’herbe et Stalingrad en une seule semaine. C’est le beau temps après la tempête. C’est : j’ai changé les îles dans WHF.
Maarten
Ne goeiendag! Ik zou gene Vlaming zijn moest ik de kans laten liggen om hier es wat Nederlands in te krijgen - è giën Ninovieter ak er ni een bekken Ninofs bauj zo smaujtn, mo k zant ier mo bau auven of ter versto mau giënniën!
Deze week heb ik het leven van mijn art & sound collega's wat makkelijker gemaakt. Zo heb ik net een systeem afgewerkt waarbij de level artists heel eenvoudig een soort van ondertitels aan hun artwork kunnen hangen: je kan ingame een beschrijving zien van bepaalde art assets, wat meteen ook gebruikt kan worden voor de vertaling van de vele plakkaten of opschriften in Wellington Wells.
Onze sound engineer Valentino weet ook altijd leuke programmeer-taken te verzinnen, zoals zorgen dat de Bobbies niet praten terwijl ze op hun fluitje blazen, dat z'n meeuwen ongestoord kunnen blijven kwelen ongeacht waar de speler gaat of dat, wanneer je oude vrouwtjes in brand steekt, ze stoppen met schreeuwen eens ze gesneuveld zijn. #typischewerkdag
Michael
Cor blimey, bruv! How do you do?
I’ve been working, this week, on clarifying information that is displayed through the UI for the player. This has included stuff that we want to try out in the upcoming user playtest and helping Antoine with his excellent work on the new starting island. One of the tasks was updating our new suspicion icons so that there is a difference between “you are doing something bad, people will ask you politely to stop” and “if anyone sees you doing this, they will freak out immediately, and attempt to stop you with all their might”. Lock picking, for example, is not something people will just accept “Oh sorry i didn’t realise this wasn’t a normal thing to do to my neighbours house” as an explanation for. Nope, that behaviour is prime cricket-bat-to-the-head material. The information of what causes instant-aggro was already available “under the hood” so it’s just a case of reflecting that from code so we can wire it up to the UI scripts.
I also added a little arrow for the 3D waypoints, for when it is offscreen. Sam liked it a lot, he said so many times. It’s been a good week.
I worked with Antoine on some tutorial moments for our player menus. We don’t want you to get halfway through the game and not know that you could have been upgrading your skills, in the skill tree, or using the quest tracking feature to help guide you around. We also don’t want to be intrusive with tutorials, so we’ve found some ways to convey the knowledge when it’s needed without holding you up.
[ignore the programmer art/writing]
For the crafting menu for example we don’t want people to miss the fact that there are multiple categories of recipe lists, but as soon as the player switches category we know that this information is understood, so we just display a notice to direct attention to the category buttons when we know the player is looking for a specific recipe, and hide it when they switch categories, we don’t need to pause the game or throw up a big graphic, and we teach it when the player needs to know it. If you can’t tell, I love a well-made tutorial.
Also, Montreal weather update, apparently when it gets cold, the snow gets armour, something called freezing rain. It’s beautiful and weird. Anyway, that’s enough rambling for this week.
Pip Pip Cheerio!
Megillah
Alex and Lisa
Oy, such tsuris has the Arthur playthrough been, but we’re almost done, ayn kaynhoreh. The Parade District was missing a few tchotchkes, particularly the Department of Senseless and Idiotic Research. So it shouldn’t be a shanda, I rewrote.
The usual schtick is I write all sort of shpiels for the player character. At this point, new shpiels would make the LD plotz, so I’m trying to be a mensch and only rewrite individual lines we already got.
Why? With a rewrite, only the audio boys and me have to schlep. The level design specifies the name of the file containing the line – say GD0_006_PC_Art_Well_That, “Well, that’s terribly romantic, isn’t it. They had each other until the end.”
But, I can rewrite the line so Arthur says, “Oh, heavens, that’s horrible,” then record it. Adrien edits it out of the recording session and Valentino puts the new sound file into the GD0_006_PC_Art_Well_That “bucket.” Now when the level design calls up GD0_006_PC_Art_Well_That, we hear “Oh, heavens, that’s horrible.”
You might think it’s a pain in the tuchis, but necessity is the mamaloshen of invention, nu?
Also, a new bridge we made from Eel Pie to Maidenholm, and we needed the gants megillah yesterday, so not to be a putz I jumped in to help our environmental narrative maven, Lisa.
Meanwhile, Sam has been proposing some ferkakta idea about how we should design levels and narrative “rationally” in the DLC (don’t worry, we won’t be starting on this until we’re done with the game). It sounds meshugenah – what, you don’t like flailing and yelling? – but he’s mishpocheh, so we humor him. Not so much would you like him when he’s angry.
Gey gezunterheyt!
Animation
MikeP
Sup! As the great Don Rickles once said:”Some people say funny things, but I say things funny.” That’s kinda what I’m trying to do. So this week I continued to work on some cutscenes for you guys. When I work, I try and makes things a bit different for you guys, give them a bit of a twist, something you weren’t expecting. Hopefully when you guys finally get to play, you’ll notice that and it’ll make playing the game that much better for you! Nothing else of note to speak of this week, just wanted to share that little tidbit with you. So that’s it for me for this week, so tune in again next week, Same Bat Time, Same Bat Channel! (Also if you’re wondering why I haven’t written anything in my native language, it’s because I’m born in Montreal and speak English. Nothing interesting about that. In fact, it’s kinda just like I’m writing here. Pretty Vanilla)
Franzi
Hallo liebe Leute, hier ist Franzi, die andere mysteriöse Animatorin!...Moment...Franzi wer? Was sagt sie da? Und vor allem wie???
Ja, Ze German kommt jetzt auch mal dahergeschlittert (ich sag nur Eis in Montreal) und schreibt euch ein paar Zeilchen. Ihr habt bisher noch nicht viel von mir gehört, aber es ist Mutter- sprachenwoche bei Compulsion Games und ich lasse es mir nicht nehmen, euch meine Arbeit zu erklären. Und das auch noch in Deutsch!
Also, mein Revier sind die zahlreichen Encounters, sprich NPCs, auf die ihr trifft, wo ich entweder bereits bestehende Dialog Animationen zusammenschneide oder für spezielle NPCs neu erstelle. Es geht darum, den Charakteren Leben einzuhauchen und dabei die jeweilige Emotion und Intention zu unterstreichen. So kommt es, dass z.B. ein Romantiker auf die Knie geht, ein Wellie euch ein Geschenk überreicht oder ein wütender Wastrel auf den Boden stampft.
Und diese Woche habe ich wieder einige solcher Dialoge mit Animationen versehen, aber was genau, werdet ihr selber sehen.
So weit so gut, das wars auch schon. Traurig, aber wahr, es ist auch meine letzte Woche bei Compulsion Games und ich fühle mich geehrt an einem so coolen Projekt mitgewirkt zu haben. Machts gut!
Jules
Salut à tous ! C’est un avec un grand plaisir que je vais vous raconter ma semaine mais cette fois-ci en français. Pour changer j’ai encore et toujours travaillé sur le combat ! Ça tombe bien c’est ce que je préfère. Donc comme je vous le raconte depuis plusieurs semaines je “polish”, où disons plutôt raffine les animations que j’ai réalisées il y a plusieurs mois auparavant. Cette semaine c'était au tour des attaques au poing. Dans un premier temps pour nos chers Wellie et ensuite pour les Wastrel. Donc concernant le combat, les attaques sont prêtes. Mais il reste encore beaucoup d’autres animations telles que les provocations ou encore bien d’autres animations de communication durant le combat. Comme promis je vous partage un GIF de ces attaques : l’attaque lourde des Wellie. Bon week-end à tous et à la semaine prochaine.
Design
Eric
Alrighty there folks, this week is talk in yer native language dont’cha know. Well, this week was all aboot finally Arthur. We have a really big play test coming up that we’re super excited aboot. There going to play all the wicked new content we made for the intro areas of the game. Arthur’s playthrough has gotten surprisingly good over the past few weeks, and it’s nice to be able to finally show some people and see what they think. Well, that’s all I got, so uh, have a super weekend eh!
