Weekly Journal - Painted cakes do not satisfy hunger
Hi everyone,
Breezy update this week. This weekend we will be at MEGA in Montreal. We will even have a photoshoot with some Uncle Jack props, so if you are around, come by and say, “Lovely day for it!”
Animation Team - JR, Rémi, Vincent, Mike P, Jules, Raph And Franzi
Jules
Hi everybody! So this week I’ve worked on the Doctor’s bonesaw attack. I added the VFX and tweaked the animation for it a little bit to look better in-game. During the other part of the week, I’ve started to work on my new task, a new taunt and a death reaction. We want to add some custom animation for NPC’s death. At the moment it’s just a hit reaction with a ragdoll notify inside of the animation sequence. So basically more variant in combat for it to look better. I will share with you some gifs next week.
Mike
So this week I worked hard to deliver a cutscene that .. well won’t be used anymore. At least not for its intended purpose. Then I moved onto polishing up some animations I had to rush a few weeks ago, and then I finished a first person animation of talking on a Walkie Talkie. So this week has been a bit of a mixed bag, but fun nonetheless! See you next week, same Bat Time same Bat Channel!
Vincent
Ahoy, long time no see! I’ll just peek my head behind the curtains to confess that this week I took some off time to tweak and polish a bit the Mad Scotsman intro, a cinematic I worked on almost two years ago… daaammn, time flies. The game has changed so much since those days. The team and the office as well!
Art Team - Whitney, Emmanuel, Tito, Marc-André, Sarah, Guillaume, Cary And PH
Carylitz
A lot of sculpting work lately! I have to create a new character variant which is really challenging, but a really fun process. I have also been doing the last touch ups to some maps so we can finish them for real, really small details like fixing lights intensity, arrangement of portraits and moving some props around. I worked in some ninja tasks assigned by Antonio, most of this work is just going back to props and separate them or add pieces.
Marc-André and PH
We are currently refactoring every single buildings of the Garden District (the procedural fillers as well as the encounters) by adding custom pieces of land. So far so good; we are quite happy with the results we have achieved so far. What this means is that the transitions between the plots are getting a lot smoother. Using vegetation also helps us blend everything together in an organic fashion. Instead of the rigid set of buildings we had, the new plots have a bit more chaos (broken stone walls, plants growing here and there, height variation) which makes the world feel, visually, less procedural. By blending custom-made plots and the procedural world generation, we’re getting closer to a hybrid every day.
QA Team - Lee, Stephanie, JP and Alexina
Jean-Philippe
Rarely ever any interesting news coming from QA. This week has been spent largely regressing fixed issues and disseminating data from other QA testers and playtesters. With this kind of data, we can see potential issues, such as too much time in between two quests, unusually long quests, and it can also tell us roughly how much time it takes to complete our content.
Alexina
Hey everyone, I started here back in September but haven’t had much to say. There’s nothing beyond the usual (testing, regressing, test plan creating - you know, the usual) going on in the QA world of Compulsion. We had a playtest this week that Lee oversaw, besides that, “nose to the grindstone” as Arthur says (except we’re actually doing so, and not off our Joy).
Engineering Team - Matt, Serge, Michael, Lionel, Rob, Evan, Maarten, Céline, Neil And Guillaume (Sometimes)
Maarten
Hi all! We have been hard at work getting the PS4 build up to par. While Unreal is pretty good at supporting console platforms, it leaves enough things for us to figure out. Those can be simple, like "How do I properly set up our savegames so they play nice with PS4's dashboard?"; less simple: "Where are those damn GPU faults coming from?"; or downright odd: "Why do our houses look like they're auditioning for a Tim Burton movie?"
Michael
Recently I’ve been going through all the NPC reactions for the naughty things you can do that make them mad, like climbing, stealing their stuff, murder etc. The goal is to make sure it is clear exactly what triggered their reaction, and what you can do to avoid being punished. The reactions consist of 3 elements, the NPC animation, their VO and then feedback through the HUD and status menu. It’s a lot of stuff to test, so my first step was create a level where I can easily spawn each type of NPC and switch outfits and weapons with a few button presses, and fill it with stuff like cupboards to steal from and locks to pick. Then I just have to press a button and check how each character reacts to a guy in a boiler suit and gasmask trying to jimmy bar a window. Are they angry enough? What if I start shoving them? Am I dead yet? ...success!
Lionel
There are things that make a city (or a hamlet) more believable. Among them is the structure of the road layout. It implies the flow of people over time, some kind of history. So this week, I focused on how to improve the diversity of our roads. The problem is not the roads themselves but when they meet. The crossroads are transition areas that are complex : they are the meeting points for different visual styles and different road width. I am not done but I already worked out the final model for crossroads the game will use. I implemented in a small prototype to see what it would be once on the screen.
I made a mockup for our artists to validate (warning programmer art) :
And now I am integrating it into the game. “What strange phenomena we find in a great city, all we need do is stroll about with our eyes open. Life swarms with innocent monsters.” Baudelaire, Best City Bro.
Publishing – Steve, Jeff, Mike C, Mike R, Austin, Meredith, Elisa, Kat, Kelly, Nicole, Sean, Mike M, and Elliot (and more)
Elliot
Hey there! I’m Elliot, Gearbox Publishing’s Publishing Producer. What exactly does that (rather redundant) title mean? A number of things! I put together production schedules that incorporate timelines from Marketing, User Research, and Certification from Publishing, plus Compulsion’s development timeline. I coordinate with outsourced localization teams to get the game’s in-menu text and subtitles translated. I also put together the submission materials we send off to the ratings boards, which is what takes up most of my time at this point in development.
Each ratings board has different requirements for the submitted materials, and different turnaround times. For example, ESRB’s turnaround time is 5-7 business days, so we can submit to them a little later- but turnaround time for DJCTQ (Brazil) is 30 days, so we submitted We Happy Few to them a few weeks ago and are waiting to receive our rating certification.
Many boards require a gameplay video that shows pertinent content – violence, language, and sexual themes, among others – so we’re tasked with finding and recording the “worst” or strongest instances of these that are present in the game, and editing them together for submission to the boards. Kind of a highlight reel of things that might affect the rating of the game. For We Happy Few, we’re expecting to receive 16-18+ ratings with content descriptors calling out the dark themes, violence, sexual references, strong language, and drug (Joy) use.
Some boards require a playable build of the game, and a few require a supercut of all the in-game cinematics (I’m looking at you, PEGI!). A few boards have special requirements. CERO (Japan) requires all communications and submission materials to be in Japanese, so we work with a third party (in this case, Neilo) for translation and guidance. IMDA (Singapore) and GCRB/GRAC (South Korea) do not allow extranational applications, so we secure local representation in order to be rated there.
It can sound pretty dry on paper, but I enjoy it - both the work itself, and being part of the process of helping Compulsion get their awesome game out there where people can play it!
Thanks for tuning in!
Compulsion Team
Weekly Journal - Robe and wizard hat
Hey everyone,
Winter has finally arrived in Montreal. It’s cold and night falls at 4:30pm but the party doesn’t have to stop! It never starts, that’s the real secret. We just hibernate.
We will be attending a convention here in Montreal called MEGA, so if you are in the area, come say hi to us! We’re really just here to meet you guys, so we’ll have a few consoles showing Life in Technicolour, and we’ll be showcasing alongside our friends from Red Barrels (creators of Outlast).
Production wise, this week has been all about subtitles in preparation for localization, more rating submissions and reviews of all the playthroughs.
