Weekly Journal - Production update and regional price adjustment
Zdarova,
This week’s development has been focused on finalising encounter blocking for the last stretch of the story, along with finally recording those additional Uncle Jack kickstarter shows! It’s great to finally complete these recordings, as it means there will be even more Uncle Jack as part of the final version of the game.
It’s a busy time for our level designers as they create the remaining building blocks of the game, and we work to lock down all the features in the game.
We also spent additional time with Gearbox analyzing the regional pricing for the game after several discrepancies were brought to our attention. Here are revised price points for several regions, effective immediately:
Production
Sam
Hi folks! From now on until we ship, I’ll be adding weekly production updates so that you can keep up with our progress towards finishing the game.
To start with, I want to explain where we are in the production cycle: in 7 weeks, we are aiming to be “content complete”. This is the point where we effectively “lock down” what’s in the game, to submit to ratings. After this point, we can touch things up, fix bugs, and add in missing pieces (eg recorded VO for which we used robo voice previously), but can’t create new things.
In order to get there, the first step is to make sure that all of our levels are “blocked” - aka the point where the levels can be played, but the supporting things like VO, animation and journal text are not final. We will not be blocking any new encounters after the end of next week. That means this week, and the past 2-3 months, have been all about blocking encounters.
To give you context, we launched the Early Access version of the game with around 50 encounters. As part of the quest rework, the Clockwork Update shipped with 61 remade/reworked encounters. 94 encounters were in the game by the Maidenholm Update, and 110 in Life in Technicolour. These range from big encounters like the Butcher, or smaller encounters like bridges or Crazy Legs, but does not include things like interactive houses. Once we have finished the current content creation, we will have significantly more encounters, which should make for a much richer world.
As part of this, Alex is furiously writing VO to be recorded, and we will be having probably 1-2 dozen recording sessions over the next month and a half.
Narrative Team - Alex and Lisa
Lisa
Wakey, wakey! In addition to writing environmental narrative for the Parade District, I wrote a fun scene in which Uncle Jack’s Fan Club breaks into a melee, arguing about whether his 1951 Christmas Special is part of The Uncle Jack Show’s canon.
I’ve also been coordinating with the art and level design teams to make sure the amount of environmental narrative feels right for the newest locations. (For instance, if someone is trying to kill you when you’re in a certain room, that might not be the best place to hide lots of diaries and letters.) I usually start with my own list of character-related documents I want to put in a location, but honestly, some of the most fun stuff happens when another department tells me, “Figure out what this room is used for.”
Ninja Department
Clara The Great Cheese
Hello everyone, So much news this week from the ninja department!
Last Monday we gathered our film gear, scripts and Wellie masks to shoot more Uncle Jack shows with the amazing Julian Casey. It went really well!
(Julian, aka Uncle Jack, and Bruno Gatien, our wonderful make-up artist!)
We managed to shoot about 12 shows which will add even more diversity on all the tellies and radios of Wellington Wells… plus a special episode which I can't talk about just now. Secret secret, you know the drill.
A hundred coffees later, I also started syncing footage and cleaning everything for the team to review, while going back to my daily tasks of retouching the UI, planning the next weekly video and reworking some of our loading screens to make them fit even more seamlessly in the world of Wellington Wells.
Animation Team - JR, Remi, Vincent, Mike P and Jules
Mike (Kinda not the new guy anymore)
Hey gang! So this week I did some work on some atmospheric conversation stuff and started animation on a new takedown for the player. Can’t mention anything specific, but if this thing doesn’t make you shudder just a bit, you might be a robot. It’s a little on the terrifying side of things. Unfortunately you’ll have to wait till 1.0 to see it! But it’ll be worth the wait!
That’s it for me, see you all next week, same bat time, same bat channel!
Jules
Hi, folks! So for me during the first part of the week, I finished another POI (point of interest) animation. As you can see it's a poke fire animation.
Now the NPCs have another interaction with their fires, I'm going to take a break from the POI animations and move to an exciting task, updating combat animations! The goal of this is to improve the feeling of intensity during the fight for the player. We want more variety for the attacks and really want to make the player feel how much the NPCs hate them (because you are a Downer...).