Roxanne
Bonjour les amis! Cette semaine, j’ai rajouté pleins de conversation ambiantes pour nos chers Wellies. J’ai également travaillé à améliorer les objets que l’on peut trouver dans le jeu. Voilà ! Rien du super palpitant, mais oh combien nécessaire ! :)
Audio
Valentino
Ciao a tutti !
Per la prima volta vi scrivo in italiano. :D Questa settimana ho integrato un sacco di nuovi effetti per i "Wastrel/Wellie/Bobby etc." (circa 600 linee). D’ora in poi potrete sentire delle nuove parole quando si interpella il giocatore.
Ho dovuto giocare un sacco e completare tantissime missioni per assicurarmi che si sentano bene le voci, i suoni e la musica. Poi ho creato un nuovo ambiente con la pioggia! Ora si potranno sentire le gocce che battono sui tetti delle case, il rumore dell’acqua quando si cammina e in tante altre situazioni. Non vedo l’ora di vedere le vostre reazioni quando ci giocherete. A presto !
QA
Alexina
Hey guys! So my first language is France’s worst nightmare - la joual. So I’m just gonna skip on that and avoid all the billion spelling mistakes I would make.
This week we’ve been in super high gear for the upcoming playtest and all collectively complaining at least twice a day about how awfully icy the sidewalks are (except Sam - Sam never complains). There’s also new features that are being tested and there’s also some older features we’ve been reviewing such as the bobby whistle. I’ve been doing a stealth pass for Arthur this week and the usual QA work stuff as well as nonsense.
On a side note: Kumusta kayong lahat na Pilipino naglalaro, huwag ninyong kalimutan ang iyong kaligayahan sa pag "tune in" kada simana!
For now, keep warm and do a weird foot shuffle every time someone gives you scotch.
(Please someone, give me scotch to survive - please.)
Art
Carylitz
Que onda raza! Escribiré en español, pero Mexicano (y del norte). Mucho jale en las últimas semanas, he estado en todos lados como de costumbre acá uno tiene que ser todologo, asi que, estuve trabajando en variaciones de personajes, locaciones de encuentros secretos, unos callejones que servirán como variantes para las islas de las pequeñas ciudades y uno que otro prop que se nos cruza como urgencia. Las semanas que vienen estarán algo pesadas porque tenemos que finalizar todo el arte del juego, así que estaremos enfocados 100% en eso. Hay mil pequeñas tareas por todos lados, así que habrá mucho movimiento entre departamentos, pero ya es viernes tiempo de ponerse impertinentes. Bueno nada mas que decir por aca, que tengan buen fin y pasenla bonito!
Marc-André
Cette semaine, l’on est presque tombé à bas dans la street à cause de la température glaciale mais nous pouvions quand même nous rendre à la workplace. Le travail a avancé de façon effrayable: beaucoup de layout et un peu de modeling et de material tweaking. Le bridge entre le garden district one et le village un arrive full prêt pis ready to go et le progrès est encouraging. On a pas slacké!
Whitney
Howdy doo! Vermont here!
Jeezum Crow it's chilly out there! Let me grab my favorite flannel and some craft brew before tellin' ya how my week was. If only I could describe it to ya with a vegetable diorama or day-glo painted junk art sculpture.
This week I reviewed play-through notes, drew a new location, and chugged along on remaining environmental narrative. So. Much. Environmental. Narrative.
PH
Salut à tous,
Cette semaine c’était la fashion week car je me suis occupé de modéliser des chaussures et des bottes. Toujours super intéressant de s’occuper de props pour We Happy Few car il y a toujours une excellente phase de recherche à effectuer avant de démarrer. Après avoir récolté tout ce qu’il me fallait pour coller au mieux aux années 40/50, Whitney m’a aidé à valider des designs et je viens de passer ma semaine dessus.
Ninja Department
Clara
Wesh les gros, bien ou bien?
Aujourd'hui j'ai l'autorisation de vous la faire comme on se les balance dans le 9-5, façon "susu la famille" et "mais m'dame j'ai rien fait"! Alors big up à tous les banlieusards qu'on traite de parichiens, aux gangstas et leurs frocs sous le cul, aux meufs à leggings, et plus généralement, aux utilisateurs du RER D. Et mes darons, s'ils me lisent.
Cette semaine, c'était beaucoup d'aller retour entre google drive et ma timeline de montage. Le machin ressemble à la fermeture du marché de Goussainville : gros bordel ambiant mais ça sent bon les épices. Ca consiste à mater des pages et des pages de doc excel et à essayer beaucoup de trucs avec Cord, notre directeur marketing. On essaye de pécho les meilleurs moments narratifs et les lignes de dialogue qui nous paraissent les plus intéressants pour un projet top secret pour le moment.
Tá an chuid eile de mo sheachtain tiomnaithe do UI athbhreithnithe. Go leor oibre ag teacht. Ná iarr orm é seo a fhuaimniú. Hi to our irish players.
Weekly Journal - Release schedule update and introducing Sally
Hey everyone,
In case you missed it, this morning we released an official announcement that we were delaying We Happy Few to Summer 2018 and as a thank you for being so patient we also teased the new female character player. You can see the video and the announcement we posted here, along with a little taste of the story. We also talk about it in more depth in this week’s production update below.
Otherwise, it’s onwards to release for us! This week we wanted to make it a good one, so it’s a bit longer than average.
Production
Sam
Hi folks - if you haven’t already watched the video about the new release window, these next few paragraphs will probably make no sense. Here it is again if you haven’t seen it. We hope you like meeting Miss Thigh Highs.
G, Whitney, Alex, Matt and I have been on the project for four years now - we started January 2014. The rest of the team have joined us since then, bringing together their enthusiasm, skill and determination to create a game we’re very excited about. Regardless of whether we’ve been on the project for 4 years or 3 months, today’s decision is a tough one, as is any that involves critically assessing the work you’ve done.
To elaborate on what I said in the video, once we finished getting the major content into the game, we reviewed how it felt when it fit together. In particular, we noticed that the game had a good pace throughout Arthur's story, except the beginning - that was some of the first content we built a long time ago, and after refining our tools and world, it just didn't cut it any longer. It wasn’t structured well, and we were not doing a good enough job of introducing the world (the lore behind the Wastrels, the Garden District, Arthur, and all that good stuff). We also weren’t sufficiently introducing the game’s mechanics. In retrospect, this is something we should have done better on the Early Access launch too, but hindsight is always 20/20.
In any event, we didn't think the early game was shippable (among other things), and looking at what we're building now, we are confident that was the right decision. The new intro island is shaping up to be just as weird and wonderful as the rest of the game, as it should be.
The review was a little while ago, which is why you have seen weekly updates mentioning the revised tutorial island for the past few weeks. It has taken us some time to come to conclusions about what to do design wise, line up funding, organise a new production schedule and release window, in order to be able to make this announcement. Gearbox has been supportive all the way along - I appreciate some of you have had some skepticism about our partnership, but we can only reiterate that they have been excellent partners, and are doing a fantastic job at supporting us while we make We Happy Few the best it can be.
To look ahead, 2018 is still a very exciting year for us. We’re in finaling mode, so no more new things, just polish and bug fixes to go. I’m very proud of the team for creating something so unique, and we’re all very much looking forward to getting the game in your hands as soon as we can.
Art Team - Whitney, Emmanuel, Tito, Marc-André, Sarah, Guillaume, Cary and PH
PH
This week, I continued the work on the posters and graffiti for the Garden District. Early tests were quite good, now I will have to place them everywhere.
Then I started to remodel some old rubble piles for the player to loot. Those piles have been there for a long time and we want another look for them. Pipes, shiny things, rubbles, dirt, bricks... these have to be intriguing for the player to pique his/her interest. I’m working with David and Whitney towards this goal. Here’s a sneak peek at some chunk of mortared bricks I’m working on.