Engineering Team - Matt, Serge, Michael, Lionel, Rob, Evan, Maarten, Céline, Neil And Guillaume (Sometimes)
Lionel
This week (and the week before actually), I worked on offering a bit of closure to the hamlet and Village in the game. One common reproach from our beloved artists was that those had an abrupt outline: it was either nothing and then the wilderness or buildings and then the wilderness. They were obviously right, so I took my robe and wizard hat and looked to see if we could do something about that. I had a bit of luck, and adapting for the outlines the current system of generic buildings was quite easy. The impacts it had on other parts of the world generation system was not. After a lot of coffee, head scratching and scribbling on paper and in code, the new placement system is there.
Narrative Team - Alex And Lisa
Lisa
This week I feel like the Easter Bunny! I finished the first draft of the time capsule book HOW TO BE HAPPY, and it is chock-full of Easter eggs. I even read through the text one last time, just to see if everything would make sense to someone who hadn’t played the game yet. Hopefully the text works on two levels, for both newbies and longtime Downers.
We’re also still dealing with odds-n-ends that came up after content lock. For instance, every type-o I made in the past year in a lore document is getting pinged by the QA folks, but fortunately it’s only a handful at this point (thank you, Spell Check!) But it looks as if I’ll have more time to play the game now (and cross your fingers that I don’t find other things I need to fix!).
Alex
This week I’ve been mostly reviewing the game. I’ve been playing as Arthur. Anyone who’s wondering if there will be enough game, well, I’ve logged about 550 hours in the game, I know how the game works, and it’s still taking me the better part of the week to play through Arthur. That’s not blockers, although there are some places where progression is blocked; that’s stuff to do and places to go and weirdos to talk to and things to find out.
Probably the most fun part was when an elaborate, phantasmagorical encounter we’ve been working on for three years came to full fruition. It was hilarious. And weird. And yet, I think, at some level true.
“It never happened; yet it is still true. What magic art is this?” says the Puck in Sandman 34, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” That’s the writing I aspire to.
We also spent a good bit of the week rejiggering the opening island, so that when the player comes out of the shelter for the first time, he is “onboarded” through a curated experience. Some new players were getting lost when they hit the open world – what do I do? how do I play? where am I supposed to go – and we’re hoping to fix that.
Animation Team - JR, Rémi, Vincent, Mike P, Jules, Raph And Franzi
Jules
Hi everyone! This week I've worked on the Doctor and his powerful bone saw! The gif I am sharing with you is the new doctor light attack. I've also made a new custom hit reaction for the player.
Apart from that I've spent my week tweaking the navigation of the doctor, his idle animation with the bone saw and a lot of other small animations.
Just Mike, and the rest of the animation team
Sup! Been working hard to try and blow your socks off with some cinematic/cutscene love! Unfortunately I can’t show you anything or talk about it… so yeah. But I’m confident y’all are going to like it! Sorry not much other than that to report this week. So tune in next week, same Bat Time, Same Bat channel!
Art Team - Whitney, Emmanuel, Tito, Marc-André, Sarah, Guillaume, Cary And PH
PH
I finished a really cool weapon that the Doctor will use in combat to resurrect people and I can’t wait to see it in action. I will put my props time period on hold for a moment because I really have to help Marc refine the art side of the procedural system. We are really optimistic on this but it’s going to take several weeks. In the meantime, here’s a little picture of the Resurrector:
Publishing Team – Steve, Jeff, Mike C, Mike R, Austin, Meredith, Elisa, Kat, Kelly, Nicole, Sean, Brad, and Erick (and more)
Michael
Hello All,
I’m Michael, Gearbox Publishing’s Submission Specialist, and I’d like to share a little bit of information on something I worked on this week for We Happy Few.
As the Submission Specialist, I work with the Publishing Producers, Developers, Marketing, and Functional and Certification QA groups to gather information and materials that are required by first parties (such as Microsoft and Sony) to publish a game on their respective platforms. After these groups plan and carry out their tasks, I take the finished materials and bring them to the first parties for approval and ultimate publication.
Titles that are published through Microsoft and Sony go through a Certification process (which is the last step before a game goes “Gold”), which helps ensure the games are stable and meet performance requirements and work with system-level features without issue. There’s also a “Pre-Certification” process that is provided by both Microsoft and Sony to help the developers understand where their product stands and what items need to be fixed before the title enters the final Certification process.
This week I’ve been working with Microsoft to address a unique situation that we ran into when planning for the Pre-Certification process. We Happy Few is currently part of the Game Preview program and the Game Preview build is already live on the Xbox Marketplace. This means, in Microsoft’s systems, I can see the product and all its parts and pieces-- but what happens when I need to change something or add something new? For Example, we will be submitting a new build (of the final release game) to Microsoft; however, the location we would normally submit the build to (for Certification) is already occupied by the Game Preview build.
Which leads me to my task for the week—How do we get this build to Microsoft for Pre-Certification without that original upload location. Part of why this is so important is that we don’t want to risk uploading a build that is not final to the original location and have it accidentally published to the public. We also want to leave that original location untouched in case there is a need to patch the Game Preview version before the game official launches. Ultimately, working with our Producers, Sam at Compulsion, and Microsoft, we successfully found an alternative that provides a solution that works for everyone. We made a new upload location! While it sounds easy on paper, there’s some work that goes into getting this setup, with the communication and planning between our internal groups and with Microsoft. But we have amazing people at Microsoft who are very responsive and creative, as well as those at Compulsion Games which have the patience to help us work through these kinks.
Thanks for tuning in!
Compulsion Games
Weekly Journal - Remember November
Hey everyone,
We can’t believe we’re already in November! Wait, who are we kidding?! It’s Montreal, and already freezing cold, so we have plenty of reminders of where we are in the season! Before we know it, it will be Spring, and--after 4 years of hard work--we’ll be presenting our game to the world. This is both scary and exciting!
We received a lot of pictures from your We Happy Few Halloween costumes and thought they were all wonderful. Thank you for taking the time to make, wear, and share them! It warmed our twisted little hearts.
Production
Sam
After lots of hard work from the team, we're pretty much where we wanted to be with "content complete!". For us, this doesn't mean that content is done - it's not - but it does mean that we have every quest in the game, with its objectives, journals and VO. That's an exciting milestone, because we can now review the entire game, and entire story, to make sure that it works. That work begins next week, along with localization, more finaling, responding to UX tests, bug fixing, and all the final tasks that we have on the project. The team has worked really hard to get here, and it's really shaping up to be a lot of fun.
Design Team - David, Hayden, Antoine, Adam, Ben, Eric, Roxanne And Benji
Adam
Holy Hell has this been a productive week. I’ve been working with Cary and Remi to blow stuff up. Big stuff. BIG boom... And you’re going to love it when you see it. That aside, as most of you know, I’m in charge of the Mad Scotsman in its entirety. I finished up plugging in all the dialogue last week, and this week I’ve been focusing on realization (making shit believable), and blockers (bugs which halt your progression). I have to say, I’m super proud of the Mad Scotsman’s playthrough… and I also find myself adopting a scottish accent from time to time. Gonnae git back tae it, ya weapons!
Roxanne
Lots of dialogue integration on my side this week. I also found some time to add five new “non-lethal” weapons, for those of you that want to avoid unnecessary deaths.
Eric
Well, Alex wrote a mountain of dialogue for Arthur, and we got most of it into the build this week. Thanks to Hayden, Benji, Ben, and Roxanne for helping me put in something like a thousand different Arthur lines across 30+ quests. Take that Alex!