Vincent
Hoi! This week, I joined the Ninja Department for a bit, and switched my animator hat for a driver hat! Then I quickly returned under my secret cinematics animator hat.
J.R.
Greetings my mates. Another secretive week under the belt! Trust me, if you’re getting impatient about the story, I am equally if not even more eager to show you bits of narrative. Again this means I don’t have much to show you, but it keeps moving forward.
This week I finished working on the longest scene in the game, it was a lot of fun and took me a couple of late nights. Otherwise we are getting underway with effectively closing the shots. This means we’ve been scrolling through every completed scene, making sure everything is nice and tidy in order to sign off on the final animations and mark them audio ready.
Adding check marks and colouring the sheet in green is exciting!
Design Team - David, Hayden, Antoine, Adam, Ben, Eric, Roxanne and Benji
As is now customary, the design team is working on story quests/encounters, meaning that most of them have to be very secretive.
Eric The Fantastic
Last week or two has been story encounters. Mostly bridges. Waaaay too many bridges. Mostly just making the existing bridges work for all 3 characters. Plus some more department of science quest stuff #secrets. Cary made a sweet computer console, and hooking up all the buttons so they work in game is gonna be fun.
Antoine
Still well, alive and scripting! My head is 100% dedicated to deliver the playthrough of the second character (miss fancy pants). She’s got some very surprising mechanics, probably things that you don’t see a lot in video games. I’m currently going through her playthrough from beginning to the end and cleaning up any blockers that I come across. Progressively coming out of blocking phase. I wish I could openly talk about the story in the same way we talked about the sandbox but… of course we want to have a surprise effect (with a side dish of jazz hands ?).
Art Team - Whitney, Emmanuel, Tito, Marc-André, Sarah, Guillaume, Cary and PH
Carylitz
I have been doing really small changes everywhere so I feel like I haven't done much this week! I have mostly been fixing problems here and there, alongside lots of meetings with Remi to implement new textures on old models (gotta make the old stuff look as good as the new stuff) and finally I started working on secret new stuff.
Whitney
Hello everyone! This week was a bit of a blur. I'm helping out on some environmental narrative for some fun new locations that I REALLY wish I could talk about! Here's a little teaser image:
Another thing that I can finally share is this concept of Arthur Hastings. I rarely have time to spend getting images up to my liking, but I allowed myself that luxury for this one. I was really trying to get the feeling of the classic, slightly neurotic, bureaucratic Every Man. As you can see he's got a lot on his mind :)
Marc-André
This week, I have been working on modifications for a story level to align better with narrative. We have cinematic flashbacks occurring in the level and they were too close to one another. So design has been adapted to lengthen the size of an area - and I’ve been doing an art pass on top of it.
Afterwards, I was able to go back to the special house I’m working on. It will be the biggest in terms of detail and work involved - and will be very iconic. Can’t show pictures for both locations since they are story related.
This week I convinced the sun to move in the correct direction. There’s been quite a few of you who noticed that the sun does not rise in the east and set in the west. This was not part of a deeper conspiracy in our world, compass makers are still as trustworthy as ever. It was just a bug, which has now been fixed.
After that I added some new events into the code for the weapons to allow Ben to create some cool gadgets, including the bee cannon. Unlike our other weapons you can charge it and fire it, instead of just swinging it at your enemies.
Lionel
This week it has been mostly surgery of my creatures. Some encounters were not spawning correctly. Well, not spawning *sometimes*, it would have been too easy otherwise. For example, in the new worldgen, crossroads were a rare event, but were mandatory for some new part of the scenario. So, I kidnapped a game designer (thank you Antoine ! ) and with his help, we did some good sleuthing, and found what the problems were. Good times. And yes, I let him go.