Animation Team - JR, Rémi, Vincent, Mike P, Jules, Raph and Franzi
Mike
Hey folks! As the great Groucho Marx once said: “One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got into my pajamas I'll never know.” It’s been an interesting week. Been working hard on cutscenes for you guys. Still working on the same one from last week, which is part of Arthur’s first island, so there is that. Now I know what your thinking to yourself. You’re saying: “ Self, why does Mike take so long to make cutscenes? Shouldn’t this take, like… I dunno, like 2 hours tops!?” And although I don’t disagree that I could slap together something in two hours, I’m pretty sure you’d want to slap me back if you had to suffer through that while playing our game. So until they invent a magical “Animate” button, you’re all just going to have to bear with me while I try to work my magic for you. Well this post kind of reminds me of Seinfeld for some reason. ... Well that's it for me folks, tune in next week, Same Bat Time, Same Bat Channel!
Vincent
Well… It’s finalling time! That means a lot of reviews and spreadsheets filling, to keep track of all the polish we need to do. I won’t lie, there’s a lot… We really want the baby to be pretty!
Other than that I’ve been working on a sort of ‘light NPC’, to put spectators in the background of some encounters. Real AI characters are super versatile, react to all sort of stimuli and, you guessed it, take a lot of processing power! Sometimes we just need to have some sort of crowd with very basic behaviour, and using generic NPCs for that would be a bit of a waste. So I’ve been putting together a simple object that only can look at something and ‘cheer’. Actually, cheering can be any kind of animation, it’s all customizable. So you can use that object to have a crowd of wastrels that cheers on demand when you get punched in the face, or a crowd of posh wellies taking pictures and taking notes! The script only has to call a function and they all ‘cheer’, with some random offsets and animation speed, so that they don’t look (too much) like robots!
Of course this has to be used in a controlled environment, where the player can’t interact with those fake NPCs, or they’d just look at you very insistently, looking like the complete idiots they are.
Jules
Hi! I’ve started this week by doing some animation for the Jubilator. After this task, I moved to our POI (point of interest) animations, which are the random activities that Wellies and Wastrels can do about town. We had some issues with the animation and now it’s fixed! So our NPCs can pick their nose/ear, cough and sneeze in total tranquility in Wellington Wells. During the time I had left, I went back to polish combat animation, especially the fist attack! I will share some GIF of them next week for sure. See you then!
J.R.
Hey guys. After recovering from the plague that's been slowly knocking down Compulsion team members over the past month, I was back and ready for a week of reviews and meetings! Not the most glamorous of all things, but very productive as it makes our goals very clear. Aside from that, I've technically been finishing the last cinematic I owned except for one special case... which is crazy! Sure there's other shots to fiddle with (still secret!!) and a little bit of polish and fixes to be done here and there, but looking back and to think that I went through all of those scenes, it makes me really happy and proud. Hope you enjoyed the little sneak peek in the announcement today ;) ......Sally who?
Engineering Team - Matt, Serge, Michael, Lionel, Rob, Evan, Maarten, Céline and Guillaume (sometimes)
Céline
Hello ! Lots of fixes were done in the last two weeks concerning Stealth. There was a funny bug where asleep NPCs could see you even if their eyes were closed. Additionally, when spotting you, they were so surprised that, most of time, instead of just falling from the bed like a normal person, they would fall through the floor and disappear in the abyss of the world. I'd never thought Arthur could be that scary. Jokes asides, we also fixed some weird NPC behavior when throwing objects. Now they’re properly distracted, leaving the path clear for you to progress. There are still a lot of tweaks and fixes to make the stealth experience nicer but it is progressing quite well.
Michael
Happy Friday Ladies and Gents. I’ve spent a good deal of time this week sitting in meetings with a large number of the team and reviewing all our mechanics for combat, conformity and stealth in order to see how “done” we are. Fortunately the feedback is “just balance and polish” for almost everything, which seems like a good stage to be at. One thing that has been given a bit of additional love is the Quickslots, which are very important to the game and have received a lot of valid criticism from players and the team. So this week I have rejigged this design and implemented a new system which allows you to have 4 slots assigned to use at all times, and the list of things that can be assigned is a lot larger and more up to you.
Serge
Hello world! The goal for me this week was to polish a special fight with the Jubilator by implementing a custom behavior for it when the player leaves the arena. For that I needed to implement a new mechanism to acquire position from a level in order to feed the behavior of a NPC. That effort will also serve to polish another encounter as the goal is to support specific realization (aka NPCs doing unique things) while still running systemic characters. Rapid iterations with a gameplay animator has been key to achieve that within a week which makes me particularly proud!
If you are curious to see how what I am talking about looks like in the editor, here is a screenshot of the new subtree that handles that fight with the Jubilator:
Design Team - David, Hayden, Antoine, Adam, Ben, Eric, Roxanne and Benji
Adam
I’m back from Christmas vacation, and it’s straight back into overdrive here. We’re continuing our blitz to finish up Arthur’s story mode, and being really careful about whether we REALLY need this thing, or whether we can live without it. Personally, I’ve been reworking the flow for the 3rd hour of the game to clear up confusion, and streamline the player to his objectives. I’ve also been playing with this awesome tool that Matt made (draw road shapes and it appears on the overworld map). As you can probably guess, my test case was to draw a giant dick.
Eric
What Adam said, but for different parts of the game. Although similar parts of the anatomy.
Ninja Department
Clara (Do I have to state my name everytime? I’m the only one in this department for Christ’s sake) Editor's note: Yes you do.
Hey guys,
The ninja department is alive. Working in the shadows, as always. (Literally. My screens are blocking the lights from the windows. It's dark in there. For the better.)
Since I've been back from Christmas holidays, I went back to editing for my greatest pleasure and to put together the short Sally sneak peek that you probably saw earlier today. I love doing those. Not only do I get to explore storytelling and tease you guys, it makes for lovely collaborations within the team; I get to work with people that I actually rarely work with:
Benji was nice enough to spend some time adding console debug for me to go to specific cinematics (and avoid a lot of swearing on my part), Celine looked over builds, Emmanuel did his Emmanuel stuff and made everything look amazing, Valentino handled sound recording, Cord wrote and talked and threw ideas to my head and we played that pleasant game of bouncing ball with the edit ("won't it look better if? Shouldn't we try this? What about that?")
Those little pieces of videos work pretty much the same way we make this game. With a lot of people, coffee, Digestives(cookies) and collective effort. Hope you enjoyed it. See you!
Having recently reached our “content complete” milestone, the team has conducted a thorough review of the game, beginning to end. You can listen to Guillaume and Sam chat about it in the accompanying video, but bottom line: the team has built some amazing content, but we need more time to polish than we anticipated.
As a result, we will now be releasing the game this summer.
We have also received feedback that some Steam players felt the new pre-purchase asking price didn’t mesh well with the game being categorized as Early Access. Given all the content we have yet to reveal to the public, we can see their point. That being said, we’ve done a huge amount of work and the scope of the game is substantially increasing over what’s there right now, which is a very unusual situation for Early Access games, especially as we have a retail release on the way. What you guys see right now is definitely not what we see internally.
So, we find ourselves caught between Early Access (where it’s important to have a price that reflects the current game) and the eventual release of the full game with increased scope (which we believe reflects a traditional retail game). We had anticipated that Steam players would be okay with pre-purchase still granting early access, but since we won’t be offering any additional early access updates beyond August’s “Life in Technicolour”, we think having this labeled Early Access and charging the price of a larger game caused more confusion than we had hoped.
We want to make sure everyone who plays the game is happy, so alongside our revised release date, we are doing two things:
1) Enabling refunds for all players who purchased on Steam, past and present, regardless of playtime. We’ll continue working to make sure 1.0 is great and something you’ll be happy buying.
2) Temporarily disabling the buy button on Steam as of February 1st, 2018. We don’t want new players to have the same frustration, so we’re temporarily disabling the option to buy on Steam, and will re-enable the buy button once we’re closer to launch when more info and materials on the game will have been released, giving players more clarity on what they can expect in the full version of We Happy Few.
So, that’s it for today. We’re going to get back to making We Happy Few. Thank you once again for all your ongoing support.