Narrative Team - Alex And Lisa
Lisa
I’m...done? We’ve locked content for 1.0, so mostly what I’m doing for the game now is just dealing with missing bits and bobs, and making suggestions for polish. Happily, I am also writing the How To Be Happy book that will be in the time capsule, so I still get to live in the joyful world of Wellington Wells a while longer!
Animation Team - JR, Rémi, Vincent, Mike P, Jules, Raph And Franzi
Jules
Hey, everybody! So this week I've worked mostly on the doctor! Especially on his resurrect and healing ability. And also I've made a new hit reaction for the player when he carries the bone saw.
Somewhat Dangerous Mike
Hey guys! So this week I worked on some more cutscenes like last week for something again I can’t tell you about. But I REALLY REALLY want to though! Cause it’s great! But alas I can’t. Guess you’ll just have to play the game to find out. I’m on to something far more exciting now though. I know I know, you’re saying to yourself: “Self, this seems impossible, with all the awesome.” And you’d be right. But really though it’s not impossible! At least not for me. It’s super exciting. But again it’s all hush hush. So that’s it for me this week, so tune in next week, same Bat time, same Bat channel!
TL;DR: Super Awesome & Hush hush.
Engineering Team - Matt, Serge, Michael, Lionel, Rob, Evan, Maarten, Céline, Neil And Guillaume (Sometimes)
Céline
I’ve been working on the skills and skill menu with Evan, and we have a first working version! The team is also looking for the best skills that will improve and level the game experience. Additionally, they will be used to highlight some unclear gameplay features which are already implemented. It is progressing quite well and I hope you guys will like that new addition.
Michael
This week I’ve been taking a look at the conformity system to see how we can make sure the reasons for suspicion and detection are clear when we’re playing. I haven’t actually done a lot of work on it yet, it’s a big system and I need to get an understanding of how it all works before I start digging in and making changes. Thankfully, Serge has been patiently passing on his wisdom and teaching me the way the AI think.
I have made one change, which is to add some new icons to the HUD to better explain how you are perceived in game. Previously Suspicion was represented by the colour-changing eye and the notification that tells you when you’re suspicious, but we felt this was inelegant and still not giving enough information, so we’re trying out having 3 icons below the compass which reflect whether you can be seen, heard, and whether what you are doing is suspicious. The advantage is they also help at this stage to debug what is and isn’t working the way we expect, so we can flag bugs to fix later, for example if you were sprinting down the street and the noise meter says you are silent, we’ll need to check why.
Art Team - Whitney, Emmanuel, Tito, Marc-André, Sarah, Guillaume, Cary And PH
PH
I continued my props series and this week, I’ve made some dynamite! I had the chance to work on a legendary item that I can’t wait for players to discover. And I also worked closely with the animators to provide them some small props. Pretty fun week for me!
Marc-André Voyer
This week I have been doing a lot of organisation and testing for the following weeks. Two other artists and I are going to be refactoring all of the Garden District terrains that are connected to roads, to better account for height variation and to add gardens and stone walls that will give it much more the feeling of being a real place. I created a spreadsheet with the list of every level that spawns and delimited which ones will require the refactoring - and eyeballed the worst-looking encounters - so we give these more love. I also created multiple roughed up versions of the plots to test various elements such as the transitions between the terrain and the sidewalk and see if we can get some height variation in these while avoiding the pitfall of adding extra steps.
Emmanuel
This week I continued the village refactor while also doing a major lighting pass by disabling auto exposure to get more control over every lighting scenario and specially reduce the skylight intensity to get less inside buildings. The contrast are much better balance and we’re really getting toward the final look for the game!
Publishing – Steve, Jeff, Mike C, Mike R, Austin, Meredith, Elisa, Kat, Kelly, Nicole, Sean, Brad, And Erick (And More)
Hey everyone!
I’m Austin, Gearbox Publishing’s PR Manager. This week has been a particularly fun week in PR, as I’ve been doing some story brainstorming!
During a game’s marketing campaign, there are a lot of major moments (announcement, gameplay trailer, story trailer, launch, etc.), but it’s beneficial to keep the conversation going between those moments; that’s where feature stories come in. By feature stories, I mean fun and in-depth looks at specific features in the game that different media outlets would be interested in covering.
We teamed up with PR agency Evolve to get some ideas down on paper. Some of the ones we’re excited to take further are:
Ultimately, our goal is to come up with features that will pique the interest and curiosity of you, the We Happy Few community! Feel free to let us know what in-depth features interest you!
Thanks y’all!
Compulsion Games
Weekly Journal - The Ballad of Foggy Jack
Hey everyone,
We hope you are having a good end of October. There are a lot of cool games coming out, shows to watch and Halloween is right around the corner. If you are dressing up as anyone from We Happy Few, send us some pictures!
This week we’ve been posting some fun stuff on our social media such as some pumpkin stencils and a little bedtime story by Uncle Jack.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UybrH_SkCCI&t=4s
We also posted a tutorial on how to make your very own Bobby mask thanks to the amazingly talented cosplayer DeAnna Davis.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g22bGqTnHYM
Production
Sam
Reviews continue this week as we look more closely at player progression, world setup (the procedural generation) and balance. Looking at the user research reports from Gearbox (who have added a piece below explaining who they are and what they do), one of the pieces of feedback that matched community feedback was that many people were taking a while to get to the Village and start taking Joy. As you guys know, these are critical parts of the game world, and many early reports from players have been “I don’t get it, is this just a survival game?” because they never got to the more colourful parts of the world:
These reports are cool because they’re independent - they’re similar in a way to the feedback all of you have given us over the past few years, but are focused on the story playthroughs. These aren’t editorial suggestions, they’re (as much as possible) objective evaluations based on player feedback. They’re a way to help us gain perspective, because it can be very easy to get tunnel vision during development. With this specific issue, we have a range of solutions.
One thing that has become apparent the past two months is that we have huge power with the procedural generation to make big changes very quickly. One option to solve the problem above is to use the generation system to change the layout of the world, introducing these areas earlier. While the generation system has caused issues for our art and level design teams in the past, it is much easier for us to make changes like this than it would be for a traditionally built game. We’re really starting to see the benefits of it at this stage.
For most of the team, content work continues well, and we are able to finalise our ratings submissions. Brazil has been submitted (it is the region with the longest analysis time), and we’re now beginning work on Japan and Malaysia! We do have a couple of last minute cinematics coming in today (including one highly suggestive and comical scene), but as of today that means we have now built the raunchiest, goriest, most full-of-expletive, parts of the game. It’s very fun to review! One more week until “content complete”.
Design Team - David, Hayden, Antoine, Adam, Ben, Eric, Roxanne and Benji
Adam
Over 1000 lines needed to be plugged in for the mad scotsman… and that is now finished… hooray! After that, animators go through all the conversations and put together idles/animation chains for conversations. This is a double-edged sword because it opens up the floodgates for a bugs and problems, but it’s an important part in helping give life to the dialogue and story.
Bugs and problems are pretty much daily life during development. If we have a bug with animation, we’ll need to either fix it through script, or ask for a better tool from programmers. Both solutions can potentially break with subsequent changes, although script fixes are more volatile. For example, in the Technicolour update we remade our AI systems. That system continues to be iterated on, but that can cause problems and break encounters that worked correctly beforehand (eg if we add a new conformity rule, our quest NPCs may not know that they’re supposed to ignore that rule until we fix it).
Early Access was fun for that, because each update meant we’d need to fix encounters that were working previously! Good times. That being said, we’re almost at the point where major systems stop getting significant changes, so we are looking forward to doing the final “finaling” pass and making things run super well. In the meantime, *opens beer bottle*.
Eric
Integrated VO mostly. Had to fix bugs to be able to do this, so it was a twofer this week.