Serge
Since last week, I've been working on the combat system in order to improve the whole experience. The first step was to fix some issues related to navigation that were preventing our AIs from working as a group. Then, with design, we iterated on the formation they should aim for, meaning that while some characters will keep you busy in close combat, others will throw stuff at you from farther away. On top of that, we will also implement people that cheer the mob but I'll come back to that in a later post. The idea is that combat will be more threatening, and more varied.
Toward our polish phase, we will have more attack variety so ensuring that our system can support that in an efficient data-driven approach is also at the heart of my efforts. Working closely with the animators in order to reach the design intention is a big part of being a gameplay programmer and that is so fun because they are highly creative persons (and I love that, isn't it why I do game in the first place? or because I'm a gamer myself, hard to tell).
Thanks for tuning in!
Compulsion Games
Weekly Journal - The Ravens Have Gone From the Tower
Hey all,
Welcome to a new weekly journal! This week we released the second hotfix for PC and the combined hotfix for Xbox One (both patches into one). If you are still having issues, feel free to post on the forums or to email support@compulsiongames.com
It is a long weekend over here, so response time to some posts might be a bit slower. But, they will come!
Art Team - Whitney, Emmanuel, Tito, Marc-André, Sarah, Guillaume, Cary and PH
Marc-André
At the beginning of the week I finished a brutalist building interior for the Parade District. After that, I started working on a very special victorian house that’s going to be very grand and girly. There will be gold accents everywhere and new architecture pieces! So far, I’ve adapted the level design blocking for art and have started adding wallpapers and tweaking rooms per color palette, as well as adding props and tweaking their materials.
Can’t show anything because it’s related to story, but progress on the new locations/encounters is going faster than ever.
Emmanuel
This week I’m doing a final art pass on what is by far the biggest level of the game and maybe our most iconic piece. It looks already pretty amazing but I’m aiming for “mind blowing”. It’s also a secret for the time being, as it’s a core part of the story of Wellington Wells.
PH
This week, I tried to catch up with the artistic team since I’m new here. I learned a lot of technical stuff and super interesting things about shaders. Then, I started making some props that will be used for the story.
The Design Team, LLC - David, Hayden, Antoine, Adam, Ben, Eric, Roxanne and Benji
This week we have all been working on additional story content, but Adam and Antoine in particular have been working on the main path. Good news, we can now play through all stories for all characters! (hypothetically)
Here’s a fun screenshot that I can actually show for one location. In one character’s story, the store is open, in another character’s story it’s broken:
Animation Team - JR, Remi, Vincent, Mike P and Jules
Jules
Hi! This week I made a few new POI (point of interest) animations for our NPCs. After the picking ear and the sneezing, it was time for the picking nose and a soft variant of coughing. I had a lot of fun making these animations. I can’t wait to see them in the game.
Mike (less of the new guy than before)
Sup folks! So this week I finished up that character animation I have been droning on about for the last few weeks but couldn’t tell you about. Well that situation hasn’t changed so…. Guess you’ll have to wait to play the narrative. In any event I have now moved on to helping the level designers with encounters. So yay! Breathing some life into narrative is FUN! But again, mum’s the word, cloak and dagger kinda stuff. Like a nerdy Ninja. That pretty much sums it up for me this week. It’s been a slice, tune in again next week, same Bat Time, same Bat Channel!
Rémi & Vincent
Amongst the usual top secret cinematics animations, Rémi has been working on a little scripted event in which the player destroys a wall in order to circumvent a recalcitrant door. He broke the walls to pieces and then simulated the behaviour of the exploding chunks.
Once this was done, the only thing left was to get all that mayhem in Unreal. Unreal kind of prefers skinned meshes, so I gave him a hand to make a small python script that puts a bone on each piece and transfer the objects motions to the bones, then skin the pieces back on the bones. Hope you’re still following. After some hair pulling (because Maya has its very unique and ‘charming’ way of doing python), we managed to get it working, and that’s how it looks:
As you can see the art is not quite done yet, the hole doesn’t have ‘thickness’. Of course there’s gonna be some extra effects added, like smoke, particles, cam shakes and co!
