Hey everyone,  

It is finally the holidays and we are more than ready to take a break and recharge before 2018 kicks in! But no rest for the wicked just yet, we still have a lot of work to do before some the team heads off to visit their families. We wish you all a very happy holidays and may you work your way through your backlog! We asked each team member to write what game they were looking to play over the holidays and we would love to hear yours as well. 

We also released some print-outs of We Happy Few paper snowflakes to add a little extra Joy to your holiday decorating!


Alex

This week, Lisa and I gave a talk at MIGS on “Dirty Narrative” in We Happy Few. Dirty narrative is my term for making the game into a bit of an unreliable narrator. There will be inconsistencies. There will be absences. There will be mysteries. There will be translucent lies -- lies that tell you as much about the liar as they do about the truth. Characters will tell you things you need to know only tangentially -- they are not there to serve your story, they are the heroes of their own stories.  

Our theory is that pushing information at the player pushes you away; we only want to answer a question after you’ve asked it. That way, you pull yourself into the story and the world.  

You may judge for yourself whether we have been successful in this approach.  

I’m also writing dialog for the great effort to rework the first two hours of the game. Right now it’s all robo-speech, which is horrifying to listen to, but works for the designers. Probably after the holidays I’ll turn that into recorded temp speech in which I do all the voices, which gives us a more accurate sense of how the encounters play out. And then, once everything is nailed down, I’ll bring our actors back and turn it into recorded final dialog.  

Now that we’ve given our talk, things as home have returned to normal (or, normal for us, anyway), so I can get into Horizon Zero Dawn: The Frozen Wilds and Witcher 3: Blood and Wine. There is also a Crusader Kings 2 game that I’ve had on hiatus for months, and if I give in to temptation, I might re-install CK2 and disappear from reality for a week.

Lisa

Same as above, but over the holidays, I will be playing CUPHEAD!


Cuddly Eric

After a few weeks of restructuring some things, planning, schedules, meetings, chats, bug fixes, design schtuff, and whatever else I was up to I’m back making some new content. I’m making a new bridge that is supposed to be a bit of an event. Think it’ll be cool, and hopefully pretty weird.  

Adorable Adam

I’ve been working on a new transition quest for Arthur’s story. It involves some new areas, and some areas that you may have come across in early access builds. Also, I made a bobby spawner that bobbies actually return to when their alarm is over.  

So, if you guys haven’t heard of this game, it’s effing scary. Terrific sound design, and some genuine “oh f*ck” moments:  

http://unforgivinggame.com/

Antoine

Hey there good people ! So the level design area is getting a tiny bit invaded. I’ve got two new neighbors (Emmanuel and Marc André) that are both doing a pretty hardcore job of arting up the sections I’ve created for the very first Garden District island. We’ve gone through a lot of iterations on those, trying to route the player into interesting locations, accentuate certain things in the environment. Having them closer made the whole process a lot easier. Trying to make sure the world is creepy enough, I’ve tried to push a little the creation of more “Wastrel art” into our garden district islands. What’s interesting about them is that, they are trying their best to be normal again (words from Alex our narrative director). So that’s why when sometimes they set up tea parties with mannequins it’s just a way for them to do something normal but with the wacky side effect of a brain messed up by Joy (if some of our early access players remember the giant cat with a hat sitting at a table with a bunch of tea cups it’s definitely coming back with more stuff).


Mike P (Diddy)

Sup folks! So this merry week I have been working on a cutscene that has taken on a bit of a larger scope than I originally intended. It’s one of the first narrative beats so I figured it needed a bit more love. As it turns out, if any of you get the reference: “Pitcher la vache” from Monty Python, then you’ll probably like this shot. Hehehehe… So yeah, I think it’s hilarious and when you guys get around to it I hope you have a chuckle too! That’s it for me for this week, so tune in next week, same Bat Time, Same Bat Channel!

Jules

Hey everybody! So during this week, I've worked on few different tasks. Like I shared with you last week, we are currently working on a new death reaction. Previously for the NPC’s death, we played the hit reaction animation and we turned on the rag doll at the end of the animation. Now it's a special animation and they finish on rag doll.  

My second task was to make some placeholders for stealth. After that I worked on a few reaction variations for our NPCs before they join the fight. Previously we had just one and it was much too repetitive. I finished my week working on a few issues with feet sliding during combat and some animation fixes. We have reached roughly where we want to be on combat and made huge progress over the past couple of months. It is much more fun and more technical to fight the NPCs now. In the new year, it will be time to polish all of those animations. 


PH

I’ve done a second art pass for the Garden District fillers. I’m really happy with the early results because we are getting something more and more organic. It takes time, though. I have to go through every filler and every encounter to check if everything is pretty and navigable for the player. Collisions are often working against me and I have to do lots of back and forth to make sure that the walking experience in the Garden District is as smooth as possible.
 
 
 
 


Concerning video games, I’m still motivated to finish The Witcher 3. I’m getting near the 100 hours and still enjoying everything about it. A masterpiece I can't leave unfinished for sure!

Carylitz

I got the worst cough of the year, but I’m back. I have been working on some maps helping Emmanuel with the refactoring of the Village. I have been doing a lot of tests to make sure everything spawns the way it should. It’s really impressive to see the improvements in the world and see how the work of everyone is finally coming together and showing up in the maps! So I have not much to tell but that. Since this is the last weekly of the year, that means that next time it will be a year since I began working here, which is pretty awesome! And that also means that I'll have some time to play some video games during the Christmas break so I'm looking forward on finally finishing Outlast and probably going through the Witcher if I don't lose the motivation.


Lionel

We are upgrading our foliage system and it means upgrading two things, the big and the small (or automatic) parts. The big part is the stuff the player will be interested in, like a ring of trees with a chest in the center. The small/automatic part is everything else: the grass, the bushes even the trees, all the vegetation that have no role in the game but would be missed if it wasn’t there (actually some bushes have a role gameplay wise but bear with me there).  

I am working on the big part. To make the patterns more easily defined and more diverse, I built a tool to visualize them and to allow real-time editing. You define a shape (circle or diamond for example), choose an object, the number of times it should appears, and add some perturbation to the placement and you can create some very natural looking patterns, which you can then edit in real time. In the capture below, you can see the basic shape in blue, the candidate positions in red and the preview for the final placements, that includes some pushing.


Real time editing is very useful for procedural systems as it reduces the number of iterations to get what we want. In a word : nice.  

That brings me to the end of my part for this last 2017 weekly. I wish you a very happy Xmas. On my end, I will now start sleuthing to see who is my secret santa in the team. See you in 2018 for new procedural explorations and crazy contraptions.

Céline

Hi ! I've got some updates on stealth. We now have stealthy high bushes in the game! When crouched while in them, you're basically invisible if no hostile NPCs noticed you before. That offers new stealth options for the Level Designers, and being hidden so close to the enemy is very enjoyable.
 

Next we're trying to figure out if adding more UI feedback will help you guys more to know if/why you're detected. It is a big discussion at the office as the UI can break the immersion and make the players ignore the other audio/visual cues we worked on. We’re also considering adding a Lean mechanism, but this is under discussion as well.

On another note, I wish you a great Christmas and a happy New Year celebration ! One week of holiday might allow me to finish Xenoblade Chronicles 2 and start Dishonored: Death of the Outsider. Maybe.