Roxanne
This week I worked on the new loot system and populating our loot lists. I also made some burning status effects for people stepping in campfires. Tons of VO integration otherwise.
Engineering Team - Matt, Serge, Michael, Lionel, Rob, Evan, Maarten, Céline, Neil and Guillaume (sometimes)
Michael
A bit more combat and a bit more stealth this week. The content complete deadline looms and it’s starting to feel more panicked. The goal for content complete is to have a representative version of the game ready to fix and polish. So any features we want in the game should be in before this deadline, and for me it feels like packing for a holiday the night before; chucking things into the suitcase and hoping you haven’t missed something you really need. Also, with the end in sight you start to be even more judgemental of the game you’re making, and see all the things you want to improve, so it’s a vicious cycle. Fortunately, I’m also still seeing new bits of the game that really impress me, and we’ve still got many months to polish up the work that has been done, and to keep improving and improving the features we’ve got to make the moment to moment gameplay as brilliant as possible.
Lionel
The world generation impacts two different aspects of the game, the gameplay and the visual. On the first hand, the length of the roads or the distance between “interesting places” are directly connected to the way the world generates. On the other hand, the suspension of disbelief depends (among other things) on the coherence of the world generated. I worked the last week on the first aspect (gameplay) and while there is still room for improvement (there always is), I worked this week on adding subtle (or not so subtle) visual stuff to the hamlets and villages. Things that you would miss if they weren’t there but that makes the world more natural.
Neil
In the past few weeks I have been working on implementing very different things that Miss Thigh Highs and the Mad Scotsman need to take care of over the duration of the game. Both of these features rely heavily on the flow of time (coincidentally like the looming content complete deadline)! Much like my previous task, this has helped me learn more about the many different systems that are in play in our game. It’s been an incredible adventure to content complete, and I hope this translates into an experience you’ll all enjoy.
Narrative Team - Alex and Lisa
Lisa
When you play 1.0, each character will have audio flashbacks that let you hear moments in their past that defined them. That’s what I’ve been writing for Miss Thigh Highs this week (in addition to writing the last bits and bobs of environmental narrative). It’s going to be very hard for me to say goodbye to Miss Thigh Highs when we lock content next week. I’ve poured a lot of my own experiences into her character (though of course I never lived in a 60s dystopia where A Very Bad Thing happened). I hope you’ll love her as much as I do! In Halloween-related fun, Naila asked me to write a Foggy Jack poem for our Twitter last week. This one that didn’t quite make the cut (we went with a limerick instead), but perhaps it could still serve as a useful warning for all you Downers...
The Ballad of Foggy Jack
On Halloween Eve, in Wellington Wells,
The church bells knell, and yet all is not well.
When all good Wellies should be in their bed,
Comes a nameless fear and a leaden dread --
If you’re out past curfew, you’ll end up dead!
For out on the heath, under night’s velvet sheath,
Whistling cuts through the mists like a scythe!
Do hurry back home if you value your life,
Or the last thing you’ll see is the gleam of his knife!
You may have noticed there’s actually a bunch of verse in the game -- we have bawdy army songs, a Rupert Brooks-style soldier poet, pop-star lyrics, and even a couple of modernist diary-entry poems. It’s fun to have a job that lets me write in lots of different literary styles -- from cheeky magazine articles to faux-Shakespearean witches’ dialog. This week I even got to write a riddle in rhyme. I’m trying to squeeze in as much as I can in the last week before content lock!
Alex
When Lisa and I were taking Kenneth Koch’s writing class at Columbia a long time ago, we learned two things: (a) develop a writing style by writing in other people’s styles (b) you will never run out of words. Writing a game is a master class; I’ve got to write in different voices and different media.Originally we were just going to have audio flashbacks for Arthur, because Arthur’s main issue is someone who never comes on stage in the present, while Miss Thigh High’s issue is clear and present, and the Mad Scotsman has a special friend to talk to. But Sam asked for audio flashbacks for them, too, so I wrote the Mad Scotsman’s memories this week. They’ll have to go into the game in robospeech or temp voice or something, as the fellow who voices the Mad Scotsmen disappears Monday to the wilds of Alberta till just before Christmas; apparently where he is, there are not high quality sound studios. (Everyone now carries a pretty decent microphone in their pocket; but you still need a professional quality sound studio to get clean audio without a “boxy,” “roomy” quality of reverb.)Other work: figuring out how to bring the player up to speed on the Garden District faster; writing clever journal entries and objectives in the game’s voice for about half the game; and editing Arthur’s nightmares. Oh, he will have nightmares. He was going to have cinematic nightmares, but with our animators working their fingers to the bone and Clara frantically editing Uncle Jack, now it’s audio nightmares.
I actually love editing audio.
Lisa and I are giving a talk at MIGS this December on the various forms of narrative we’ve put in the game. Back in the day, if you’d proposed to tell stories via randomly collected letters, signs, graffiti, and gin bottle labels, in an artificial environment, they’d have given you a degree for experimental writing. Now it’s not so experimental, but it continues to be strange fun.
Animation Team - JR, Rémi, Vincent, Mike P, Jules, Raph and Franzi
Slightly less dangerous Mike
Hey folks!
So this week was cutscenes,cutscenes, cutscenes!!! Was working on them like they were going out of style! These little snippets are there to make you laugh, cringe and add to the flavour of the world we are making for you. This week I worked on one of our characters that I can’t mention, buuut… so if you’ve ever seen a circus act where a guy’s shot out of a cannon.. Well it’s pretty much like that. Except there are no soft landings in store. And I started working on a shot heavily laden with some wink, wink, nudge, nudge, know what I mean, know what I mean type stuff going on. (For you Monty Python fans out there) Except in this situation it’s probably not as exciting as you might think it is. Plot twist! So that’s pretty much it from me this week! Tune in again next week, same Bat Time, same Bat Channel! Jules Hi everybody ! So this week, I worked on combat animation! I've made some new attack for the bayonet weapon. I’m sharing you the new heavy attack of this weapon. At the middle of the week, I worked on the Doctor! As some of you find, the only NPC who can carry the powerful bonesaw is the Doctor! So the doctor can heal other NPC during a fight, he can resurrect them and heal himself. Yes, he can do a lot of things and reverse the situation during the fight! So during the last part of the week, I've also made some Heal and resurrect animation for the NPC and the doctor.
Art Team - Whitney, Emmanuel, Tito, Marc-André, Sarah, Guillaume, Cary and PH
Whitney
Hey folks,
It's been a while! The last couple weeks have been a whirlwind. We've been developing the parade district and figuring out what we can do to improve the look of the procedural world on the art side. I've also designed a new version of The Plough Boy (concept soon to come), and the nighttime gas mask for The Doctor, inspired by a medieval plague doctor. Somewhere in there I got the plague myself and had to take a couple of days off, but that's over and I'm back to organizing, prioritizing, reviewing environmental narratives, and concepting:) Speaking of which another thing I've been up to is figuring out ALL remaining art tasks to be done and ALL art related bugs to prioritize, and the underlying conclusion is it's not going to be too terrible! Yay!
PH
I had the chance to made a really cool plague doctor gas mask based on Whitney’s concept, our Art Director. So I gathered some old leather and vintage gas mask references and I started to sculpt the general shape. The challenge was to give some personality to the mask. Looking at the concept, you can see the frowning eyebrow, the aggressive shape and how everything fits very well with the Doctor’s face. So my main goal was to give strong attention to this. Texturing was a critical process and I spent hours refining the overall leather look. I’m quite happy with the final result. Then I moved on to weapons. I was in charge of creating a set of variation that the player will be able to craft to get a specific weapon ability.