When you’re mad scientist, sometimes, you let your creatures in the world and they come back broken. So it was with last week new city layout : something unexpected happened and things broke (specifically, a whole bunch of necessary features stopped spawning in the world with our new urban layout). So I investigated what exactly happened and spent quite some time on the blackboard to improve it. At the same time, a few improvements were added to city layout to make it more structured.
Maarten
Hey guys! I've been working in the shadows for a while now, but since this is my first weekly: Hi! I'm Maarten, working as a freelance programmer, mostly tasked with engine support. That means my stress levels are *slightly* lower than those of the other programmers, and I get to work on some fun stuff! :) You may know me from such features as Video Support or Community Localization, but this week I'm hacking away at the Linux build for We Happy Few. Good news for our Linux fans, we're making good progress there. We sorted out all compilation issues, and are now fixing third party lib per lib. It's a cumbersome process, between switching to/from Linux, toolchain mismatches, having to figure out each lib's build process, etc - but hey, the thrill of the challenge is what we're programmers for, right?
[Ed note: this one’s for you Shmerl.]
Thanks for tuning in and have a fantastic weekend!
Compulsion Team
44776 - Life in Technicolour Hotfix 2
Gameplay Alpha 6.2
This is the second PC hotfix for the Life in Technicolour update, and contains a bunch of code and content fixes to improve the game.
Encounters:
• Fix case where player could get stuck after riding the Jubilator in I Sing Body Electric.
• Fix case where an objective would not complete in Mystery House.
• Fix case where NPCs would be missing upon returning to Mushroom Log.
• Fix an issue with map marker not updating correctly upon posting flyer at 1st location in Speaker’s Corner.
• Fix the map marker for finding Margery’s diary in Give a Pig a Pancake.
• Fix for unexpected failure of Speaker’s Corner quest.
• Mysterious chest will now open again after finding a bell in it.
• Fix case where Faraday would not talk into the window after you drop off the bucket in House of the Inventor.
• Make sure eviscerator will spawn on reload if it is needed.
• Fix for the dealer not being invisible inside his cart.
Gameplay:
• Create recipe for metal tubes - can be used to create some hard-to-find items.
• Using any health/stamina/regen boost will now give you back an empty syringe in your inventory.
• Fix detection direction on worship animation.
• Canteens no longer disappear after use.
UI/HUD:
• Allow button hold to move stack of items in a single action.
• Fixed HUD status effects not updating while in the inventory screen on Downer and Birdwatcher.
• Fix missing bound key for consumable items in inventory.
• Fixed problems with time passing and stat calculations when fast travelling.
• Fixed an issue with key binding displays not updating after they are changed.
• Fixed double clicking to track quests on quest screen.
• Fixed an issue where some of the input displays weren't always updating.
• Added mouse over sounds for the player sub menu buttons.
• Fixed a problem where an invisible UI element was blocking legend entries from being selected.
• Crop status effects in the status effect screen if they are too long.
• Fix for some icons not showing up in the map.
• Fix an issue causing journal entry tracked and unread icons to overlap.
Engineering:
• Fix a few more cases where HDR support could be enabled in old configuration data.
• Add loading screen videos while streaming in-game.
• Fix cases where interaction between vomiting and using a Joy Booth would cause the player to be stuck inside the booth.
• Fix crash on talking to NPCs in Shibboleth quest.
• Fix a number of other crash cases.
Weekly Journal - Joy Division
Hey everyone,
Another week, another journal. This week the team continued their hard work on the build. It’s becoming very busy as features come in and content gets created, and it will continue to be very busy most likely until April.
We released a hotfix earlier this week on PC, which fixed the majority of our known crashes. We will be releasing hotfix 2 on PC early next week that addresses quest blockers and other fixes, and a combined patch will go out to Xbox players early next week too.
We’d like to recap a few things we have discussed on our forums and in responses on reddit, just so that everyone is on the same page:
Finally, we have had a number of very vocal players upset about the partnership with Gearbox. We understand you feel strongly, and are happy to talk through it. However, please remember that we are human beings just like you. So, feel free to disagree but lighten up on the anger and remember that we’re are talking about a video game here.