Michael

It’s my last working week of the year and I’ve been continuing to look at combat primarily, but it’s also the season of goodwill so I’ve been handling some requests from the other team members, and fixing up some bugs. For combat I’ve been hooking in some more animations and I did a quick prototype of a feature we discussed last week for a quick throw that could be used in combat, without having to unequip and swap weapons. It worked but it’s not necessarily solving any problems that are very big, so it’s still under consideration. Next week I’ll be heading back home to England, to relax, see family and play games. I enjoy playing with the PlayStation VR with my family, and there’s been quite a few new games and experiences to try out since the last time I saw them; looking forward to meeting Trico from Last Guardian in (virtual) real life.


Jean-Philippe Leighton  

This week has been spent vetting and regressing many issues. A few developer support tasks were also completed in order to help them evaluate specific areas of the game. Christmas Holiday is coming up fast and I am looking forward to spending some time with friends and family. Throughout my Christmas Break I’ll most likely be gibbing it up in Quake Champions, exploding things in Space Engineers and playing some Terratech in my spare time.  

Thank you for tuning in everyone and see you soon!  

Compulsion Team

PS: We swear this weekly was not sponsored by CD Projekt RED

Hey everyone,  

It is finally the holidays and we are more than ready to take a break and recharge before 2018 kicks in! But no rest for the wicked just yet, we still have a lot of work to do before some the team heads off to visit their families. We wish you all a very happy holidays and may you work your way through your backlog! We asked each team member to write what game they were looking to play over the holidays and we would love to hear yours as well. 

We also released some print-outs of We Happy Few paper snowflakes to add a little extra Joy to your holiday decorating!


Alex

This week, Lisa and I gave a talk at MIGS on “Dirty Narrative” in We Happy Few. Dirty narrative is my term for making the game into a bit of an unreliable narrator. There will be inconsistencies. There will be absences. There will be mysteries. There will be translucent lies -- lies that tell you as much about the liar as they do about the truth. Characters will tell you things you need to know only tangentially -- they are not there to serve your story, they are the heroes of their own stories.  

Our theory is that pushing information at the player pushes you away; we only want to answer a question after you’ve asked it. That way, you pull yourself into the story and the world.  

You may judge for yourself whether we have been successful in this approach.  

I’m also writing dialog for the great effort to rework the first two hours of the game. Right now it’s all robo-speech, which is horrifying to listen to, but works for the designers. Probably after the holidays I’ll turn that into recorded temp speech in which I do all the voices, which gives us a more accurate sense of how the encounters play out. And then, once everything is nailed down, I’ll bring our actors back and turn it into recorded final dialog.  

Now that we’ve given our talk, things as home have returned to normal (or, normal for us, anyway), so I can get into Horizon Zero Dawn: The Frozen Wilds and Witcher 3: Blood and Wine. There is also a Crusader Kings 2 game that I’ve had on hiatus for months, and if I give in to temptation, I might re-install CK2 and disappear from reality for a week.

Lisa

Same as above, but over the holidays, I will be playing CUPHEAD!


Cuddly Eric

After a few weeks of restructuring some things, planning, schedules, meetings, chats, bug fixes, design schtuff, and whatever else I was up to I’m back making some new content. I’m making a new bridge that is supposed to be a bit of an event. Think it’ll be cool, and hopefully pretty weird.  

Adorable Adam

I’ve been working on a new transition quest for Arthur’s story. It involves some new areas, and some areas that you may have come across in early access builds. Also, I made a bobby spawner that bobbies actually return to when their alarm is over.  

So, if you guys haven’t heard of this game, it’s effing scary. Terrific sound design, and some genuine “oh f*ck” moments:  

http://unforgivinggame.com/

Antoine

Hey there good people ! So the level design area is getting a tiny bit invaded. I’ve got two new neighbors (Emmanuel and Marc André) that are both doing a pretty hardcore job of arting up the sections I’ve created for the very first Garden District island. We’ve gone through a lot of iterations on those, trying to route the player into interesting locations, accentuate certain things in the environment. Having them closer made the whole process a lot easier. Trying to make sure the world is creepy enough, I’ve tried to push a little the creation of more “Wastrel art” into our garden district islands. What’s interesting about them is that, they are trying their best to be normal again (words from Alex our narrative director). So that’s why when sometimes they set up tea parties with mannequins it’s just a way for them to do something normal but with the wacky side effect of a brain messed up by Joy (if some of our early access players remember the giant cat with a hat sitting at a table with a bunch of tea cups it’s definitely coming back with more stuff).


Mike P (Diddy)

Sup folks! So this merry week I have been working on a cutscene that has taken on a bit of a larger scope than I originally intended. It’s one of the first narrative beats so I figured it needed a bit more love. As it turns out, if any of you get the reference: “Pitcher la vache” from Monty Python, then you’ll probably like this shot. Hehehehe… So yeah, I think it’s hilarious and when you guys get around to it I hope you have a chuckle too! That’s it for me for this week, so tune in next week, same Bat Time, Same Bat Channel!

Jules

Hey everybody! So during this week, I've worked on few different tasks. Like I shared with you last week, we are currently working on a new death reaction. Previously for the NPC’s death, we played the hit reaction animation and we turned on the rag doll at the end of the animation. Now it's a special animation and they finish on rag doll.  

My second task was to make some placeholders for stealth. After that I worked on a few reaction variations for our NPCs before they join the fight. Previously we had just one and it was much too repetitive. I finished my week working on a few issues with feet sliding during combat and some animation fixes. We have reached roughly where we want to be on combat and made huge progress over the past couple of months. It is much more fun and more technical to fight the NPCs now. In the new year, it will be time to polish all of those animations. 


PH

I’ve done a second art pass for the Garden District fillers. I’m really happy with the early results because we are getting something more and more organic. It takes time, though. I have to go through every filler and every encounter to check if everything is pretty and navigable for the player. Collisions are often working against me and I have to do lots of back and forth to make sure that the walking experience in the Garden District is as smooth as possible.
 
 
 
 


Concerning video games, I’m still motivated to finish The Witcher 3. I’m getting near the 100 hours and still enjoying everything about it. A masterpiece I can't leave unfinished for sure!

Carylitz

I got the worst cough of the year, but I’m back. I have been working on some maps helping Emmanuel with the refactoring of the Village. I have been doing a lot of tests to make sure everything spawns the way it should. It’s really impressive to see the improvements in the world and see how the work of everyone is finally coming together and showing up in the maps! So I have not much to tell but that. Since this is the last weekly of the year, that means that next time it will be a year since I began working here, which is pretty awesome! And that also means that I'll have some time to play some video games during the Christmas break so I'm looking forward on finally finishing Outlast and probably going through the Witcher if I don't lose the motivation.


Lionel

We are upgrading our foliage system and it means upgrading two things, the big and the small (or automatic) parts. The big part is the stuff the player will be interested in, like a ring of trees with a chest in the center. The small/automatic part is everything else: the grass, the bushes even the trees, all the vegetation that have no role in the game but would be missed if it wasn’t there (actually some bushes have a role gameplay wise but bear with me there).  

I am working on the big part. To make the patterns more easily defined and more diverse, I built a tool to visualize them and to allow real-time editing. You define a shape (circle or diamond for example), choose an object, the number of times it should appears, and add some perturbation to the placement and you can create some very natural looking patterns, which you can then edit in real time. In the capture below, you can see the basic shape in blue, the candidate positions in red and the preview for the final placements, that includes some pushing.