Compulsion Games
Weekly Journal - Happy New Year!
Hey everyone,
Most of the office is now back at work after a much needed holiday break and we are ready to take on 2018!
Production
Sam
Hi everyone, happy new year! From everyone here at Compulsion, we hope you’ve had time over the new year period to relax and check out some great games.
Since November, we have been reviewing game mechanics, playthroughs and all of the nitty gritty details that go into making a game. Many of us on the team have been in almost constant review meetings, going over everything with a fine toothed comb, deciding what’s working well, what isn’t, and what needs improvement. One initial decision we made was to improve Arthur’s first two hours, which we have spoken about in the past few weekly journals.
We’ve now progressed into different type of decisions, for example, which features to keep and which just aren’t interesting enough. For example, we just don’t think the gifting function is great as it is currently implemented, and the time we would need to improve it is better spent elsewhere. So, we’re restricting gifting to Bobbies only (which already have good realisation), and probably renaming it as “bribery”. We will post more about what we’ve been doing on this front, and the big picture calls we’ve had to make as a result of all of these changes, next week.
Narrative Team - Alex and Lisa
Alex
We’ve all been scrambling to rebuild the first two hours of Arthur’s playthrough so it functions as a better tutorial while also being more spectacular and “sticky.” We’ve also rejiggered the order of islands you’ll have to cross, and fixed the logic of your interactions with a certain very important person. So for me, that means writing and recording about 500 new lines of encounter dialog.
Meanwhile we’ve been recording barks to clarify why exactly NPCs are pissed off at you. Altogether, let’s say I recorded about 1100 lines of dialog in five recording sessions with actors in London, LA, and somewhere in New Zealand.
Also, in my copious free time, I’ve been reworking the scripts to Top Secret Project #1. I realized that it was impossible to get into the head of Top Secret Person #1, so I gave her a troublesome person to talk to. This really has opened things up.
Wot I Did Over My Winter Vacation: I suck at vacation. Lisa is much better at it. But either way, over the break, Lisa and I did a lot of research and kicking around ideas for Top Secret Project #4. Some of this is quite a bit in advance. But we like to have time to write, then realize the writing is broken, then reformulate. As all pro writing monkeys know, writing is rewriting. We think you’ll be really excited ... sometime ... in the future ... forget you even read this.
Design Team - David, Hayden, Antoine, Adam, Ben, Eric, Roxanne and Benji
Eric
Well, this week and the last few have been 100% dedicated to making sure Arthur’s playthrough is the best it can be. We restructured some things, changed a bit of the narrative, fixed a ton of bugs, rearranged some things, made a few schedules, excel sheets, had some meetings, and got fat(ter) over Christmas. So far it’s turned out a lot better than where it was 2 months ago. It’s starting to shape up into the game we wanted to make. So that’s cool. That all said, I think every game I’ve worked on has scared me until the last like 3 to 5 months of production. It’s like a broken mess, until it’s not. Then it’s like, “oh hey, this is cool!”.
Roxanne
This week, I added quest rewards to all Arthur’s playthroughs quests, including adding skill points everywhere, and added a bunch of recipes so all our new clothes and weapons are spawning. I also worked on our ambient civilians (what we call “AI Decorators”), to make sure Wellington Well is full of life.
Animation Team - JR, Rémi, Vincent, Mike P, Jules, Raph and Franzi
Mike
Hey folks! Hope you all had a great holiday. I’m back and working on some sweet ass cutscenes. We are working hard to make your immersion into our games as wicked as possible and so this week I’ve worked on a little cutscene that’ll make getting bullied in high school because you were wearing the wrong clothes, look like a walk in the park. Like one of the instructors on my Basic Training said, “If you want to stay out of trouble in the army, look at everyone else is doing, divide by half and do that.” I still don’t really know what he meant by that, but save it to say that we will try our bestest to prevent the locals from playing whack a mole with your skull! That’s it for me, so tune in next week! Same Bat Time same Bat Channel!
Jules
Hi all! I’m starting this new year with a task I haven’t done in a long time, polishing my animation. I’ve done the majority of the NPC attacks and I must say, it’s looking great! I am sharing some of them with you today and will bring you more next week. I hope you will like them!
Engineering Team - Matt, Serge, Michael, Lionel, Rob, Evan, Maarten, Céline and Guillaume (sometimes)
Michael
I’ve been getting back into the swing of things after the holidays with some easy repetitive bug fixing. It’s nice to have some quick tasks to complete to get you back into the working mood. I also picked up a task to give some love to our special pickups, and create some effects that activate when you have the pickup in your inventory. The mission rewards for certain big encounters; the Simon Says Medal, Holy Yam, and the Adulator pickup you get from the Newspaper office quest, all now have a lasting bonuses to help you on your journey through Wellington Wells.
My favourite was the Holy Yam. Once you have the Holy Yam, you will magically start finding more yams than you would before. Were they always there and you were just not seeing them, or does the Holy Yam have the power of creation in its starchy grasp?
Serge
Happy new year everyone! This week, I’ve been working on the Jubilator : that big machine that cleans up the Village over the night. Be ready to run if you get caught by it during curfew! I also spent time with the level and game designers for the fight that occurs within an arena where you learn how to beat them.
Lionel
I was moving islands around this week. The current system wasn’t as stable as we wanted, and on a few rare occasions islands could collide, producing very strange worlds. So I went back to the whiteboard, armed with a pen and math, I tried to find a solid way to place the islands, and then I built a prototype to see if my thinking was correct (spoiler : it was not). Still, after a few back and forth, I converged on something and the new system seems promising. Picture (warning : programer art.).
Note that not all of these are islands, nor are they necessarily representative of the size of an island.
QA Team - Lee, Stephanie, JP and Alexina
Alexina
Hello folks, this week I’ve been mostly working on compiling a tracker in our database and a test plan to keep track of blockers, conditional blockers and crashes for some upcoming playtests that we’re doing this month. Besides that, the usual QA shenanigans of bugging/vetting, testing new features and helping players on our support forums. I hope everyone had a wonderful holiday and a good start to the new year.
Jean-Philippe
Hello folks, back from Holidays and back to work. Much of this week was spent preparing for upcoming Playtests. Not much else to add beyond that. Typical QA stuff as mentioned by Alexina consists of 70% of our work.
Enjoy the attached image; this animation is not in the public version but now the Wastrels go to the bathroom. Of course it wouldn’t be real game development without bugs so here is a funny one.
Art Team - Whitney, Emmanuel, Tito, Marc-André, Sarah, Guillaume, Cary and PH
PH
Hello, This week I modeled some kind of giant TV show set inspired from the 50s. I worked with Level Designer Eric to get something that will be fun and interactive for the player. Then I worked with Level Designer Benjamin on a wrecked car that the player will scavenge to collect special loot. Then I started to implement some posters and flyers into the levels that Sarah and Whitney have beautifully created. Trust me, they are amazing! These pieces of environmental narratives will help a lot to give backstory and context for players. Adding these details here and there is really time consuming but the results are without doubt worth it for the player experience! And one more thing, I did it! I managed to finish The Witcher 3 during the holidays, 3 years after the release. But I’m not totally over with it because I’m now playing the expansions. Will see if I can finish them before the end of 2018.
Marc-André
This week, I am back from Christmas vacation! The harsh weather I have been experiencing made me question why anyone with a sane mind would decide to come live here in Canada. -37° Celsius (-35° Fahrenheit) is freezing cold. The entirety of my week was aiming toward finishing the tutorial island and tweaks/bug fixing of other areas of the game. I’ve been shuffling a lot of minor tasks that, together, add up to a lot. I did some polish on the grass, houses and hooligan camp of the tutorial island, did tweaks to the Mystery House & [a spooky redacted] encounters, fixed terrain SFX issues, did some new flag variants, added environmental narrative and fixed minor collision in bugs in some encounters such as The Church of Simon Says. I also did some new optimised materials that will be useful when placing posters on the Garden District buildings. Basically, I was everywhere, doing the much needed task of finishing up a lot of small important details in order to mark stuff as “Finished”.