Marc-André, Guillaume, Cary
This week, we’ve kept working away on level art for the new wonderfully handcrafted biome that is the Parade District. After completing the mid-level blockout of the areas (polishing the layout of the streets, the buildings and creating the rough shape of the terrain), we have been placing all of the decorators such as leaves, vines, puddles and signs on the buildings. We’ve also been placing streetlights to set the ambiance.
Publishing – Steve, Jeff, Mike C, Mike R, Austin, Meredith, Elisa, Kat, Kelly, Nicole, Sean, Brad, and Erick (and more)
Jon, Michelle, and Kyle
Hail, and well-met! We are the Gearbox Publishing User Research Team. Our jobs involve conducting user tests and analyzing data from players for nearly every project at both Gearbox Publishing and Gearbox Software. We work primarily out of our User Research Facility, a dedicated testing lab in Frisco, TX. We recruit participants from the Dallas/Fort Worth area to come to our labs and playtest content for us. Prior to moving over to Gearbox Publishing, the team operated under Gearbox Software since 2008.
This month the team has been focused on a large multiday user test for We Happy Few; this is the kind of test where our participants come back to the lab for a second day of content and feedback, and we can really focus in on critical areas for analysis. While we can’t divulge the details of the test or the data we collected, we can say that the test itself went very well. Our partners at Compulsion and our Publishing QA groups were fantastic allies throughout the preparation and execution of the test, and all parties were pleased with the report that was delivered. We are looking forward to the next round of testing, and we will be planning that out in the next couple of weeks.
Until next time!
Compulsion Games
Weekly Journal - Parade District teaser
Hey everyone,
Lots to share this week even though the team is knee deep in work and in story related content. Enjoy!
Production
Sam
As we near the end of content complete, we come a bit closer to understanding our estimates, and what we can/can’t accomplish in the time we scheduled. The level design schedule is looking tighter than we’d like for the final week, as it has taken a bit longer to record VO than anticipated, so rather than ask everyone to work super crazy hours we’ve made the call to extend content complete by an extra week. This won’t affect street date as we had built in time to the schedule for exactly this kind of situation. So, still roughly 2 weeks to go until we can say “this is the content we’re shipping with”.
In the meantime, the team continues integrating content and getting us to the point where we’re ready to submit to ratings. One area of interest right now is the Parade District. Some of you may remember that we had planned to add this in the last Early Access update, but we removed it because we felt it was too intertwined with the story (aka, there was really only story content there, and much less systemic gameplay). Once we made that call, we were also able to make another one: we are creating this area by hand, rather than using the procedural system. This should give the Parade District a very distinct feeling, and provide an experience that is a bit more hand crafted. However, that means a lot of art team time, so almost the entire art team will be working on this for the next two weeks.
Narrative Team - Alex and Lisa
Alex
Wednesday I flew down to Texas for a motion capture shoot for a key scene in the Mad Scotsman’s story, that will also be the backbone of an upcoming trailer! This is the first time I’ve ever directed mo-cap. As with most motion capture shoots, we already had edited audio — I recorded one actor in London, and another in Toronto. Now we needed to give arms and legs to those voices. So motion capture is a bit like dance. My job was choreographing the movements and gestures that are supposed to sell the emotions in the voices. I had a general idea of where the actors could move in the imaginary space we’d already built. On the mo-cap stage, I worked with the actors to express the characters they were there to inhabit. The mad Scotsman is big in all senses of the word. The other person in the scene is a British aristocrat who measures her every move. But it’s not just gestures. As I was working with the actors, at a couple of points we’d rehearsed a scene to the point where they were getting everything right; but I wasn’t feeling it yet. In one case I realized that the other party was just sort of hanging out with our mad Scotsman; I needed to tell her mo-cap actress that she had somewhere else to be, and something urgent she needed to do there. Suddenly the scene woke up. It’s funny, because exactly none of her gestures changed. But now, I felt it. In the other case, I hadn’t given the actress her intention. She was saying stuff to the mad Scotsman; but she wasn’t trying to convince him. The actress didn’t know what the character’s “verb” was. And again, not a gesture changed; but as soon as I gave her an intention for her character, the whole scene came alive. I find the two most powerful questions I can ask about a scene, whether it’s written, or recorded, or edited, or mo-capped are: do I believe it? And, do I care? If I can get both answers to yes, I think we end up with something pretty neat.
Lisa
This week has been a bit nuts. My to-do list was tantalizingly short at the beginning of the week, but as we get closer to content lock, we notice that some things I wrote a year ago need tweaking because levels have changed slightly in the meantime. It’s now a race to get everything done before time’s up! But it’s also fun and exciting. Alex went to Texas for a mo-cap session, so I got to use the Big Desk and drink all his diet colas. (Caffeine is pretty necessary at this point, as you can imagine.)
Design Team - David, Hayden, Antoine, Adam, Ben, Eric, Roxanne and Benji
Roxanne
Worked a lot on weapons and outfits. We are making them so we will have a proper tiering of specialisation. We will also identify them to indicate their rarity. We are getting close to having our definitive list. Stay tuned. In the following weeks, I will also make big adjustments on the loot lists for all containers (NPCs, lootable furniture and so on). We are also modifying our crafting system a bit. Our recipes will no longer unlock by finding ingredients. You’ll find them in the world, mostly on crafting tables and be able to buy most of them at the shop keepers. Hopefully, I will contribute to improve balance and make the game more exciting to explore! Your help is precious for this part, so do not hesitate to give us constructive feedback!
Eric
This week has been purely bug fixing for Arthur’s story. When I’ve not been doing that, I’ve been integrating the vast amounts of VO Alex recorded that has not been put into the game. I might be mistaken, but I think this is the game with the most VO I’ve ever worked on in 10 years.
Animation Team - JR, Rémi, Vincent, Mike P, Jules, Raph and Franzi
Mike P (Still a danger)
Did stuff. Animated more stuff… All work and no play makes Mike a dull boy…All work and no play makes Mike a dull boy…All work and no play makes Mike a dull boy…All work and no play makes Mike a dull boy…All work and no play makes Mike a dull boy…All work and no play makes Mike a dull boy…All work and no play makes Mike a dull boy…All work and no play makes Mike a dull boy… (Don’t worry Naila.. I’ll add something)… So yeah, it’s been an interesting week. Been working on a cutscene that falls in a bit of a moral grey zone that hits a little close to home for me. But I got through it and I think what I came up with works. As per usual can’t tell you about it but rest assured I gave it my best college try and I hope when you see it you’ll feel a bit of emotion. So that’s it for me, tune in next week, same bat time, same bat channel!
Jules
Hi folks! So last week I talked you about our new weapon on the game, the bone saw! I can now share with you some gifs of my animation (this is a work in progress). As you can see with this weapon, you will be able to realize real carnage in a short amount of time! But when you equip it, you are restricted to only walking. This weapon is too heavy for you, so you can't run. It's the same for blocking the attack of your enemy.
So you are not strong enough to do that, but maybe another person can... yes some other NPCs can carry the bone saw. And this transforms them into powerful opponents.
Do you have you an idea who?
Remi
Hello people! This week, I was still on cinematic animations. Progressed quite well and did lots of back and forth with the rest of the team for a complicated scene. And when I say the rest of the team, I mean the WHOLE rest of the team. I got some feedback from programmers, artists, concept artists, writers and other animators. I find it quite important that you ask everyone for feedback. Everybody has a different background and knowledge that can apply to your animations. They might not be able to tell you that your animation lacks weight or why it needs more anticipation, but in the conceptual phase, anyone can tell you how they feel about the scene. Everyone has already played a game or seen a movie. If a non-animator notices there’s something off, maybe it’s worth listening to him ;).