Real time editing is very useful for procedural systems as it reduces the number of iterations to get what we want. In a word : nice.  

That brings me to the end of my part for this last 2017 weekly. I wish you a very happy Xmas. On my end, I will now start sleuthing to see who is my secret santa in the team. See you in 2018 for new procedural explorations and crazy contraptions.

Céline

Hi ! I've got some updates on stealth. We now have stealthy high bushes in the game! When crouched while in them, you're basically invisible if no hostile NPCs noticed you before. That offers new stealth options for the Level Designers, and being hidden so close to the enemy is very enjoyable.
 

Next we're trying to figure out if adding more UI feedback will help you guys more to know if/why you're detected. It is a big discussion at the office as the UI can break the immersion and make the players ignore the other audio/visual cues we worked on. We’re also considering adding a Lean mechanism, but this is under discussion as well.

On another note, I wish you a great Christmas and a happy New Year celebration ! One week of holiday might allow me to finish Xenoblade Chronicles 2 and start Dishonored: Death of the Outsider. Maybe.

Michael

It’s my last working week of the year and I’ve been continuing to look at combat primarily, but it’s also the season of goodwill so I’ve been handling some requests from the other team members, and fixing up some bugs. For combat I’ve been hooking in some more animations and I did a quick prototype of a feature we discussed last week for a quick throw that could be used in combat, without having to unequip and swap weapons. It worked but it’s not necessarily solving any problems that are very big, so it’s still under consideration. Next week I’ll be heading back home to England, to relax, see family and play games. I enjoy playing with the PlayStation VR with my family, and there’s been quite a few new games and experiences to try out since the last time I saw them; looking forward to meeting Trico from Last Guardian in (virtual) real life.


Jean-Philippe Leighton  

This week has been spent vetting and regressing many issues. A few developer support tasks were also completed in order to help them evaluate specific areas of the game. Christmas Holiday is coming up fast and I am looking forward to spending some time with friends and family. Throughout my Christmas Break I’ll most likely be gibbing it up in Quake Champions, exploding things in Space Engineers and playing some Terratech in my spare time.  

Thank you for tuning in everyone and see you soon!  

Compulsion Team

PS: We swear this weekly was not sponsored by CD Projekt RED

Hey everyone,  

The end of the year is upon us and things are getting festive around the office which really adds that extra sparkle to our development routine.  

Next week Alex and Lisa will be at MIGS (the Montreal International Game Summit) to give a talk on Making Wellington Wells Memorable, i.e. all the non-story narrative in the game. Feel free to come say hi if you are attending!


Adam “pretty much lead level designer” Alim

All of us are dog-piling on Arthur’s story playthrough this week. Eric and I have been leading the charge on scheduling and prioritizing his playthrough, and handing out assignments based on those priorities. So for now, The Mad Scotsman and Miss Thigh-Highs get a little rest.

As for details to the changes we’re making: we had some playtests set up with several people playing certain parts of the story, and taking notes on where there are lulls or dips. As we thought, there were quite a few, so we’re reworking some areas and adding in a couple of new moments to better transition between moments.


Marc-André

For the first part of the week, I've been working on finishing the new ivy vines that are on the buildings in the garden district. I first started by modeling leaves and laying them out by hand on branches created with spline curves inside Autodesk Maya. Doing this by hand gives me a lot more control over the look than outsourcing photos. For foliage, we are leaning toward a cartoonish side.

I baked/transferred those arrangements onto a 2D plane, creating what essentially is a sprite sheet. I had to generate a lot of textures to get nice quality and control over the final artistic result, which I achieved in Photoshop.


Since we will be placing a lot of them and want a high density of leaves, it was crucial that I kept the polygon count as low as possible (in this case, between 240 and 500 verts). I laid out the sprites on low-poly cards inside Maya to create the 3D arrangements. I imported these and the textures in Unreal and created a new material with all of the features.


Relying heavily on vertex painting and masks, I implemented the following features:  

-Choice between procedural/vertex painting of color variation  

-Ability to vertex paint branches that are dead, to quickly create variety  

-Transition of colors from green/red to purple when player is on Joy 

-Dead branches during Joy overdose/withdrawal 

-Wind & Subsurface

Here is an example of vertex painting of the vines in action. It is very easy to change the color and density of the vines directly inside Unreal in the game's levels.


For the second part of the week, I’ve been helping Eric on the blocking of an exciting new bridge.

PH

With the new vines from Marc-André, I was able to give an art pass on the garden district buildings. It’s already better and we are quite happy with the organic feeling that we are able to achieve. We’ve finally got this overgrown nature that we were looking for. So we will soon enter the 2nd art pass on the garden district and we will try to polish everything with little details and more colors.



Lionel

A lot of small things this week. Beside the panic-ridden “oh, WTF is the worldgen system doing?” moments (followed by “oh, people are giving it really bad data”), I mostly worked on the road intersection and the foliage/patterns systems. The first one is simply slowly getting to where we want. The second is a reuse of an experiment we did a few months ago. It seems to be working but it is a bit early to be final on this. No screenshots this week.

Michael

This week we had a meeting to review combat. We want to decide soon whether there are still features missing, or whether we have what we need at this stage, and we can move on to just bug fixing and tweaking values to deliver something that we’re happy with.

So people from Level Design, QA, Animation, myself and Guillaume sat in a room and got into some fights, in game. It’s quite good to watch other people play and to have these discussions as a group because it highlights things you wouldn’t notice, or wouldn’t consider from your own playstyle. Also if you’ve been working on aspects of the system, you can get into a playstyle to test what you’re working on. I’d been working on blocking and parrying, and NPC reactions. My style is either quite static, or moving towards the NPCs. So watching Lee play and be constantly moving and backing away from enemies was a good reminder. The meeting generated a lot of tasks to work on, but I think we have a lot of the systems already in place. To avoid the impression that we have shallow or repetitive combat we just need to be better at highlighting these systems/tactics to players and showing the depth that is in there (like parrying, stuns, throwables in combat), and then improving the feel of them and how they can be used together. So no new features, but some good feedback and direction to keep improving what we have.


Mike P (Smarter than your average bear)

Sup folks! Greetings from our secret underground lair… well not so much, but it’s nice to think it is. So this week was again a mixed bag. Worked on some more cinematics and some camera moves to enhance your playing experience. To give you the ooooh’s and aaaah’s! As usual I can’t show them to you, but believe me, 1 out of 2 animators here say they are passable ;) So yay! That again, is about it from my end folks, so tune in again next week, same Bat Time, same Bat Channel!

Jules

Hi everybody! I've continued my work on combat this week again. Creating new animations for the death by the status effect of bleeding:

This animation ends in rag doll, which means if a NPC dies by bleeding near a bench... there is a possibility that he/she will hit his head violently on it.

I can also share you this new animation of when a NPC has their weapon destroyed:

If I were you, I would start already training with the parry because it's going to be very useful during combat! See you next week for more news about combat!

J.R.

Hey guys, this week I tried to go back to narrative but ended up tuning and polishing combat animations all week! Most of all, I polished and exaggerated all of the “reaction” animations for NPCs in combat, meaning whenever they get hit or parried, the point of impact (head/body) is more obvious, and in general just so the animations would communicate better in the middle of a fight. So far I did this pass on 1-handed combat, and I will have to retarget those animations for all combat archetypes.