Sarah
Heyo! New year, new art (same Sarah)! I hope you had a restful, happy holiday. This week I worked on brand new posters, graffiti, and propaganda, all for the tutorial island! There's lots of new opportunities to push the story in this place, and to get familiar with the world. We explored some long forgotten ideas that Alex drafted ages ago (including the attached image text below! A bad apple spoils the bunch, don't cha know!), as well as new concepts and scribbles, thanks to Lisa! And of course, as ever, lots of Wastrel graffiti. Here's a little doer I made this week! Have a great weekend!
Publishing – Steve, Jeff, Mike C, Austin, Meredith, Elisa, Kat, Kelly, Nicole, Sean, Mike M, Elliot, and Simon (and more)
Mike R
Hello Everyone! My name is Mike. I am the Creative Director of Marketing at Gearbox Publishing. I spend my time leading and collaborating with artists of many specializations, bringing marketing content to life. You may have already seen my work – the We Happy Few Re-Announce trailer was the first trailer I directed since joining the team in June. You can also find me for a split second playing a guitar in the Trailer Audio Behind the Scenes video. Fun fact: They used that clip in reverse, so that’s me playing… but backwards!
On to the update - Whew! Fun break! I hope everyone had a fun and safe end of the year. December was very productive, planning for the development of some exciting trailers and other marketing assets in the coming year.
With the aforementioned planning finished, we are well prepared for the best part of the process – MAKING COOL STUFF. I can’t wait to turn these paper ideas into something you all can see. 2018 should be a fun year!
Thanks for tuning in!
Compulsion Team
Weekly Journal - Happy Holidays!
Hey everyone,
It is finally the holidays and we are more than ready to take a break and recharge before 2018 kicks in! But no rest for the wicked just yet, we still have a lot of work to do before some the team heads off to visit their families. We wish you all a very happy holidays and may you work your way through your backlog! We asked each team member to write what game they were looking to play over the holidays and we would love to hear yours as well.
This week, Lisa and I gave a talk at MIGS on “Dirty Narrative” in We Happy Few. Dirty narrative is my term for making the game into a bit of an unreliable narrator. There will be inconsistencies. There will be absences. There will be mysteries. There will be translucent lies -- lies that tell you as much about the liar as they do about the truth. Characters will tell you things you need to know only tangentially -- they are not there to serve your story, they are the heroes of their own stories.
Our theory is that pushing information at the player pushes you away; we only want to answer a question after you’ve asked it. That way, you pull yourself into the story and the world.
You may judge for yourself whether we have been successful in this approach.
I’m also writing dialog for the great effort to rework the first two hours of the game. Right now it’s all robo-speech, which is horrifying to listen to, but works for the designers. Probably after the holidays I’ll turn that into recorded temp speech in which I do all the voices, which gives us a more accurate sense of how the encounters play out. And then, once everything is nailed down, I’ll bring our actors back and turn it into recorded final dialog.
Now that we’ve given our talk, things as home have returned to normal (or, normal for us, anyway), so I can get into Horizon Zero Dawn: The Frozen Wilds and Witcher 3: Blood and Wine. There is also a Crusader Kings 2 game that I’ve had on hiatus for months, and if I give in to temptation, I might re-install CK2 and disappear from reality for a week.
Lisa
Same as above, but over the holidays, I will be playing CUPHEAD!
Design Team - David, Hayden, Antoine, Adam, Ben, Eric, Roxanne and Benji
Cuddly Eric
After a few weeks of restructuring some things, planning, schedules, meetings, chats, bug fixes, design schtuff, and whatever else I was up to I’m back making some new content. I’m making a new bridge that is supposed to be a bit of an event. Think it’ll be cool, and hopefully pretty weird.
Adorable Adam
I’ve been working on a new transition quest for Arthur’s story. It involves some new areas, and some areas that you may have come across in early access builds. Also, I made a bobby spawner that bobbies actually return to when their alarm is over.
So, if you guys haven’t heard of this game, it’s effing scary. Terrific sound design, and some genuine “oh f*ck” moments:
http://unforgivinggame.com/
Antoine
Hey there good people ! So the level design area is getting a tiny bit invaded. I’ve got two new neighbors (Emmanuel and Marc André) that are both doing a pretty hardcore job of arting up the sections I’ve created for the very first Garden District island. We’ve gone through a lot of iterations on those, trying to route the player into interesting locations, accentuate certain things in the environment. Having them closer made the whole process a lot easier. Trying to make sure the world is creepy enough, I’ve tried to push a little the creation of more “Wastrel art” into our garden district islands. What’s interesting about them is that, they are trying their best to be normal again (words from Alex our narrative director). So that’s why when sometimes they set up tea parties with mannequins it’s just a way for them to do something normal but with the wacky side effect of a brain messed up by Joy (if some of our early access players remember the giant cat with a hat sitting at a table with a bunch of tea cups it’s definitely coming back with more stuff).
Animation Team - JR, Rémi, Vincent, Mike P, Jules, Raph and Franzi
Mike P (Diddy)
Sup folks! So this merry week I have been working on a cutscene that has taken on a bit of a larger scope than I originally intended. It’s one of the first narrative beats so I figured it needed a bit more love. As it turns out, if any of you get the reference: “Pitcher la vache” from Monty Python, then you’ll probably like this shot. Hehehehe… So yeah, I think it’s hilarious and when you guys get around to it I hope you have a chuckle too! That’s it for me for this week, so tune in next week, same Bat Time, Same Bat Channel!
Jules
Hey everybody! So during this week, I've worked on few different tasks. Like I shared with you last week, we are currently working on a new death reaction. Previously for the NPC’s death, we played the hit reaction animation and we turned on the rag doll at the end of the animation. Now it's a special animation and they finish on rag doll.
My second task was to make some placeholders for stealth. After that I worked on a few reaction variations for our NPCs before they join the fight. Previously we had just one and it was much too repetitive. I finished my week working on a few issues with feet sliding during combat and some animation fixes. We have reached roughly where we want to be on combat and made huge progress over the past couple of months. It is much more fun and more technical to fight the NPCs now. In the new year, it will be time to polish all of those animations.
Art Team - Whitney, Emmanuel, Tito, Marc-André, Sarah, Guillaume, Cary and PH
PH
I’ve done a second art pass for the Garden District fillers. I’m really happy with the early results because we are getting something more and more organic. It takes time, though. I have to go through every filler and every encounter to check if everything is pretty and navigable for the player. Collisions are often working against me and I have to do lots of back and forth to make sure that the walking experience in the Garden District is as smooth as possible.
Concerning video games, I’m still motivated to finish The Witcher 3. I’m getting near the 100 hours and still enjoying everything about it. A masterpiece I can't leave unfinished for sure!
Carylitz
I got the worst cough of the year, but I’m back. I have been working on some maps helping Emmanuel with the refactoring of the Village. I have been doing a lot of tests to make sure everything spawns the way it should. It’s really impressive to see the improvements in the world and see how the work of everyone is finally coming together and showing up in the maps! So I have not much to tell but that. Since this is the last weekly of the year, that means that next time it will be a year since I began working here, which is pretty awesome! And that also means that I'll have some time to play some video games during the Christmas break so I'm looking forward on finally finishing Outlast and probably going through the Witcher if I don't lose the motivation.
Engineering Team - Matt, Serge, Michael, Lionel, Rob, Evan, Maarten, Céline and Guillaume (sometimes)
Lionel
We are upgrading our foliage system and it means upgrading two things, the big and the small (or automatic) parts. The big part is the stuff the player will be interested in, like a ring of trees with a chest in the center. The small/automatic part is everything else: the grass, the bushes even the trees, all the vegetation that have no role in the game but would be missed if it wasn’t there (actually some bushes have a role gameplay wise but bear with me there).
I am working on the big part. To make the patterns more easily defined and more diverse, I built a tool to visualize them and to allow real-time editing. You define a shape (circle or diamond for example), choose an object, the number of times it should appears, and add some perturbation to the placement and you can create some very natural looking patterns, which you can then edit in real time. In the capture below, you can see the basic shape in blue, the candidate positions in red and the preview for the final placements, that includes some pushing.