Sadly, we were not able to fly to Texas with Alex for the Mocap session, but still managed to be in a conference call and watch them from Montreal. They did an amazing job and Alex was great to direct the actors. The only times we had to communicate is for the initial setup of the scene. Where the characters should be at the beginning/ending of the scene and providing them with the right dimensions of the environment.
I can’t wait to get my hands on this data and start playing with it!
Vincent
Ahoy lads and lasses, the rest of the animation team is not quite dead, despite what you would think, reading the previous updates. We’re still hard at work on the cinematics, as well as all the little scripted moments that can’t be done with simple conversation animations. Tackling those smaller events is a nice change of pace, especially when you’ve been animating 4000 frames long scenes (Alex quite likes to write, in case you haven’t noticed yet!).
We also welcomed yet another new animator to help us in the final stretch, Franziska. She’s gonna give us a hand on the conversation animations, along with Raph who just arrived a few weeks ago. That makes eight of us, and we all have quite ‘du pain sur la planche’ (did I mention Alex writes a lot?).
J.R.
Greetings! Aside from integrating several scenes into the game before content complete, I spent the week on the end of the game… yes, you read that right! WHF actually gets a complete story with a beginning and an end. Who would have thought. And let me tell you, it’s short, sweet and totally satisfying. It’s also a technique we haven’t used a whole lot of in the past. Our cinematics are all in first person, but at some point in the game we make a cool transition into a new point of view.
I don’t want to tell you more, because we think the whole thing is a very nice moment in the game and I wouldn’t want to spoil it. After all that, I’m very happy with the story, where it got to and where it’s getting. In the end, it truly is a lovely day for it!
Art Team - Whitney, Emmanuel, Tito, Marc-André, Sarah, Guillaume, Cary and PH
PH
Rock’n Props for another week. I’m still trying to help everybody here with the last minute props before content complete. Unfortunately, this week I can’t really show them to you folks. A lot of them are too much related to the story. However, here’s a little walky talky I made:
Carylitz
Hi people! This week it was all about the Parade District, and trying to make it look as pretty as we can, so Marc, Guillaume and I are working on the island, each of us have a section assigned and our work is to decorate with props, lights and give it the feel of a real place.
Sarah
Another day, another sign. Hey lil' babies! We're busy busy busy filling all the environmental narrative gaps, and that means lots of signs in the Parade District, where all the trendy Wellies go to get their fab goods, you know. Marc-Andre's going to plug these doers in, and make them look amazing (as he so often does). Can't wait for you guys to see the Parade for yourselves!!!
Emmanuel
The Village is undergoing major changes! After two years of creating story encounters and FX, I’m finally back on WorldGen!! Things are moving fast and some big decisions have been made in term of gameplay and final look of the procedural generation; we’ll have more control over it and will be able to predict how levels spawn, therefore being able to effectively art them up and place them into the world, no more gaps! The idea is also to compact the world and being able to predict and control the series of events the player will be facing. All of this is extremely exciting and signifies the final steps for bringing a powerful and coherent experience at anytime and anywhere in the world of We Happy Few!
Engineering Team - Matt, Serge, Michael, Lionel, Rob, Evan, Maarten, Céline, Neil and Guillaume (sometimes)
Lionel
Ah, procedural generation, the realm of wonders and nightmares, of immense or tiny creations, some hard as diamond and other so brittle, they collapse under their own weight. Visiting this strange place, the careful traveler consider his path and his spells carefully as a simple variation can make a huge difference; there, the letter of difference between castle and cattle has immediate consequences. This week has been one of careful tuning and delicate changes, but those will make the city more hospitable, and more amenable to new inhabitants - a tighter, more compact Village. It was a cold place that looked at who wanted to move there with a reproachful stare. So we nudged its spirit toward a more tolerant perspective.
Serge
I have spent the week working on the Doctor, which can now revive someone that you killed during combat. Plus an effort on his signature weapon, the bone saw, has been done with Jules. His unique ability to smell someone that is not on joy allows him to chase you more efficiently than any other archetype (so take your drugs when you see him). We also continue to iterate on conformity rules to increase the pressure on the player while ensuring that the whole experience stays fun.
Michael
Getting creepy as we approach Halloween, as I am working on stealth! Specifically this week I have been doing little bits and pieces to get distraction objects working. We want the AI to be so addicted to the sound of smashing and crashing that you can lead them wherever you want with enough empty bottles and rocks. Before this week the citizens of Wellington Wells were really uninterested in using their ears, but with a few tweaks they are getting better.
Hopefully we will continue to improve this, and other stealth gameplay, up until launch, because personally I prefer having the sneakier, less lethal approach to our encounters. After all, they were once your neighbours.
Publishing – Steve, Jeff, Mike C, Mike R, Austin, Meredith, Elisa, Kat, Kelly, Nicole, Sean, Brad, and Erick (and more)
Kat
Hey guys! My name’s Kat. I’m a recent East coast transplant to the Dallas area, and one the newest members of the Gearbox team. As the Publishing Project Manager, my days are spent working on thrilling things like Gantt charts, schedules, emails and spreadsheets (which I love)--basically making sure everyone has the most information possible to make awesome stuff! I’ve been working hard on the production of the Time Capsule (what we used to call the Collector’s Box), and currently have a prototype of the mask replica sitting on my desk! Caffeinated lifeblood in a can for scale:
I also helped with a motion capture shoot for an upcoming trailer with Alex yesterday, which was awesome to see. I’ve never been part of something like that before and I learned a lot! I look forward to being able to share more with all of you in the future!
Thanks for tuning in!
Compulsion Games
Weekly Journal - Two weeks until content complete
Hey everyone,
A bit of a short journal this week as we are now more than ever in the middle of the super secret content and finishing the last bits of the game!
Production
Sam
Hi everyone! Continuing on from last week, we’re now approximately 2 weeks away from content complete. I think we’ll need just a little bit more time on this than we have previously planned for, because in our playthroughs we’ve been making changes based on things we have missed - eg adding in the new opening island, noticing gaps in player direction, etc. This means that the work slated for right now has been pushed off a little bit. That being said, we’re still on track to hit our ratings deadlines.
However, we have hit at least one important milestone this week: we have, essentially, 99% complete narrative material for the game! All the scripts, encounter dialogue etc for the game is now essentially done, barring some journal entries for encounters and the inevitable touchups we’ll make as we keep reviewing the game. We’ve collated this (thank you Alex!) and sent it off to Gearbox, so they can submit this to ratings agencies. Think of the children, everyone.
In other news, this week we had a series of playtests over at Gearbox, and early feedback is that we’ve made some good improvements on the issues raised in the previous report. Hopefully next week we’ll have the guys at Gearbox provide a bit of an excerpt of the report, so you can see the kind of information we’re looking at.
Ninja Team
Clara
Hello all,
We had a very interesting week. After a few months of being pulled out of the weekly videos for production reasons, we remove the dust on our film gear and went out to shoot the next Blade Runner movie. Well, that's what we told Sam anyway. What we really did was shoot a series of interviews with a few willing victims (aka select members of the team), talking with them about numerous subjects that we didn't have the chance to touch base yet on previous weeklies... It resulted in two full days of shooting, a great number of rushes and a fully-packed media drive which we can't wait to go through and properly edit.