Otherwise my week was split between new variations for dodge, polished some old taunt animations and did a little bit of tuning on the combat idle and other small non-combat related tasks.


Lisa  

This week I alternated between writing environmental narrative for a new “introductory” island and freaking out about public speaking -- Alex and I are giving a talk at MIGS next week about narrative in We Happy Few. It’s actually been great to step back and look at the big picture of the game -- not only for our talk, but as part of the game polishing process. We’re seeing all sorts of patterns we hadn’t really come up with on purpose, but of course we’re going to pretend that we knew all along what we were doing! If you’re at MIGS next week, please say hi.  

Thanks for tuning in!  

Compulsion Team

Hey everyone,  

The end of the year is upon us and things are getting festive around the office which really adds that extra sparkle to our development routine.  

Next week Alex and Lisa will be at MIGS (the Montreal International Game Summit) to give a talk on Making Wellington Wells Memorable, i.e. all the non-story narrative in the game. Feel free to come say hi if you are attending!


Adam “pretty much lead level designer” Alim

All of us are dog-piling on Arthur’s story playthrough this week. Eric and I have been leading the charge on scheduling and prioritizing his playthrough, and handing out assignments based on those priorities. So for now, The Mad Scotsman and Miss Thigh-Highs get a little rest.

As for details to the changes we’re making: we had some playtests set up with several people playing certain parts of the story, and taking notes on where there are lulls or dips. As we thought, there were quite a few, so we’re reworking some areas and adding in a couple of new moments to better transition between moments.


Marc-André

For the first part of the week, I've been working on finishing the new ivy vines that are on the buildings in the garden district. I first started by modeling leaves and laying them out by hand on branches created with spline curves inside Autodesk Maya. Doing this by hand gives me a lot more control over the look than outsourcing photos. For foliage, we are leaning toward a cartoonish side.

I baked/transferred those arrangements onto a 2D plane, creating what essentially is a sprite sheet. I had to generate a lot of textures to get nice quality and control over the final artistic result, which I achieved in Photoshop.


Since we will be placing a lot of them and want a high density of leaves, it was crucial that I kept the polygon count as low as possible (in this case, between 240 and 500 verts). I laid out the sprites on low-poly cards inside Maya to create the 3D arrangements. I imported these and the textures in Unreal and created a new material with all of the features.


Relying heavily on vertex painting and masks, I implemented the following features:  

-Choice between procedural/vertex painting of color variation  

-Ability to vertex paint branches that are dead, to quickly create variety  

-Transition of colors from green/red to purple when player is on Joy 

-Dead branches during Joy overdose/withdrawal 

-Wind & Subsurface

Here is an example of vertex painting of the vines in action. It is very easy to change the color and density of the vines directly inside Unreal in the game's levels.


For the second part of the week, I’ve been helping Eric on the blocking of an exciting new bridge.

PH

With the new vines from Marc-André, I was able to give an art pass on the garden district buildings. It’s already better and we are quite happy with the organic feeling that we are able to achieve. We’ve finally got this overgrown nature that we were looking for. So we will soon enter the 2nd art pass on the garden district and we will try to polish everything with little details and more colors.



Lionel

A lot of small things this week. Beside the panic-ridden “oh, WTF is the worldgen system doing?” moments (followed by “oh, people are giving it really bad data”), I mostly worked on the road intersection and the foliage/patterns systems. The first one is simply slowly getting to where we want. The second is a reuse of an experiment we did a few months ago. It seems to be working but it is a bit early to be final on this. No screenshots this week.

Michael

This week we had a meeting to review combat. We want to decide soon whether there are still features missing, or whether we have what we need at this stage, and we can move on to just bug fixing and tweaking values to deliver something that we’re happy with.

So people from Level Design, QA, Animation, myself and Guillaume sat in a room and got into some fights, in game. It’s quite good to watch other people play and to have these discussions as a group because it highlights things you wouldn’t notice, or wouldn’t consider from your own playstyle. Also if you’ve been working on aspects of the system, you can get into a playstyle to test what you’re working on. I’d been working on blocking and parrying, and NPC reactions. My style is either quite static, or moving towards the NPCs. So watching Lee play and be constantly moving and backing away from enemies was a good reminder. The meeting generated a lot of tasks to work on, but I think we have a lot of the systems already in place. To avoid the impression that we have shallow or repetitive combat we just need to be better at highlighting these systems/tactics to players and showing the depth that is in there (like parrying, stuns, throwables in combat), and then improving the feel of them and how they can be used together. So no new features, but some good feedback and direction to keep improving what we have.


Mike P (Smarter than your average bear)

Sup folks! Greetings from our secret underground lair… well not so much, but it’s nice to think it is. So this week was again a mixed bag. Worked on some more cinematics and some camera moves to enhance your playing experience. To give you the ooooh’s and aaaah’s! As usual I can’t show them to you, but believe me, 1 out of 2 animators here say they are passable ;) So yay! That again, is about it from my end folks, so tune in again next week, same Bat Time, same Bat Channel!

Jules

Hi everybody! I've continued my work on combat this week again. Creating new animations for the death by the status effect of bleeding:

This animation ends in rag doll, which means if a NPC dies by bleeding near a bench... there is a possibility that he/she will hit his head violently on it.

I can also share you this new animation of when a NPC has their weapon destroyed:

If I were you, I would start already training with the parry because it's going to be very useful during combat! See you next week for more news about combat!

J.R.

Hey guys, this week I tried to go back to narrative but ended up tuning and polishing combat animations all week! Most of all, I polished and exaggerated all of the “reaction” animations for NPCs in combat, meaning whenever they get hit or parried, the point of impact (head/body) is more obvious, and in general just so the animations would communicate better in the middle of a fight. So far I did this pass on 1-handed combat, and I will have to retarget those animations for all combat archetypes.

Otherwise my week was split between new variations for dodge, polished some old taunt animations and did a little bit of tuning on the combat idle and other small non-combat related tasks.


Lisa  

This week I alternated between writing environmental narrative for a new “introductory” island and freaking out about public speaking -- Alex and I are giving a talk at MIGS next week about narrative in We Happy Few. It’s actually been great to step back and look at the big picture of the game -- not only for our talk, but as part of the game polishing process. We’re seeing all sorts of patterns we hadn’t really come up with on purpose, but of course we’re going to pretend that we knew all along what we were doing! If you’re at MIGS next week, please say hi.  

Thanks for tuning in!  

Compulsion Team

Hi everyone,

While the core development team continues to spend long hours polishing the game, others on the team are prepping for the launch in a wide variety of ways. We’re planning the migration to a new, more robust platform for our forums, negotiating and signing deals with different merchandising partners, making the final updates to text and subtitles so our localization partners can make our game internationally accessible, and also coordinating efforts with our partners at Gearbox across a number of major marketing assets that we’re super excited to release in 2018.

All that while juggling everyone’s holiday obligations as we strive to balance our focus on family and friends with our desire to maximize every aspect of the game itself. It makes for a substantial challenge, but Sam managed to unify our efforts and ensure everything’s on course just before taking a brief international leave--so while there’s no proper Production update this week, you can rest assured that we are coordinating efforts and lining things up for success!
Mike P
Hey folks! So this week was a mixed bag. Worked on some cutscenes, did some camera work, investigated some post camera effects and did some cycles. Did a bit of everything actually. Was fun and will provide some small moments for all of you to make gameplay feel a bit more special. That's about it for me for this week. So tune in next week, same Bat Time, Same Bat channel!