Real time editing is very useful for procedural systems as it reduces the number of iterations to get what we want. In a word : nice.
That brings me to the end of my part for this last 2017 weekly. I wish you a very happy Xmas. On my end, I will now start sleuthing to see who is my secret santa in the team. See you in 2018 for new procedural explorations and crazy contraptions.
Céline
Hi ! I've got some updates on stealth. We now have stealthy high bushes in the game! When crouched while in them, you're basically invisible if no hostile NPCs noticed you before. That offers new stealth options for the Level Designers, and being hidden so close to the enemy is very enjoyable.
Next we're trying to figure out if adding more UI feedback will help you guys more to know if/why you're detected. It is a big discussion at the office as the UI can break the immersion and make the players ignore the other audio/visual cues we worked on. We’re also considering adding a Lean mechanism, but this is under discussion as well.
On another note, I wish you a great Christmas and a happy New Year celebration ! One week of holiday might allow me to finish Xenoblade Chronicles 2 and start Dishonored: Death of the Outsider. Maybe.
Michael
It’s my last working week of the year and I’ve been continuing to look at combat primarily, but it’s also the season of goodwill so I’ve been handling some requests from the other team members, and fixing up some bugs. For combat I’ve been hooking in some more animations and I did a quick prototype of a feature we discussed last week for a quick throw that could be used in combat, without having to unequip and swap weapons. It worked but it’s not necessarily solving any problems that are very big, so it’s still under consideration. Next week I’ll be heading back home to England, to relax, see family and play games. I enjoy playing with the PlayStation VR with my family, and there’s been quite a few new games and experiences to try out since the last time I saw them; looking forward to meeting Trico from Last Guardian in (virtual) real life.
QA Team - Lee, Stephanie, JP and Alexina
Jean-Philippe Leighton
This week has been spent vetting and regressing many issues. A few developer support tasks were also completed in order to help them evaluate specific areas of the game. Christmas Holiday is coming up fast and I am looking forward to spending some time with friends and family. Throughout my Christmas Break I’ll most likely be gibbing it up in Quake Champions, exploding things in Space Engineers and playing some Terratech in my spare time.
Thank you for tuning in everyone and see you soon!
Compulsion Team
PS: We swear this weekly was not sponsored by CD Projekt RED
Weekly Journal - Yuletide Update
Hey everyone,
The end of the year is upon us and things are getting festive around the office which really adds that extra sparkle to our development routine.
Next week Alex and Lisa will be at MIGS (the Montreal International Game Summit) to give a talk on Making Wellington Wells Memorable, i.e. all the non-story narrative in the game. Feel free to come say hi if you are attending!
Design Team - David, Hayden, Antoine, Adam, Ben, Eric, Roxanne and Benji
Adam “pretty much lead level designer” Alim
All of us are dog-piling on Arthur’s story playthrough this week. Eric and I have been leading the charge on scheduling and prioritizing his playthrough, and handing out assignments based on those priorities. So for now, The Mad Scotsman and Miss Thigh-Highs get a little rest.
As for details to the changes we’re making: we had some playtests set up with several people playing certain parts of the story, and taking notes on where there are lulls or dips. As we thought, there were quite a few, so we’re reworking some areas and adding in a couple of new moments to better transition between moments.
Art Team - Whitney, Emmanuel, Tito, Marc-André, Sarah, Guillaume, Cary and PH
Marc-André
For the first part of the week, I've been working on finishing the new ivy vines that are on the buildings in the garden district. I first started by modeling leaves and laying them out by hand on branches created with spline curves inside Autodesk Maya. Doing this by hand gives me a lot more control over the look than outsourcing photos. For foliage, we are leaning toward a cartoonish side.
I baked/transferred those arrangements onto a 2D plane, creating what essentially is a sprite sheet. I had to generate a lot of textures to get nice quality and control over the final artistic result, which I achieved in Photoshop.
Since we will be placing a lot of them and want a high density of leaves, it was crucial that I kept the polygon count as low as possible (in this case, between 240 and 500 verts). I laid out the sprites on low-poly cards inside Maya to create the 3D arrangements. I imported these and the textures in Unreal and created a new material with all of the features.
Relying heavily on vertex painting and masks, I implemented the following features:
-Choice between procedural/vertex painting of color variation
-Ability to vertex paint branches that are dead, to quickly create variety
-Transition of colors from green/red to purple when player is on Joy
-Dead branches during Joy overdose/withdrawal
-Wind & Subsurface
Here is an example of vertex painting of the vines in action. It is very easy to change the color and density of the vines directly inside Unreal in the game's levels.
For the second part of the week, I’ve been helping Eric on the blocking of an exciting new bridge.
PH
With the new vines from Marc-André, I was able to give an art pass on the garden district buildings. It’s already better and we are quite happy with the organic feeling that we are able to achieve. We’ve finally got this overgrown nature that we were looking for. So we will soon enter the 2nd art pass on the garden district and we will try to polish everything with little details and more colors.
Engineering Team - Matt, Serge, Michael, Lionel, Rob, Evan, Maarten, Céline and Guillaume (sometimes)
Lionel
A lot of small things this week. Beside the panic-ridden “oh, WTF is the worldgen system doing?” moments (followed by “oh, people are giving it really bad data”), I mostly worked on the road intersection and the foliage/patterns systems. The first one is simply slowly getting to where we want. The second is a reuse of an experiment we did a few months ago. It seems to be working but it is a bit early to be final on this. No screenshots this week.
Michael
This week we had a meeting to review combat. We want to decide soon whether there are still features missing, or whether we have what we need at this stage, and we can move on to just bug fixing and tweaking values to deliver something that we’re happy with.
So people from Level Design, QA, Animation, myself and Guillaume sat in a room and got into some fights, in game. It’s quite good to watch other people play and to have these discussions as a group because it highlights things you wouldn’t notice, or wouldn’t consider from your own playstyle. Also if you’ve been working on aspects of the system, you can get into a playstyle to test what you’re working on. I’d been working on blocking and parrying, and NPC reactions. My style is either quite static, or moving towards the NPCs. So watching Lee play and be constantly moving and backing away from enemies was a good reminder. The meeting generated a lot of tasks to work on, but I think we have a lot of the systems already in place. To avoid the impression that we have shallow or repetitive combat we just need to be better at highlighting these systems/tactics to players and showing the depth that is in there (like parrying, stuns, throwables in combat), and then improving the feel of them and how they can be used together. So no new features, but some good feedback and direction to keep improving what we have.
Animation Team - JR, Rémi, Vincent, Mike P, Jules, Raph and Franzi
Mike P (Smarter than your average bear)
Sup folks! Greetings from our secret underground lair… well not so much, but it’s nice to think it is. So this week was again a mixed bag. Worked on some more cinematics and some camera moves to enhance your playing experience. To give you the ooooh’s and aaaah’s! As usual I can’t show them to you, but believe me, 1 out of 2 animators here say they are passable ;) So yay! That again, is about it from my end folks, so tune in again next week, same Bat Time, same Bat Channel!
Jules
Hi everybody! I've continued my work on combat this week again. Creating new animations for the death by the status effect of bleeding:
This animation ends in rag doll, which means if a NPC dies by bleeding near a bench... there is a possibility that he/she will hit his head violently on it.
I can also share you this new animation of when a NPC has their weapon destroyed:
If I were you, I would start already training with the parry because it's going to be very useful during combat! See you next week for more news about combat!
J.R.
Hey guys, this week I tried to go back to narrative but ended up tuning and polishing combat animations all week! Most of all, I polished and exaggerated all of the “reaction” animations for NPCs in combat, meaning whenever they get hit or parried, the point of impact (head/body) is more obvious, and in general just so the animations would communicate better in the middle of a fight. So far I did this pass on 1-handed combat, and I will have to retarget those animations for all combat archetypes.
Otherwise my week was split between new variations for dodge, polished some old taunt animations and did a little bit of tuning on the combat idle and other small non-combat related tasks.