These shoots always represent a lot of efforts in terms of planning, research, and obviously time spent by our fantastic team, who is taking time outside production to help us build all this cool content for the community. That said, it's always super rewarding and super motivating to hear them talk about what they love doing, creating and working on. Makes us appreciate their passion and efforts even more.
Animation Team - JR, Rémi, Vincent, Mike P, Jules, Raph and Franzi
Jules
Hey ! So this week I continued to work on the new combat animation. The animations now work well with our new process! But these animations are not yet totally finished. We need to tweak the timing during the windup to achieve good balancing. After all, we don't want to transform the NPC into an all-powerful killer! We want to use these new attacks to add depth into the combat and make it more tactical for the player. This is the new heavy punch, because I know you guys like gifs!
Next I take a break from combat animation to work on another super exciting task: ("drum roll") The Bonesaw weapon! That's our new weapon, it's very powerful and bloody (mouhaha). To activate this weapon you need two power cells and an activate card. I know that's expensive, but imagine being able to run into Wellington Wells and attack things with what amounts to a chainsaw made of spoons. Like really dull ones. Carnage! I think it’s a fair price, isn't it ? Next week I will able to show you the animation about this Bonesaw !
Mike
Hey folks! So this week was a short one due to the proper Canadian thanksgiving. I finished polishing up the transition cutscene from last week and started work on some custom animations for another one. Again can’t say much about it other than in the immortal words of Marvin the Martian: “There was supposed to be an earth shattering KABOOM!” Hehehehe. Also I animated a few obscene gestures. So that’s about it from my end folks, tune in again next week, Same Bat Time, Same Bat Channel!
Design Team - David, Hayden, Antoine, Adam, Ben, Eric, Roxanne and Benji
Roxanne
On top of working on some content, I’m starting to go through all of our items and categorise them, this will allow us to balance them and handle their repartition on each island.
Art Team - Whitney, Emmanuel, Tito, Marc-André, Sarah, Guillaume, Cary and PH
PH
Hi all! At the moment, I’m trying to help as many people as I can by doing small assets. That gives me the opportunity to work with all the departments and that’s awesome. Everyday is a new day with completely new art to make. Absolutely no time to be bored. This week for example, I made some crutches, various papers and letters with the awesome artworks of Whitney and Sarah, new clothes variations, a gate...
Engineering Team - Matt, Serge, Michael, Lionel, Rob, Evan, Maarten, Céline, Neil and Guillaume (sometimes)
Lionel
So with world generation, the thing is that despite all its advantages, it is hard to test. And the QA people are nice, but they don’t like untestable stuff. So they invited me to a meeting. Once we all sit, they just stared at me with a nice, silent pacino vibe and I stared back… for a while. I kept my poker face approximately 5 sec. In the end, I just built a better logging system for them to check the worldgen. Also hunted down bad data that was making the system barf. Of course, not everything is true in the above paragraph but who would read programmers’ reports if it was ?
Céline
This week I have been working on Miss Thigh Highs’ exclusive items. Physically, she may be a weaker character but she has particular talents that make up for any lack of brawn. These items are quite interesting to work on as they can involve several areas of the games (animation, AI, …etc.). I hope you guys will enjoy using them ! :D
Publishing Team – Steve, Jeff, Mike C, Mike R, Austin, Meredith, Elisa, Kat, Kelly, Nicole, Sean, Brad, and Erick (and more)
Elisa
Hi! I’m Elisa, the New Media Manager here at Gearbox. New Media is the umbrella term for all the cool new ways folks are creating content, such as podcasts, streams, and video. Right now, I’m starting prep for TwitchCon next week. At TwitchCon, I’ll meet with Twitch staff, streamers, and other game developers and publishers to learn as much as I can about putting together livestreams and working with streamers to make sure they can deliver a fun experience for their audiences. As a streamer in my (limited) spare time, I’m always curious to know what tips and tricks broadcasters have to make their streams unique, high-quality, and entertaining. I’ll eventually translate what I’ve learned to the streams we produce from our own space here at Gearbox Publishing. I’m also looking forward to meeting with broadcasters that are a perfect fit and would have a blast showing off We Happy Few to the world!Feel free to come say Hi!
Thanks for tuning in!
Compulsion Games
Weekly Journal - Eye of the storm
Hey everyone,
We are pretty much in the eye of the storm of the project right now. The purpose of these updates is not to always show the pretty side of development but to be transparent and right now it is hectic, busy and a bit tense. If it's difficult, and challenging, but that's not a bad sign at this stage. The challenge keeps us engaged, and help us make a better game.
Last week in Montreal, the Metropolitan Orchestra paid tribute to Montreal made games during a video game symphony. It was beautiful and our previous game Contrast was part of the show along with many other local games, like all 137 Assassin’s Creeds.
Production
Sam
As we approach content complete (now three weeks away), we’ve been looking at the full game and making the last major adjustments to content that we can.
One of the challenges in game design is that it’s rarely ever “done”. The artistic nature of it means that there are always improvements; always parts of the game that you want to put more into. However, you also need to ship the game, and that often conflicts with wanting to make changes (as I’ve mentioned before, finishing a game involves locking down parts of the game, allowing us to do things like bug fix, optimization and polish). Balancing production realities with creative desires is most difficult at the end of the project, and not always an easy task. But, we’re getting there!
This week sees the last major changes (eg Adam’s work below, structural changes to the final island, structural changes to the stories, etc) coming in, as we prepare for a playtest of Arthur’s full story next week. This is being done by Gearbox’s user research team, and it’s exciting to get independent verification of whether we have improved on the issues raised by the previous report (and also on all the issues raised by the community!). Hopefully once that information is available, I’ll be able to share some of it with you all.
Design Team - David, Hayden, Antoine, Adam, Ben, Eric, Roxanne and Benji
Adam
Surprise surprise, we’re all working on story stuff, BUT some exciting news. I’m redoing the first level of Character 3’s story to give it a boatload more action. What else… a lot more VO has been recorded and imported, so.. that’s me for the next 3 weeks.
Roxanne
I have been working on fixing some blocker bugs and lots of VO integration. Most importantly, I just started helping on balancing weapons. We will do massive tweaks to them, so they stop feeling all the same and are actually interesting to acquire. More on that soon! ;)
Engineering Team - Matt, Serge, Michael, Lionel, Rob, Evan, Maarten, Céline, Neil and Guillaume (sometimes)
Lionel
I have been working on, wait for it, blocker bugs ! And to catch bugs in worldgen, one builds logging systems to validate the generated data as it is produced. As a consequence, I spent a big part of the week squinting at those aforementioned logs to find the root cause of some overlapping between buildings. I put my pirate hat on and cursed a lot (especially when bad input data was the cause). Yarrr ! Once I had a good prognosis, I corrected most impactful errors. And I put the hat down, but that part was a bit sad.
Narrative Team - Alex and Lisa
Alex
It’s fun to write lists in dialog. A good list has power. In Henry V, the English soldiers charge “For God, for Harry, and St. George!” Somewhere I have a felt banner that says, “For God, for Country and for Yale.” (This motto is listed in a dictionary as an example of “anticlimax,” no doubt by a lexicographer from Harvard.) This is the planned list, a list that has solidified in the speaker’s mind. I had fun this morning writing the sentence, “No one’s going to go to war for the sake of an island of rubble, subsistence farmers, and terribly large badgers,” describing our alternative history England. The speaker clearly has said that before, even if only to himself.
Then there is the unplanned list. After Agincourt, Shakespeare has King Henry V read a herald’s note detailing the dead among his enemies, the French:
King Henry: This note doth tell me of ten thousand French
That in the field lie slain. [...]