Jules
Hi! So this week we made a lot of progress in combat. Now, when a lot of NPC are attacking you, you have the feeling of fighting against a real crowd of people. They move everywhere, they taunt, they feint, and they communicate.
(I am sharing with you this GIF, this is a work in progress but I think that it can give you an idea of how the feint will look).



So like I said, the NPC can communicate during the fight. What I mean by that is for example, if you make a critical hit to an NPC, others are going to have a reaction like "Oh my god that must hurt". Same if an NPC assigns a critical hit to the player, the NPC is going to have a reaction like "Good job guys we will kill him". We made this improvement because we had the feeling of NPC are a little bit "dumb". Now I think we reach our goal. The combat is gonna be really different than what you can see already in the game. I'm very excited to finalize the animations and share them. See you next week, guys!

J.R.
Hey everyone, I’m out of my cinematic dungeon this week! ...well not quite, but I did spend some time helping out on gameplay a little bit. As you know we have been touching up on combat quite a lot recently. For me that meant: meetings, giving feedback, polishing up throws for NPCs, adding a new lob throw animation used for bangers, molotovs and whatnot, and replacing the infamous bayonet slash with a poke variation, which makes much more sense with the pointy stick.

Then I moved to object interaction, offering a bit of support for lock picking and creating a new jimmy bar animation that could work well with any object you can pry open. Oh and I also updated a “combing hair” animation. It doesn’t seem like much, but when you have this dude in the game, hair combing needs to be shiny. #DannyZuko

And as usual, nothing I can tell you about cinematics… except that I’m working on a scene involving an apple.

Vincent
Hellow! We’ve entered the polish phase on Arthur playthrough, so I got out of the cinematic cave as well this week, to dive into the spreadsheet pond of doom (many of us are in it so it’s still fun)! This involves also a lot of talking to other departments, awesome! The main focus is to try to find the moments that look a bit broken or cheap, and add some little animations to make it look better. Yes, I just defined polish, I know.
Roxanne
This week I set up prices for all pickups in the game. It was fun! (NOT! But necessary). Now I am working on the display of stats for all items so you will be able to compare them for their relative value and efficiency. Next week, it will be a big pass on quest rewards. I’ll try not to drown in that ocean of data! :)

Antoine
Hello! Wow it’s been a while. How’s everyone doing? I’ve been incredibly busy hence why I’m not posting too much in here due to the fear that I might be repeating myself “working on secret stuff, tune in later.”

What I can say though is that I was given a new shiny task that excites me quite a lot. That is to create a proper introduction to the world of the garden district and cover more basics of the gameplay in the form of “tutorials.” Putting tutorials in brackets because we’re trying to create exciting moments that hopefully don’t feel too much like tutorials. A recent user research report explained that most players had a hard time understanding the dynamics of the NPCs in relation to the player. We’ll try to address that by creating moments that introduce properly two factions of the garden district: the hooligans and the wastrels. That way we can understand who they are, what their motivations are and how these factions interact with each other in the world of We Happy Few. Also trying to keep the entire thing creepy, which is something that I always try to push in all the levels I’m working on.

Random bit of information: I’m also working on an island that is entirely covered in a deep white-ish fog with a level that was inspired loosely by Alice in Wonderland. That area is exclusive to one of our characters.
Céline
I’ve been working on various aspects of the game (audio, UI, level design support), but since last week I have been helping on stealth. Since Michael added some UI icons to help the player find out how he is perceived and detected by the NPCs around him, we noticed a few bugs; Wellington Wells’ inhabitants were deaf but could sometimes “see” behind them, Arthur could make silent jumps when crouched (I am sure you would have wished for that bug to stay in the game, but not happening!). Now that the perception of the NPC is more or less back to normal, we started tuning the stealth mechanisms and we plan to add more features and UI feedbacks to make sure that sneaking is as fun as combat. Please look forward to it!

Lionel
Following on last week, I was deep in the geometry generation part of the engine. This is a dark place where Math monsters lurk and everything is slower. So, I spent a lot of time waiting for the complete world generation to finish - because the geometry generation is done at the end. and I built the proper math for the corners to adapt to roads of different widths. And pulling my hair when doing something as stupid as forgetting a -1, because then I had to relaunch everything again…



Marc-André
For the first half of the week, I’ve been continuing to work on the new fillers set for the garden district and have been having a meeting about the upcoming new “tutorial island”. I will be the environment artist doing the heavy lifting of that environment when design planning will be over.

Afterwards, I started to work on new vine variants that will go on the garden district building to make them feel a lot more dilapidated. This is very tricky because it involves optimisation (polygon count, shader complexity, texture size, draw calls, etc.), a lot of manual work/steps (branches, leaves and roots all created by hand) and multiple iterations. By multiple iterations, I mean that there are requirements for: lush and dead variants, shape variants, color variation and more. Although it is challenging, it is very interesting to do.

PH
I’m still on the long road to refactor the different buildings on the garden district. We are getting there! With Marc-Andre vegetation works, we will soon have the possibility to step up the abandoned mood for this district. Nature regained control - vines, wild bush everywhere - but everything must be procedural. We had lots of discussions this week above a computer screen looking at abandoned village references. It’s going to be something, it’s already something. I will post some screenshots next week. See you then, folks.
Alex
We are at an odd phase in development. On one hand, we are scarily close to when we need to have everything built and working. At this point, we should only be fixing problems, not building new things. However, some problems can only be fixed by building new things; and many problems only become clear after you resolve other problems. You can’t tell if the car pulls to the left until you can make the wheels go round and round.

We’ve been doing a lot of focus tests on Arthur’s playthrough, and it’s become clear that we can do a better job of putting the player on the right track from the get-go – some players report coming out of the initial shelter and not knowing where to go or what to do. We also need to make the first couple of hours stickier – more cool stuff to see and do, less running around in the woods.

So, we are building (we hope) a new, sharper, more spectacular opening to the game. That involves a lot of back and forth between me, G, and the lucky designers handed this task. How can we teach you how to play the game while pulling you into the world? For the narrative department, that means new characters, new encounters, new dialog, and new environmental narrative; and a lot of consultations with the designers.
Simon
Hi everyone! This is Simon on behalf of Gearbox Publishing’s Quality Assurance (QA) Team. Our goal is to support Gearbox Publishing’s various partners/developers through a team of objective testers. We offer functional, first party certification, localization and compatibility test services to ensure that the player will have a smooth experience when the games reach their hands.
An efficient QA department needs to stay up to date with the games they are testing so we are working very closely with Compulsion to support their needs. They are keeping us informed of the various features and content they added to the latest versions and we make sure to test around those to keep them busy with a steady flow of bugs! A recent example of this is the rearrangement of the order you will be visiting the multiple islands of Wellington Wells. While it provides a better experience for you all, it may introduce technical issues. Our job is to hunt for any bugs that this change may have caused and make sure that the narrative of all the quests remain coherent. It’s important for us to be flexible and always adapt to what is being sent to us for testing!
While we always enjoy providing player feedback whenever Compulsion requests (we are gamers too!), our main job is to offer an objective view of the current state of the game through bug filing and various reports. We are here to help Compulsion and Gearbox’s production team deliver a great game and we are thrilled to be involved!