Narrative Team - Alex and Lisa
Alex
Lisa and I have also been writing new Uncle Jack episodes, both as part of our Kickstarter and as part of the increased scope of the game. My goal is to have 35-40 pages’ worth, which is the maximum we are likely to be able to shoot in a day. I try hard to have more to record than we have time for. The alternative is possibly running out. He’ll have some surprise guests on his show! Sort of.
Lisa
This week I’ve been writing “layered” environmental narrative that tells you both what a location is now and what it used to be, and what happened there. It’s sort of like archaeology, but with documents.
This fall, Alex and I will be giving a talk at the Montreal International Games Summit, where we’ll discuss how we’re creating the narrative world of Wellington Wells. So if you have questions about that, let us know (though be forewarned, no spoilers!).
Art Team - Whitney, Emmanuel, Tito, Marc-André, Sarah, Guillaume, Cary and PH
Marc-André
These past few weeks I have been working on secret story locations for which I can’t mention specifics. However, I can show you guys a few screenshots to create some sort of intrigue. There’s a house and a HUGE concrete building that will come out in the new biome. Doing the landscaping around it was also quite fun! I have also been working on some sort of police station - that is almost done as we speak. By this time in production we are working very efficiently. Levels get arted up in a matter of days and we have more and more modular pieces to work with - which makes things easier. With tight deadlines and a lot of existing levels, it becomes too easy to use and reuse the formula we already have. Making every new location fresh and unique is a challenge. But it is what makes the process creative and interesting!
Whitney
Hey everyone!
I wish I could share everything I've done this week, I really do... but I can't :( But one thing I DID do is design some fun mannequins for a secret locations - pose credit to Jules.
World generation was also a hot topic this week. One thing we would love to do is add land formations closer to the islands to help with general composition. Here you'll see some quick sketches exploring this idea.
And lastly, I've been sifting through ancient concepts to start organizing our art book. Here's a very old concept for the face of the male, village NPC.
Carylitz
Hey oh! Been doing several things this week, some locations, new props, props corrections, and other stuff, a little bit of everything, trying to keep up with the crazy schedule. But the thing that took most of my time was this location so I will leave a sneak peek for you guys!
PH
Hi guys,
My name's Pierre-Henri (PH), I'm the new artist in the team. I'm so happy to have the chance to work on We Happy Few, the team is really awesome and I’ve got a warm welcome. First mission: trying to catch up and learn the very dense and complex workflow that a game production involves. Can't wait to start creating awesome props and stuff. See you!
Sarah
You're either sick of reading this, or relieved to know that I'm also working on story specific content! Sadly I can't share those images with you just yet, but I can tell you they include MORE icons!! Thrilling, yes.
This week also involved a lot of feedback combing on my part, to see what people's impressions are of the new UI, and you guys did not disappoint!! The crafting screen was by far my favourite rework, and I'm glad it got such a positive response (lil baby's growing up!). The Inventory screen needs a substantial amount of tweaking, especially where the filters are concerned, so thanks to everyone who took the time to provide feedback! My week also included designing some options for the Collector's Box (posters, stickers, and box art!) so stay tuned, and thanks for the continued support!
Design Team - David, Hayden, Antoine, Adam, Ben, Eric, Roxanne and Benji
The design team has worked primarily on story quests and bug fixes this week, so there’s not a lot we can show without spoiling content or boring you to tears! That being said, here’s a couple of good ones:
Roxanne
Fixed an issue with the NPCs in the quest An Awkward Courtship. They were previously leaving because of the night curfew, making them absent of the mushroom log. Now they ignore curfew (these young rascals!). Also worked on a bunch of new content. But it’s a secret! ;)
Adam
As you know, we’ve all been busy fixing bugs for the hot fix, and when we have some downtime from that, we work on story content. We want to thank everybody who has helped us by reporting other bugs we had missed, and sending log files for weird issues. Thank you so much!
We would also like to thank Naila (our Community Manager) for her amazing work this week. She is a trooper.
Hayden
This week I focused on bugs for the hotfix and also had some time to work on a rather large story content level featuring some of our other characters and their search for resources.