Narrative Team - Alex and Lisa
Lisa
This week I alternated between writing environmental narrative for a new “introductory” island and freaking out about public speaking -- Alex and I are giving a talk at MIGS next week about narrative in We Happy Few. It’s actually been great to step back and look at the big picture of the game -- not only for our talk, but as part of the game polishing process. We’re seeing all sorts of patterns we hadn’t really come up with on purpose, but of course we’re going to pretend that we knew all along what we were doing! If you’re at MIGS next week, please say hi.
Thanks for tuning in!
Compulsion Team
Weekly Journal - Lining up the Shot
Hi everyone,
While the core development team continues to spend long hours polishing the game, others on the team are prepping for the launch in a wide variety of ways. We’re planning the migration to a new, more robust platform for our forums, negotiating and signing deals with different merchandising partners, making the final updates to text and subtitles so our localization partners can make our game internationally accessible, and also coordinating efforts with our partners at Gearbox across a number of major marketing assets that we’re super excited to release in 2018.
All that while juggling everyone’s holiday obligations as we strive to balance our focus on family and friends with our desire to maximize every aspect of the game itself. It makes for a substantial challenge, but Sam managed to unify our efforts and ensure everything’s on course just before taking a brief international leave--so while there’s no proper Production update this week, you can rest assured that we are coordinating efforts and lining things up for success!
Animation - JR, Rémi, Vincent, Mike P, Jules, Raph And Franzi
Mike P Hey folks! So this week was a mixed bag. Worked on some cutscenes, did some camera work, investigated some post camera effects and did some cycles. Did a bit of everything actually. Was fun and will provide some small moments for all of you to make gameplay feel a bit more special. That's about it for me for this week. So tune in next week, same Bat Time, Same Bat channel!
Jules Hi! So this week we made a lot of progress in combat. Now, when a lot of NPC are attacking you, you have the feeling of fighting against a real crowd of people. They move everywhere, they taunt, they feint, and they communicate.
(I am sharing with you this GIF, this is a work in progress but I think that it can give you an idea of how the feint will look).
So like I said, the NPC can communicate during the fight. What I mean by that is for example, if you make a critical hit to an NPC, others are going to have a reaction like "Oh my god that must hurt". Same if an NPC assigns a critical hit to the player, the NPC is going to have a reaction like "Good job guys we will kill him". We made this improvement because we had the feeling of NPC are a little bit "dumb". Now I think we reach our goal. The combat is gonna be really different than what you can see already in the game. I'm very excited to finalize the animations and share them. See you next week, guys!
J.R. Hey everyone, I’m out of my cinematic dungeon this week! ...well not quite, but I did spend some time helping out on gameplay a little bit. As you know we have been touching up on combat quite a lot recently. For me that meant: meetings, giving feedback, polishing up throws for NPCs, adding a new lob throw animation used for bangers, molotovs and whatnot, and replacing the infamous bayonet slash with a poke variation, which makes much more sense with the pointy stick.
Then I moved to object interaction, offering a bit of support for lock picking and creating a new jimmy bar animation that could work well with any object you can pry open. Oh and I also updated a “combing hair” animation. It doesn’t seem like much, but when you have this dude in the game, hair combing needs to be shiny. #DannyZuko
And as usual, nothing I can tell you about cinematics… except that I’m working on a scene involving an apple.
Vincent Hellow! We’ve entered the polish phase on Arthur playthrough, so I got out of the cinematic cave as well this week, to dive into the spreadsheet pond of doom (many of us are in it so it’s still fun)! This involves also a lot of talking to other departments, awesome! The main focus is to try to find the moments that look a bit broken or cheap, and add some little animations to make it look better. Yes, I just defined polish, I know.
Roxanne This week I set up prices for all pickups in the game. It was fun! (NOT! But necessary). Now I am working on the display of stats for all items so you will be able to compare them for their relative value and efficiency. Next week, it will be a big pass on quest rewards. I’ll try not to drown in that ocean of data! :)
Antoine Hello! Wow it’s been a while. How’s everyone doing? I’ve been incredibly busy hence why I’m not posting too much in here due to the fear that I might be repeating myself “working on secret stuff, tune in later.”
What I can say though is that I was given a new shiny task that excites me quite a lot. That is to create a proper introduction to the world of the garden district and cover more basics of the gameplay in the form of “tutorials.” Putting tutorials in brackets because we’re trying to create exciting moments that hopefully don’t feel too much like tutorials. A recent user research report explained that most players had a hard time understanding the dynamics of the NPCs in relation to the player. We’ll try to address that by creating moments that introduce properly two factions of the garden district: the hooligans and the wastrels. That way we can understand who they are, what their motivations are and how these factions interact with each other in the world of We Happy Few. Also trying to keep the entire thing creepy, which is something that I always try to push in all the levels I’m working on.
Random bit of information: I’m also working on an island that is entirely covered in a deep white-ish fog with a level that was inspired loosely by Alice in Wonderland. That area is exclusive to one of our characters.
Engineering Team - Matt, Serge, Michael, Lionel, Rob, Evan, Maarten, Céline, Neil And Guillaume (Sometimes)
Céline I’ve been working on various aspects of the game (audio, UI, level design support), but since last week I have been helping on stealth. Since Michael added some UI icons to help the player find out how he is perceived and detected by the NPCs around him, we noticed a few bugs; Wellington Wells’ inhabitants were deaf but could sometimes “see” behind them, Arthur could make silent jumps when crouched (I am sure you would have wished for that bug to stay in the game, but not happening!). Now that the perception of the NPC is more or less back to normal, we started tuning the stealth mechanisms and we plan to add more features and UI feedbacks to make sure that sneaking is as fun as combat. Please look forward to it!
Lionel Following on last week, I was deep in the geometry generation part of the engine. This is a dark place where Math monsters lurk and everything is slower. So, I spent a lot of time waiting for the complete world generation to finish - because the geometry generation is done at the end. and I built the proper math for the corners to adapt to roads of different widths. And pulling my hair when doing something as stupid as forgetting a -1, because then I had to relaunch everything again…
Art Team - Whitney, Emmanuel, Tito, Marc-André, Sarah, Guillaume, Cary And PH
Marc-André For the first half of the week, I’ve been continuing to work on the new fillers set for the garden district and have been having a meeting about the upcoming new “tutorial island”. I will be the environment artist doing the heavy lifting of that environment when design planning will be over.
Afterwards, I started to work on new vine variants that will go on the garden district building to make them feel a lot more dilapidated. This is very tricky because it involves optimisation (polygon count, shader complexity, texture size, draw calls, etc.), a lot of manual work/steps (branches, leaves and roots all created by hand) and multiple iterations. By multiple iterations, I mean that there are requirements for: lush and dead variants, shape variants, color variation and more. Although it is challenging, it is very interesting to do.
PH I’m still on the long road to refactor the different buildings on the garden district. We are getting there! With Marc-Andre vegetation works, we will soon have the possibility to step up the abandoned mood for this district. Nature regained control - vines, wild bush everywhere - but everything must be procedural. We had lots of discussions this week above a computer screen looking at abandoned village references. It’s going to be something, it’s already something. I will post some screenshots next week. See you then, folks.
Narrative Team - Alex And Lisa
Alex We are at an odd phase in development. On one hand, we are scarily close to when we need to have everything built and working. At this point, we should only be fixing problems, not building new things. However, some problems can only be fixed by building new things; and many problems only become clear after you resolve other problems. You can’t tell if the car pulls to the left until you can make the wheels go round and round.
We’ve been doing a lot of focus tests on Arthur’s playthrough, and it’s become clear that we can do a better job of putting the player on the right track from the get-go – some players report coming out of the initial shelter and not knowing where to go or what to do. We also need to make the first couple of hours stickier – more cool stuff to see and do, less running around in the woods.
So, we are building (we hope) a new, sharper, more spectacular opening to the game. That involves a lot of back and forth between me, G, and the lucky designers handed this task. How can we teach you how to play the game while pulling you into the world? For the narrative department, that means new characters, new encounters, new dialog, and new environmental narrative; and a lot of consultations with the designers.