Thanks for tuning in!

Compulsion Team

Hi everyone,

While the core development team continues to spend long hours polishing the game, others on the team are prepping for the launch in a wide variety of ways. We’re planning the migration to a new, more robust platform for our forums, negotiating and signing deals with different merchandising partners, making the final updates to text and subtitles so our localization partners can make our game internationally accessible, and also coordinating efforts with our partners at Gearbox across a number of major marketing assets that we’re super excited to release in 2018.

All that while juggling everyone’s holiday obligations as we strive to balance our focus on family and friends with our desire to maximize every aspect of the game itself. It makes for a substantial challenge, but Sam managed to unify our efforts and ensure everything’s on course just before taking a brief international leave--so while there’s no proper Production update this week, you can rest assured that we are coordinating efforts and lining things up for success!
Mike P
Hey folks! So this week was a mixed bag. Worked on some cutscenes, did some camera work, investigated some post camera effects and did some cycles. Did a bit of everything actually. Was fun and will provide some small moments for all of you to make gameplay feel a bit more special. That's about it for me for this week. So tune in next week, same Bat Time, Same Bat channel!

Jules
Hi! So this week we made a lot of progress in combat. Now, when a lot of NPC are attacking you, you have the feeling of fighting against a real crowd of people. They move everywhere, they taunt, they feint, and they communicate.
(I am sharing with you this GIF, this is a work in progress but I think that it can give you an idea of how the feint will look).



So like I said, the NPC can communicate during the fight. What I mean by that is for example, if you make a critical hit to an NPC, others are going to have a reaction like "Oh my god that must hurt". Same if an NPC assigns a critical hit to the player, the NPC is going to have a reaction like "Good job guys we will kill him". We made this improvement because we had the feeling of NPC are a little bit "dumb". Now I think we reach our goal. The combat is gonna be really different than what you can see already in the game. I'm very excited to finalize the animations and share them. See you next week, guys!

J.R.
Hey everyone, I’m out of my cinematic dungeon this week! ...well not quite, but I did spend some time helping out on gameplay a little bit. As you know we have been touching up on combat quite a lot recently. For me that meant: meetings, giving feedback, polishing up throws for NPCs, adding a new lob throw animation used for bangers, molotovs and whatnot, and replacing the infamous bayonet slash with a poke variation, which makes much more sense with the pointy stick.

Then I moved to object interaction, offering a bit of support for lock picking and creating a new jimmy bar animation that could work well with any object you can pry open. Oh and I also updated a “combing hair” animation. It doesn’t seem like much, but when you have this dude in the game, hair combing needs to be shiny. #DannyZuko

And as usual, nothing I can tell you about cinematics… except that I’m working on a scene involving an apple.

Vincent
Hellow! We’ve entered the polish phase on Arthur playthrough, so I got out of the cinematic cave as well this week, to dive into the spreadsheet pond of doom (many of us are in it so it’s still fun)! This involves also a lot of talking to other departments, awesome! The main focus is to try to find the moments that look a bit broken or cheap, and add some little animations to make it look better. Yes, I just defined polish, I know.
Roxanne
This week I set up prices for all pickups in the game. It was fun! (NOT! But necessary). Now I am working on the display of stats for all items so you will be able to compare them for their relative value and efficiency. Next week, it will be a big pass on quest rewards. I’ll try not to drown in that ocean of data! :)

Antoine
Hello! Wow it’s been a while. How’s everyone doing? I’ve been incredibly busy hence why I’m not posting too much in here due to the fear that I might be repeating myself “working on secret stuff, tune in later.”

What I can say though is that I was given a new shiny task that excites me quite a lot. That is to create a proper introduction to the world of the garden district and cover more basics of the gameplay in the form of “tutorials.” Putting tutorials in brackets because we’re trying to create exciting moments that hopefully don’t feel too much like tutorials. A recent user research report explained that most players had a hard time understanding the dynamics of the NPCs in relation to the player. We’ll try to address that by creating moments that introduce properly two factions of the garden district: the hooligans and the wastrels. That way we can understand who they are, what their motivations are and how these factions interact with each other in the world of We Happy Few. Also trying to keep the entire thing creepy, which is something that I always try to push in all the levels I’m working on.

Random bit of information: I’m also working on an island that is entirely covered in a deep white-ish fog with a level that was inspired loosely by Alice in Wonderland. That area is exclusive to one of our characters.
Céline
I’ve been working on various aspects of the game (audio, UI, level design support), but since last week I have been helping on stealth. Since Michael added some UI icons to help the player find out how he is perceived and detected by the NPCs around him, we noticed a few bugs; Wellington Wells’ inhabitants were deaf but could sometimes “see” behind them, Arthur could make silent jumps when crouched (I am sure you would have wished for that bug to stay in the game, but not happening!). Now that the perception of the NPC is more or less back to normal, we started tuning the stealth mechanisms and we plan to add more features and UI feedbacks to make sure that sneaking is as fun as combat. Please look forward to it!

Lionel
Following on last week, I was deep in the geometry generation part of the engine. This is a dark place where Math monsters lurk and everything is slower. So, I spent a lot of time waiting for the complete world generation to finish - because the geometry generation is done at the end. and I built the proper math for the corners to adapt to roads of different widths. And pulling my hair when doing something as stupid as forgetting a -1, because then I had to relaunch everything again…



Marc-André
For the first half of the week, I’ve been continuing to work on the new fillers set for the garden district and have been having a meeting about the upcoming new “tutorial island”. I will be the environment artist doing the heavy lifting of that environment when design planning will be over.

Afterwards, I started to work on new vine variants that will go on the garden district building to make them feel a lot more dilapidated. This is very tricky because it involves optimisation (polygon count, shader complexity, texture size, draw calls, etc.), a lot of manual work/steps (branches, leaves and roots all created by hand) and multiple iterations. By multiple iterations, I mean that there are requirements for: lush and dead variants, shape variants, color variation and more. Although it is challenging, it is very interesting to do.

PH
I’m still on the long road to refactor the different buildings on the garden district. We are getting there! With Marc-Andre vegetation works, we will soon have the possibility to step up the abandoned mood for this district. Nature regained control - vines, wild bush everywhere - but everything must be procedural. We had lots of discussions this week above a computer screen looking at abandoned village references. It’s going to be something, it’s already something. I will post some screenshots next week. See you then, folks.
Alex
We are at an odd phase in development. On one hand, we are scarily close to when we need to have everything built and working. At this point, we should only be fixing problems, not building new things. However, some problems can only be fixed by building new things; and many problems only become clear after you resolve other problems. You can’t tell if the car pulls to the left until you can make the wheels go round and round.

We’ve been doing a lot of focus tests on Arthur’s playthrough, and it’s become clear that we can do a better job of putting the player on the right track from the get-go – some players report coming out of the initial shelter and not knowing where to go or what to do. We also need to make the first couple of hours stickier – more cool stuff to see and do, less running around in the woods.