And also fire... Which is always nice, right?
Animation Team - JR, Remi, Vincent, Mike P and Jules
Jules
Hi! This week I focused on the ambient animation for our NPCs. That means creating a few animations that will be played randomly when the NPCs walk on the street or just waiting on a bench. None of these are particularly glorious actions (but everybody does it, I know you do). I am talking about picking your nose, picking your ears or sneezing.
All of these animations can play on male or female, in a stand up or seated position. So for this week, that's twelve new animations. I'm a little proud of me ha-ha.
Mike
Hey guys! So this week I kept working on character animations for a supporting character I can’t talk about, because we haven’t mentioned her yet. Super secret, mum’s the word, ya know; wink wink, nudge nudge, know what I mean! So needless to say I have nothing much to report to the community at large. But I will say that it’s been a learning experience and has been fun. So there’s that. Well that’s it for me, see you next week, same Bat time, same Bat channel!
Programming Team - Matt, Serge, Michael, Lionel, Rob, Evan, Maarten, and Guillaume (sometimes)
Our programmers have had a bit of a rest this week after a very busy two weeks leading up to the update. The ones who are here have been working on crash and bug fixing for this week’s and next week’s hotfixes. Back to new features next week!
Thanks for tuning in!
Compulsion Games
44631 - Life in Technicolour Hotfix 1
Gameplay Alpha 6.1
Hi everyone
We have just pushed build 44631 live on Steam.
This is the first hotfix for the Life in Technicolour release and addresses some of the crash issues players were encountering. A second hotfix to address blocking issues in quests will be released in the near future.
Hotfix 1 Changes
• Fix a number of crash points while moving around the world.
• NPCs should no longer have ridiculous quantities of loot.
• Some NPCs that should not be out in the day (or the night) should now better respect their schedules. The plague wastrel invasion should be no more.
• NPCs should no longer slide all over the place for no good reason. Any sliding should now be intentional sliding.
• NPCs in Mystery House had a weird backward cone of vision. Cones now face forward.
• Disabled in-progress support for HDR displays that was causing washed-out graphics for some users. Players may need to restart the game if they still see issues after this update. HDR displays will be supported in our 1.0 release.
• Fix some issues where players couldn’t remap key bindings.
• Joy use and coin collected statistics are now reported correctly.
• Fix for infinite loading screen at the end of the Escape quest.
• Tab key now closes the inventory menu.
• Fix some of the loading screen movies that weren’t displaying properly.
• Added extra checks to localization tool to catch some issues with submitted files
Weekly Journal - Shifting gears
Hey everyone,
This week we finally made our big announcement on the release date (April 13th 2018!), that we’ve increased the scope of the game and we’re coming to Xbox One and PS4 retail, and our partnership with Gearbox Publishing! We also released the Life in Technicolour update, so we hope you guys are having a great time.
It was a pretty crazy week. We’ll never be able to recap this fully, so here are a ton of links that might help:
We’d had a huge response to this announcement. Most of it has been fantastic - the support from you guys has been amazing, and the feedback so far on the update is really really good. Seems like we’re definitely going in the right direction.
We’ve also had a lot of questions/comments about the DLC, partnering with Gearbox, etc. Many of these questions are from people who see the price increase but don’t read about the scope increase, or from people who vehemently dislike Gearbox. For the first people, if you could please read our blog post, it answers a huge number of your questions, and is very frank and open about what we’re doing. For the second, Gearbox publishing is a new initiative run by a separate group of people. They are not funding the game, but are helping us a great deal with QA, localization, ratings, user research and marketing support. They’re working very hard, doing a great job, and care very much about helping us to make We Happy Few the best it can be. They’re always open for feedback, just like us, so if you have any concerns you can let them or us know and we’ll do our best to address them.
In the meantime, we’re back to work, excited to build the rest of the game. Our weekly journals will continue, although you’ll see a lot of [story redacted]. If you’re interested in specific parts of what we’re doing, let us know and we’ll make sure to include whatever we can (without spoilers).