The names of those their nobles that lie dead:
Charles Delabreth, high constable of France;
Jaques of Chatillon, admiral of France;
The Master of the Crossbows, Lord Rambures;
Great Master of France, the brave Sir Guichard Dauphin;
John, duke of Alençon; Anthony, duke of Brabant,
The brother of the duke of Burgundy,
And Edward, duke of Bar. Of lusty earls:
Grandpré and Roussi, Faulconbridge and Foix,
Beaumont and Marle, Vaudemont and Lestrale.
Here was a royal fellowship of death.
When most actors get a list, they tend to read it like a grocery list. They know they’re reading a list. Each word they speak is part of a list. It becomes singsong. If you perform Henry’s speech like that, it has little power.
Take a moment, and read the above like a list.
Now, read the list, but each time you come to a name, pause for a moment, and imagine someone you know. Now imagine them dead. Only then move on to the next name.
Seriously, do that.
See what that does?
It becomes an unplanned list. Short planned lists have power. Long planned lists are tedious. Long, unplanned lists have power.
It is a challenge to get actors to perform unplanned lists, because they can see the damn list right in front of their eyes. They know how many names are coming up. Yet you have to knock them off that, derail that train, or it sounds like a planned list. You have to remind them that their character doesn’t know what they’re about to say until a fraction of a second before they say it.
(In Meisner technique we were taught to practice lines at the highest possible speed, without affect: “Whatapieceofworkisman hownobleinreasonhowexcellentinfaculty etc.“. That way the words would be there when I needed to say them, but wouldn’t be associated with an emotion. So the emotion would come fresh and surprising, even though the line was memorized.)
(The ability to let go of what you know is critical to many artists. An editor has to be able to say, “Who the hell is this character that just showed up?” even though in the 22 previous cuts of the film, that character was properly introduced, so of course she knows who it is. Same thing for a writer.)
One of our characters in We Happy Few has a problem:
“Beatrice says she loves me. But she loves everything! Me... long walks... sunsets and rainbows of course. Simon Says… big wristwatches on a man… wrapping paper… dandelions… a good night’s sleep… ribbons… Uncle Jack’s bedtime stories… six o’clock … commemorative spoons. I have to know if it’s real!”
What’s funny about this list, I hope, is that it is (a) unexpectedly long (b) terribly specific (c) weirdly diverse. “Unexpectedly long” is only funny if the actor performs the list as if he does not know how long the list is. If the list becomes sing-song, it’s not funny. He has to perform it as if he is searching his memory for everything Beatrice loves. It’s funnier if it sounds like he’s done, and then he thinks of some more things. Ideally, to make it more comically upsetting, the actor should do homework: create a different imaginary circumstance in which Beatrice liked each distinct item on the list. Then each item comes with its own distinct emotion, and it will come out of his creative instrument sounding distinctly different.
By the way, giving the actor a distinct imaginary circumstance is almost always helpful, not just with lists. With good actors -- and this deep into development we’ve got an amazing repertory of voice actors -- if you simply tell them something about their imaginary circumstance, the line comes out more distinctly. Even if they’ve said the line the way I intended it the first time, I’ll still tell them something about it sometimes, to see how that informs their delivery. They usually deliver the line sharper. Remember this is in a voice session where we’re doing a new line, on average, every 30 seconds. Our guys are Teslas: they go from 0 to 60 at ludicrous speed. Their ability to interpolate the imaginary circumstance I just gave them and deliver the line fresh is what makes us bring them back.
Lisa
With the content-lock deadline looming, I finished the last few locations that still needed environmental narrative. People in Wellington Wells didn’t always take Joy. This week I wrote letters and diaries that show you what certain townspeople were like in the days before pharmaceutical pick-me-ups. Get ready for some dishy dark secrets!
For fun, I also wrote a couple of Halloween limericks about Foggy Jack, who most definitely does not exist. (And because the muse does not adhere to the calendar, I also wrote a little Valentine’s Day ditty that I'll share with you in February.) Most important, I started planning my WHF cosplay for Halloween. Have you?
Animation - JR, Remi, Vincent, Mike P, Jules and Raph
Jules
Hey everybody! So this week I will talk you about combat animation! We continued our work on it this week. We edited the animation I showed you last week, to change how the NPCs will hit you. The biggest change is that now the NPCs step towards you to hit you. They will no longer move in front of you, wait, and then hit you. This brings our combat system to another level. The immersion is more intense and less repetitive. So now my challenge is to adapt my animation so it fits with this new process. It’s really exciting! Seriously when I started this task, I never would have imagined that we’d able to upgrade our combat to that level.
Remi
Hello people, it’s been a while! Sorry for not keeping everyone up to date on what I’ve been working on in the past few weeks, but the truth is we’ve been working really hard on cinematics and story assets. I did some rigging and exploded a few more objects as well, but the main focus remains to deliver our best animation work for you all to enjoy. Have a good week and hopefully we’ll soon have some special things to share with you!
Mike (not so dangerous anymore)
Heeeeyyyyy! So this week I worked on some custom animations for our level designers to try and make all of our encounters as special and unique as possible. Then I burned the midnight oil making a cutscene to transition you guys from the first island to the second, and help set the mood for the rest of your playing experience. I know it doesn’t sound like much, however I tried to put a lot of love and effort into it for you guys. So that’s it for me folks, tune in next week, same Bat Time, same Bat channel!
Art Team - Whitney, Emmanuel, Tito, Marc-André, Sarah, Guillaume, Cary and PH
Carylitz
I did a new character this week! I call him my little monster, because he is made of many other characters. Unfortunately he is story related so I can’t show him. After him, I did a bunch of different things, I destroyed a location, worked on one of the bridges, a house, and created some variations of textures for some characters. It has been a really busy week, and probably next week will be busier, but we are getting there!
Whitney
Hey folks! Sarah and I are busting our butts to finish the 2d assets that support the environmental narrative in the game. All secret, juicy stuff for the release. I can show you something, though. Here's the Doctor rendered in a classic painting style.
PH
Wow! This week I worked on a lot of assets, but mostly small ones. I did variations and I retextured various works. No time to be bored, I switched from environmental assets to character assets. Also, do you remember all the parachute stuff I made last week? I finally finished the parachute’s bag itself.
Emmanuel
This week was a rollercoaster of disciplines, from bug fixing to arting up secret story levels, to rain FX, World Map visual FX or planning one massive section of the game! Good thing is it all ended up being pretty amazing, above all expectations! Here is a wallpaper of an “ideal” look for our country roads!
Publishing – Steve, Jeff, Mike C, Mike R, Austin, Meredith, Elisa, Kat, Kelly, Nicole, Sean, Brad, and Erick (and more)
Mike C
Hi! I’m Mike, the Director of Production here at Gearbox Publishing. This week, besides trying out a new hair color (this month its fuchsia), the team and I started the submissions process to get ratings for all territories. This starts out with conversations with representatives at each ratings board (ESRB, PEGI, USK, etc.), as each territory rates elements differently. At the same time, we work with the team at Compulsion to get the most comprehensive slices of the game to give an accurate representation of what the full game will entail. The goal is not to censor any part of the game, but rather to make sure the game is properly rated so that customers around the world with cultural differences in ratings and sensitivities understand and enjoy the content.
We're super excited about what's in the final game, and we can't wait to make it available to the world!
Have a great long weekend everyone! (It’s Canadian Thanksgiving)
Compulsion Games
Weekly Journal - Rorke's Drift
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
Weekly Journal - District 0
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, Celine, Neil 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 and story missions. I particularly enjoy doing ‘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
Weekly Journal - Almost content complete!
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!
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).
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