So, we are building (we hope) a new, sharper, more spectacular opening to the game. That involves a lot of back and forth between me, G, and the lucky designers handed this task. How can we teach you how to play the game while pulling you into the world? For the narrative department, that means new characters, new encounters, new dialog, and new environmental narrative; and a lot of consultations with the designers.
Simon
Hi everyone! This is Simon on behalf of Gearbox Publishing’s Quality Assurance (QA) Team. Our goal is to support Gearbox Publishing’s various partners/developers through a team of objective testers. We offer functional, first party certification, localization and compatibility test services to ensure that the player will have a smooth experience when the games reach their hands.
An efficient QA department needs to stay up to date with the games they are testing so we are working very closely with Compulsion to support their needs. They are keeping us informed of the various features and content they added to the latest versions and we make sure to test around those to keep them busy with a steady flow of bugs! A recent example of this is the rearrangement of the order you will be visiting the multiple islands of Wellington Wells. While it provides a better experience for you all, it may introduce technical issues. Our job is to hunt for any bugs that this change may have caused and make sure that the narrative of all the quests remain coherent. It’s important for us to be flexible and always adapt to what is being sent to us for testing!
While we always enjoy providing player feedback whenever Compulsion requests (we are gamers too!), our main job is to offer an objective view of the current state of the game through bug filing and various reports. We are here to help Compulsion and Gearbox’s production team deliver a great game and we are thrilled to be involved!

Thanks for tuning in!

Compulsion Team

Hi everyone,

There are good things about having your office in an old gramophone factory. For instance, we can find inspiration for We Happy Few props from the 50+-year-old models of radios and TVs that are exhibited in the lobby of the building, or our neighbours will all be creating cool stuff. There are some drawbacks though, like the fact that proper window sealing did not exist when they built the building and so everybody in the office who’s sitting next to a window is freezing their… fingers off, as first snow and cold temperatures are already here.

Last weekend we shared a booth with our friends at Red Barrels at the MEGA MTL event. For those who are not local, this is an exhibition mainly for independent developers. Thanks to everyone who showed up! We were happy to see so many people. The event grew dramatically this year, and we can’t wait to see next year’s edition.




Sam

Hi folks! This week, Guillaume and I flew to Los Angeles to finally sign the movie deal for We Happy Few. We announced this back in March, but the long form agreements often take months to iron out the little details, all the while work on finding a writer, financing etc continues. So finally signing is an exciting milestone for us as a team, and for G and I personally after working through some tricky licensing details. You should all be aware that there is a good chance that the movie will never see the light of day (many more projects are “optioned” than actually get made), but we are very proud of the team for creating something that people outside the industry think is cool.

In development news, we’ve finished our first round of reviews on the game. The vast majority can be completed without debug (eg cheats), and we have all our AI archetypes running around. However, we need to improve Arthur’s and Miss Thigh High’s flow - this means we need to go back to the drawing board on the first couple of hours of Arthur’s playthrough, and create new content to make sure it’s a really great experience. If the first two hours isn’t good, it won’t matter how good the rest of it is. This is a pretty big deal, so we will keep you updated (eg Lisa’s post below explains a bit about how important it is to introduce both mechanics and the various parts of the world).

Slightly sick Mike

Hey folks! Hope you all had a wonderful week! I’ve been introduced to something called the ConPlague. Apparently that’s a thing - getting sick after running a booth at a convention. Anywhoo, this week I worked on another cutscene. Our poor characters are getting abused in new and creative ways! (I kinda secretly enjoy coming up with new ways to mistreat them). So this week involves some doctors using Arthur as a pincushion. Think Mia Wallace getting revived in Pulp Fiction. So yeah, good times! That’s it for me this week! Tune in next week, same Bat Time, same Bat Channel!

Jules

Hi ! This week, I’ve had time to go back to combat! One aspect of our combat circles that wasn’t working right was the supporting NPCs (NPCs that are hostile but just out of reach) weren’t threatening you very much. So, I created a new taunt for the NPCs: 



Also, as part of our reviews of combat, we want to create some communication between NPCs during the fight, to help make it feel more coordinated (rather than just a group of people randomly beating you and ignoring each other). So I am currently working on a few feint and communication reactions. I will keep you updated about that next week because we need to run some tests before it’s final! See you next week everyone.

Roxanne

Big week on the balancing side! First, we adjusted all our shopkeepers with new loot tables - in Early Access we erred on the side of making things available, but now that we can play through the game in its entirety, we can start to understand better what you will need at certain times.

We also removed a very important component of recipes: they cannot be unlocked anymore by finding ingredients. We used this system in Early Access because it was the most efficient way of making sure recipes unlocked as we were building them - we wouldn’t have to rebalance recipe unlocks with every update. However, finding common ingredients such as metal bits would unlock 10-15 recipes and that was getting out of control. Now recipes will be found in shops, as quest rewards and on crafting stations when you find them (meaning that finding crafting stations in the wild has much more value). New wearables were also added, mainly for your character’s feet comfort! ;)

Adam

I’ve been fixing a ton of bugs on the Mad Scotsman’s playthrough, and reworking a few of the more important missions, particularly his intro sequence. We want to make sure that each new character’s introduction hits the level of Arthur’s intro, both in terms of creating something engaging and teaching you what you need to know about that character. I also made slight changes in the flow of the levels, to either speed up or slow down the action.

Lionel

Our charming, delightful (especially under Joy), islands can be sometimes a bit empty. The wild areas are not very well distributed - Early Access players will be familiar with big stretches of meadow and forest that don’t have much in them except for berries.

We had two problems to solve. First, there are tiny hamlets made of 4 or 5 houses that are supposed to provide the player with loot and side quests but they are not very well identifiable and too sparse. The player tends to simply not see them and go through them. Second, the way we connect those tiny hamlets is not ideal and creates loooong roads between them.
This week, I tackled the first part. Now, those areas have a central place with the four houses knit together and the side quests are around in a spiraling fashion. It is much more readable and at the same time more compact, making the islands smaller.

Serge

This week I have completed the features related to the Doctor (can’t wait for you to see his resurrect unique ability) and moved onto NPC search behavior. While that effort is mainly for the soldiers archetype (surprise), who need to be more relentless in finding the player than other NPCs, the coordination between the members of the search party will be beneficial to other NPC archetypes too.

It’s really motivating to see all those archetypes getting personality over the course of development!

Michael

It was nice to go along to MEGA on Saturday and see plenty of cool games, and also talk to some nice people who were interested in We Happy Few. It’s always great to see people playing the game. It’s easy to forget that we already have something that people are enjoying, and to know that we’re improving on that is pretty motivating.

The wheel of fortune that controls my tasks landed on Combat this week, another of the core gameplay systems that needs some love. The goal this week was to improve the way the combat ring works - aka the way we distribute NPCs when they’re engaging you. The way the NPCs surround you when you’re in a fight has a lot of design requirements:

• It needs to be challenging to just unthinkingly run away from combat, hence the encircling. 
• It also needs to feel like you are surrounded, and you’re not just looking at one guy and hearing all the rest, but at the same time we don’t want cheap shots coming in from offscreen. 
• We want the NPCs to look like they know they are attacking as a group and acknowledge each other to make them feel more real and less like game objects (see Jules’ post above).

To start with I have changed the pattern to make it so that more of the NPCs position themselves in view, while still making sure the ring doesn’t have big holes in it. I will make sure they move to block you if you try to run away, picking your timing and utilising the shove move will still be a useful tactic, but it should be harder to run away unscathed unless you’re good at it.
For some reason NPCs had stopped blocking as well, which was making combat too easy, so I have fixed that, and I want them to come to each other’s aid if you really start laying into one of them.