We’re very proud of our game, of our team, and of you guys. Thank you for being here on this ride with us.
Narrative Team
Lisa
I’ve always been terrible at keeping secrets. When I find a present for someone, I always really, really want to tell them. That’s what work feels like now as we head into the final stretch of We Happy Few. So many story secrets! Soooo hard to keep quiet until April 2018! Aarg!
What I CAN tell you is that I wrote the update’s newspaper, which gives you clues to what’s happening in Wellington Wells, as well a suggestive Easter egg (English majors – this one’s for you.)
I’ve also wrote dialog for the Odious MacLears – a family squabbling over the will of their patriarch who is still alive. (The temptation to add a Monty Python “I’m not dead yet!” joke is intense!) Plus, I started working on a new Uncle Jack show -- we wouldn’t want to play repeats, now would we?
Art Team
Carylitz
Crazy update week! This last part of the update for me was more focused on story so It wasn't as crazy as for others in the office. I got to work on 2 new locations that I can't show and 1 new character with its sidekick! They are gonna be really funny. I also spent some hours reading news and watching streamers and youtubers playing the new update!
Animation Team
Mike
Hey party people, Mike here. Nothing crazy to report this week. Still working on some character animations that I can’t tell you about. So far so good. I think it will contribute greatly to one of the character playthroughs. So instead of a long and elaborate paragraph detailing all the things I can’t tell you about, here is a joke: “What do you call a fake noodle? An Impasta” Have a great week, see you next time same Bat time, same Bat Channel!
Vincent
Ahoy! An update week is always a special week! If only because I can take a bit of time to play the game… which is not something I often get to do, what with all the work we have on the story’s secret cinematics and gameplay animations! Well I must say… that game is getting pretty big and pretty cool to roam about in.
Hope you’re all enjoying the update, and I’m back in my secret cinematics lair.
Jules
Hi! This week I have finished the animation of our new weapon the famous "BeeCannon"! You can see here the "Suck bee" sequence:
So that's how you reload your weapon. Find some Bee and just inhale them for having some ammo. Now the most important part, the "Shoot Bee" sequence:
As you can see, the bee cannon is hard to control :). But so powerful with its long range and its area of effect !
Ed note: A bee swarm is VFX created separately to the cannon, so you’ll need use your imagination for now...
During the next part of the week, I made a few variation animations for our NPCs. Before when they detected you, they would just point at you with their right hand. For more flavor we gave them few different gestures. I hope you like the update of the game, we worked hard on it!
Programming Team
Rob
This week was spent bug fixing and making improvements to the between level loadscreen video code, especially fixing issues related to loadscreens that would sometimes not complete. Also, much of this week was spent ramping up on HDR tech for all platforms which Chris is handing over to me to take over.
Serge
Hello world, I hope that you are enjoying our last update! This week has been pretty intense, mainly bug fixing related to NPC behaviors for me. You might notice in the update that we iterated on their perception of the player, making it more clear why they are suspicious of you. The system will continue to evolve but that rework of our core AI logic will help us to achieve our ambition for the final product. General game performance and streaming strategy was also top priority for that milestone, and we are proud of the progress we made in the last few weeks.
Lionel
If you look at those images, you'll see both the future and my current work. The dynamics of procedurally placed encounters and something, a little something we would like to add. Time will tell.
First image:
Second image:
I should say that with the procedural system, there is a lot of trial and error. Some of these more theoretical things might get into the final game if they turn out not to work in practice. But we’re very excited to see what we can do.
Design Team
Adam, Eric, Antoine, Hayden, Ben, Roxanne and Benji
The entire design team has been wrapping up bugs and hot fix issues since we released the update. Aside from that, we are all currently back onto creating Story Content. Ed note: as we approach release, I’m going to have to apologise to the level designers because we will not be able to share their level design work. Everything at this point contains significant spoilers. We’ll do our best to fill you in on the general nature of what we are doing, but [story redacted] now applies to the whole level design team, and not just Antoine and Adam (who have been on story on and off for a long time).
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