Publishing – Steve, Jeff, Mike C, Austin, Meredith, Elisa, Kat, Kelly, Nicole, Sean, Mike M, Elliot, and Simon (and more)
Simon Hi everyone! This is Simon on behalf of Gearbox Publishing’s Quality Assurance (QA) Team. Our goal is to support Gearbox Publishing’s various partners/developers through a team of objective testers. We offer functional, first party certification, localization and compatibility test services to ensure that the player will have a smooth experience when the games reach their hands.
An efficient QA department needs to stay up to date with the games they are testing so we are working very closely with Compulsion to support their needs. They are keeping us informed of the various features and content they added to the latest versions and we make sure to test around those to keep them busy with a steady flow of bugs! A recent example of this is the rearrangement of the order you will be visiting the multiple islands of Wellington Wells. While it provides a better experience for you all, it may introduce technical issues. Our job is to hunt for any bugs that this change may have caused and make sure that the narrative of all the quests remain coherent. It’s important for us to be flexible and always adapt to what is being sent to us for testing!
While we always enjoy providing player feedback whenever Compulsion requests (we are gamers too!), our main job is to offer an objective view of the current state of the game through bug filing and various reports. We are here to help Compulsion and Gearbox’s production team deliver a great game and we are thrilled to be involved!
Thanks for tuning in!
Compulsion Team
Weekly Journal - Winter is coming. Or is it?
Hi everyone,
There are good things about having your office in an old gramophone factory. For instance, we can find inspiration for We Happy Few props from the 50+-year-old models of radios and TVs that are exhibited in the lobby of the building, or our neighbours will all be creating cool stuff. There are some drawbacks though, like the fact that proper window sealing did not exist when they built the building and so everybody in the office who’s sitting next to a window is freezing their… fingers off, as first snow and cold temperatures are already here.
Last weekend we shared a booth with our friends at Red Barrels at the MEGA MTL event. For those who are not local, this is an exhibition mainly for independent developers. Thanks to everyone who showed up! We were happy to see so many people. The event grew dramatically this year, and we can’t wait to see next year’s edition.
Production
Sam
Hi folks! This week, Guillaume and I flew to Los Angeles to finally sign the movie deal for We Happy Few. We announced this back in March, but the long form agreements often take months to iron out the little details, all the while work on finding a writer, financing etc continues. So finally signing is an exciting milestone for us as a team, and for G and I personally after working through some tricky licensing details. You should all be aware that there is a good chance that the movie will never see the light of day (many more projects are “optioned” than actually get made), but we are very proud of the team for creating something that people outside the industry think is cool.
In development news, we’ve finished our first round of reviews on the game. The vast majority can be completed without debug (eg cheats), and we have all our AI archetypes running around. However, we need to improve Arthur’s and Miss Thigh High’s flow - this means we need to go back to the drawing board on the first couple of hours of Arthur’s playthrough, and create new content to make sure it’s a really great experience. If the first two hours isn’t good, it won’t matter how good the rest of it is. This is a pretty big deal, so we will keep you updated (eg Lisa’s post below explains a bit about how important it is to introduce both mechanics and the various parts of the world).
Animation - JR, Rémi, Vincent, Mike P, Jules, Raph And Franzi
Slightly sick Mike
Hey folks! Hope you all had a wonderful week! I’ve been introduced to something called the ConPlague. Apparently that’s a thing - getting sick after running a booth at a convention. Anywhoo, this week I worked on another cutscene. Our poor characters are getting abused in new and creative ways! (I kinda secretly enjoy coming up with new ways to mistreat them). So this week involves some doctors using Arthur as a pincushion. Think Mia Wallace getting revived in Pulp Fiction. So yeah, good times! That’s it for me this week! Tune in next week, same Bat Time, same Bat Channel!
Jules
Hi ! This week, I’ve had time to go back to combat! One aspect of our combat circles that wasn’t working right was the supporting NPCs (NPCs that are hostile but just out of reach) weren’t threatening you very much. So, I created a new taunt for the NPCs:
Also, as part of our reviews of combat, we want to create some communication between NPCs during the fight, to help make it feel more coordinated (rather than just a group of people randomly beating you and ignoring each other). So I am currently working on a few feint and communication reactions. I will keep you updated about that next week because we need to run some tests before it’s final! See you next week everyone.
Big week on the balancing side! First, we adjusted all our shopkeepers with new loot tables - in Early Access we erred on the side of making things available, but now that we can play through the game in its entirety, we can start to understand better what you will need at certain times.
We also removed a very important component of recipes: they cannot be unlocked anymore by finding ingredients. We used this system in Early Access because it was the most efficient way of making sure recipes unlocked as we were building them - we wouldn’t have to rebalance recipe unlocks with every update. However, finding common ingredients such as metal bits would unlock 10-15 recipes and that was getting out of control. Now recipes will be found in shops, as quest rewards and on crafting stations when you find them (meaning that finding crafting stations in the wild has much more value). New wearables were also added, mainly for your character’s feet comfort! ;)
Adam
I’ve been fixing a ton of bugs on the Mad Scotsman’s playthrough, and reworking a few of the more important missions, particularly his intro sequence. We want to make sure that each new character’s introduction hits the level of Arthur’s intro, both in terms of creating something engaging and teaching you what you need to know about that character. I also made slight changes in the flow of the levels, to either speed up or slow down the action.
Engineering Team - Matt, Serge, Michael, Lionel, Rob, Evan, Maarten, Céline, Neil And Guillaume (Sometimes)
Lionel
Our charming, delightful (especially under Joy), islands can be sometimes a bit empty. The wild areas are not very well distributed - Early Access players will be familiar with big stretches of meadow and forest that don’t have much in them except for berries.
We had two problems to solve. First, there are tiny hamlets made of 4 or 5 houses that are supposed to provide the player with loot and side quests but they are not very well identifiable and too sparse. The player tends to simply not see them and go through them. Second, the way we connect those tiny hamlets is not ideal and creates loooong roads between them.
This week, I tackled the first part. Now, those areas have a central place with the four houses knit together and the side quests are around in a spiraling fashion. It is much more readable and at the same time more compact, making the islands smaller.
Serge
This week I have completed the features related to the Doctor (can’t wait for you to see his resurrect unique ability) and moved onto NPC search behavior. While that effort is mainly for the soldiers archetype (surprise), who need to be more relentless in finding the player than other NPCs, the coordination between the members of the search party will be beneficial to other NPC archetypes too.
It’s really motivating to see all those archetypes getting personality over the course of development!
Michael
It was nice to go along to MEGA on Saturday and see plenty of cool games, and also talk to some nice people who were interested in We Happy Few. It’s always great to see people playing the game. It’s easy to forget that we already have something that people are enjoying, and to know that we’re improving on that is pretty motivating.
The wheel of fortune that controls my tasks landed on Combat this week, another of the core gameplay systems that needs some love. The goal this week was to improve the way the combat ring works - aka the way we distribute NPCs when they’re engaging you. The way the NPCs surround you when you’re in a fight has a lot of design requirements:
To start with I have changed the pattern to make it so that more of the NPCs position themselves in view, while still making sure the ring doesn’t have big holes in it. I will make sure they move to block you if you try to run away, picking your timing and utilising the shove move will still be a useful tactic, but it should be harder to run away unscathed unless you’re good at it.
For some reason NPCs had stopped blocking as well, which was making combat too easy, so I have fixed that, and I want them to come to each other’s aid if you really start laying into one of them.
Art Team - Whitney, Emmanuel, Tito, Marc-André, Sarah, Guillaume, Cary And PH
Marc & PH
We are continuing our artistic efforts to refactor the procedural system in the Garden District. We are happy to see that our new roundabouts and buildings works seamlessly together. We still have a lot to tackle, but progress is very encouraging.
Narrative Team - Alex And Lisa
Lisa
I’m working on environmental narrative for a new location that will orient players to the world of the game. So I’m having to think about a world I’ve been immersed in for over a year, from the perspective of a newbie. Fortunately, we’ve had great fan feedback about what is unclear or confusing, so that’s immensely helpful. Thank you!