Marc & PH

We are continuing our artistic efforts to refactor the procedural system in the Garden District. We are happy to see that our new roundabouts and buildings works seamlessly together. We still have a lot to tackle, but progress is very encouraging.

Lisa

I’m working on environmental narrative for a new location that will orient players to the world of the game. So I’m having to think about a world I’ve been immersed in for over a year, from the perspective of a newbie. Fortunately, we’ve had great fan feedback about what is unclear or confusing, so that’s immensely helpful. Thank you!

Thanks for tuning in! You can discuss it here.

Compulsion Team

Hi everyone,

There are good things about having your office in an old gramophone factory. For instance, we can find inspiration for We Happy Few props from the 50+-year-old models of radios and TVs that are exhibited in the lobby of the building, or our neighbours will all be creating cool stuff. There are some drawbacks though, like the fact that proper window sealing did not exist when they built the building and so everybody in the office who’s sitting next to a window is freezing their… fingers off, as first snow and cold temperatures are already here.

Last weekend we shared a booth with our friends at Red Barrels at the MEGA MTL event. For those who are not local, this is an exhibition mainly for independent developers. Thanks to everyone who showed up! We were happy to see so many people. The event grew dramatically this year, and we can’t wait to see next year’s edition.




Sam

Hi folks! This week, Guillaume and I flew to Los Angeles to finally sign the movie deal for We Happy Few. We announced this back in March, but the long form agreements often take months to iron out the little details, all the while work on finding a writer, financing etc continues. So finally signing is an exciting milestone for us as a team, and for G and I personally after working through some tricky licensing details. You should all be aware that there is a good chance that the movie will never see the light of day (many more projects are “optioned” than actually get made), but we are very proud of the team for creating something that people outside the industry think is cool.

In development news, we’ve finished our first round of reviews on the game. The vast majority can be completed without debug (eg cheats), and we have all our AI archetypes running around. However, we need to improve Arthur’s and Miss Thigh High’s flow - this means we need to go back to the drawing board on the first couple of hours of Arthur’s playthrough, and create new content to make sure it’s a really great experience. If the first two hours isn’t good, it won’t matter how good the rest of it is. This is a pretty big deal, so we will keep you updated (eg Lisa’s post below explains a bit about how important it is to introduce both mechanics and the various parts of the world).

Slightly sick Mike

Hey folks! Hope you all had a wonderful week! I’ve been introduced to something called the ConPlague. Apparently that’s a thing - getting sick after running a booth at a convention. Anywhoo, this week I worked on another cutscene. Our poor characters are getting abused in new and creative ways! (I kinda secretly enjoy coming up with new ways to mistreat them). So this week involves some doctors using Arthur as a pincushion. Think Mia Wallace getting revived in Pulp Fiction. So yeah, good times! That’s it for me this week! Tune in next week, same Bat Time, same Bat Channel!

Jules

Hi ! This week, I’ve had time to go back to combat! One aspect of our combat circles that wasn’t working right was the supporting NPCs (NPCs that are hostile but just out of reach) weren’t threatening you very much. So, I created a new taunt for the NPCs: 



Also, as part of our reviews of combat, we want to create some communication between NPCs during the fight, to help make it feel more coordinated (rather than just a group of people randomly beating you and ignoring each other). So I am currently working on a few feint and communication reactions. I will keep you updated about that next week because we need to run some tests before it’s final! See you next week everyone.

Roxanne

Big week on the balancing side! First, we adjusted all our shopkeepers with new loot tables - in Early Access we erred on the side of making things available, but now that we can play through the game in its entirety, we can start to understand better what you will need at certain times.

We also removed a very important component of recipes: they cannot be unlocked anymore by finding ingredients. We used this system in Early Access because it was the most efficient way of making sure recipes unlocked as we were building them - we wouldn’t have to rebalance recipe unlocks with every update. However, finding common ingredients such as metal bits would unlock 10-15 recipes and that was getting out of control. Now recipes will be found in shops, as quest rewards and on crafting stations when you find them (meaning that finding crafting stations in the wild has much more value). New wearables were also added, mainly for your character’s feet comfort! ;)

Adam

I’ve been fixing a ton of bugs on the Mad Scotsman’s playthrough, and reworking a few of the more important missions, particularly his intro sequence. We want to make sure that each new character’s introduction hits the level of Arthur’s intro, both in terms of creating something engaging and teaching you what you need to know about that character. I also made slight changes in the flow of the levels, to either speed up or slow down the action.

Lionel

Our charming, delightful (especially under Joy), islands can be sometimes a bit empty. The wild areas are not very well distributed - Early Access players will be familiar with big stretches of meadow and forest that don’t have much in them except for berries.

We had two problems to solve. First, there are tiny hamlets made of 4 or 5 houses that are supposed to provide the player with loot and side quests but they are not very well identifiable and too sparse. The player tends to simply not see them and go through them. Second, the way we connect those tiny hamlets is not ideal and creates loooong roads between them.
This week, I tackled the first part. Now, those areas have a central place with the four houses knit together and the side quests are around in a spiraling fashion. It is much more readable and at the same time more compact, making the islands smaller.

Serge

This week I have completed the features related to the Doctor (can’t wait for you to see his resurrect unique ability) and moved onto NPC search behavior. While that effort is mainly for the soldiers archetype (surprise), who need to be more relentless in finding the player than other NPCs, the coordination between the members of the search party will be beneficial to other NPC archetypes too.

It’s really motivating to see all those archetypes getting personality over the course of development!

Michael

It was nice to go along to MEGA on Saturday and see plenty of cool games, and also talk to some nice people who were interested in We Happy Few. It’s always great to see people playing the game. It’s easy to forget that we already have something that people are enjoying, and to know that we’re improving on that is pretty motivating.

The wheel of fortune that controls my tasks landed on Combat this week, another of the core gameplay systems that needs some love. The goal this week was to improve the way the combat ring works - aka the way we distribute NPCs when they’re engaging you. The way the NPCs surround you when you’re in a fight has a lot of design requirements:

• It needs to be challenging to just unthinkingly run away from combat, hence the encircling. 
• It also needs to feel like you are surrounded, and you’re not just looking at one guy and hearing all the rest, but at the same time we don’t want cheap shots coming in from offscreen. 
• We want the NPCs to look like they know they are attacking as a group and acknowledge each other to make them feel more real and less like game objects (see Jules’ post above).

To start with I have changed the pattern to make it so that more of the NPCs position themselves in view, while still making sure the ring doesn’t have big holes in it. I will make sure they move to block you if you try to run away, picking your timing and utilising the shove move will still be a useful tactic, but it should be harder to run away unscathed unless you’re good at it.
For some reason NPCs had stopped blocking as well, which was making combat too easy, so I have fixed that, and I want them to come to each other’s aid if you really start laying into one of them.



Marc & PH

We are continuing our artistic efforts to refactor the procedural system in the Garden District. We are happy to see that our new roundabouts and buildings works seamlessly together. We still have a lot to tackle, but progress is very encouraging.

Lisa

I’m working on environmental narrative for a new location that will orient players to the world of the game. So I’m having to think about a world I’ve been immersed in for over a year, from the perspective of a newbie. Fortunately, we’ve had great fan feedback about what is unclear or confusing, so that’s immensely helpful. Thank you!

Thanks for tuning in! You can discuss it here.

Compulsion Team

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!”


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!


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.


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).


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.


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

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!”


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!


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.


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).


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.


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