Hey everyone,  

Another week, another journal! Things are advancing very well over here. Did you happen to see the Uncle Jack takeover on our twitter this week? Sometimes Uncle Jack pays us a visit and decides to answer some questions on twitter. He changes our name for his and even our profile picture; at this point he should probably just open his own account.

It turns out, Uncle Jack likes:  

• Strawberry Joy 
• Hansel and Gretel by the Grimm Brothers 

 And does not like: 

• Downers 
• Cold tea 

No surprises there, then.


Alex

This week we had our beloved Uncle Jack into the studio, Julian Casey himself. However, no Uncle Jack did he record! Instead he added to his already sizable cache of Bobby barks. And, he gave his grave voice to a ... character that you will meet at the end of the game.  

And so, I was able to edit the last cutscene of the game. I hope you dig it.

Over the weekend I finished up writing lines for the creepy doctor convention. Hayden gave me a bunch of lines to rewrite for two encounters in the Parade District. Much of the time, I’m writing lines for an encounter before it’s finished blocking, so I’m guessing what lines it will need, after consulting with David and the LD. It’s much easier when the LDs can give me, line by line, a rough draft of each line they need. However, when I’m guessing, sometimes I notice logic issues, and sometimes I go off on an interesting toot. So one is easier, and the other is more creative.

In other news, Lisa and I will be giving a talk at the Montreal International Game Summit in November about creating the world of Wellington Wells. Come on up!


Valentino

Hey, I'm Valentino and I'm a Sound Designer! Wait what? An audio department?? After all these years? I know, I know... it's the first weekly from us...well... it's better late than never right?  

This week I imported a lot of lines (Give the lines to the LDs from Wwise (our audio middleware) to Unreal): 672 lines for the Parade district and 265 lines for a main character. Usually, I import 300-400 lines each week after 3-4 sessions with the actors. After that, I had to mix each lines in the game (to make sure all lines are audible).  

At the same time, I worked on the "crash effect". I wanted to create a new, very creepy atmosphere. For example, I added a "demon effect" for the VO on this state. I hope you will like it :)


Eric-ric-a-ric-arick-rolled 

Well, fixed a bunch of schtuff this week. Biggest thing was blocking in a new quest for the Parade District. A big rube goldberg type puzzle or monstrosity if you are Guillaume. The rest of the week has been polishing tons of bugs in old encounters so the next update should bring in some good stability to those old encounters.  

But most importantly Adam comes back on Monday!!! I miss you papa bear! 


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lL4L4Uv5rf0

Hayden

Hello folks, This week I had the opportunity to revisit some of our older encounters and fix bugs, which also means I had the opportunity to go back through those same blueprints and clean up any boneheaded decisions I made previously—I’m probably the weird-o in the pack that actually enjoys this; there’s something about iteration that makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside.  

That’s all I got, have a good weekend!


Rémi

Hello world! Last week, this week and next week are rigging weeks! I was quite productive and got to finish lots of rigs so far. I’ll be able to show you some screenshots this week, but I’ve also been recording ALL of my work, so Clara and I will be working together to make a nice time lapse video and hopefully share it with you guys sometime next week. Also got to rig and implement the first person arms for our 2 additional player characters! Before that, we were simply using Arthur’s arms with a material override. It feels waaayyyy better with the real arms now :)  

In the meantime, here are some screenshots of the rigs we’ll be showcasing next week!



Mike (New guy #2)

Hey folks! I spent this week learning the ropes and banging out my workflow in MOBU. Made my first gameplay animation for some NPC’s (Yay!) that is very dramatic! One might even say overly dramatic. Going to keep chipping away at some NPC animations for the next week.  

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

Jules 

Hi everybody, This week I mainly focused on conversation animations. Bringing characters alive during hilarious dialogue. I hope you’re going to enjoy it as much as I.


Clara Clara bo Bara Banana Nana fo Fara me mi mo mara Clara!

Hello all!  

I spent my week balancing between Unreal and After Effects, working on the User Interface and loading screens for the next update. With Evan, one of our Snowed-In programmer friends, we are focusing on the crafting screen right now. It's always satisfying to see the progression throughout the week, as it is slowly but surely coming together.



Meanwhile, I finished the new loading screen for the Garden District islands! Hurray! If someone had told me three years ago that I would go back to animation and motion design, I would have probably laughed and watched After Effects burns.  

But eh, here I am now, having a lot of fun making those cameras work.  

Onto to the Village now! And a happy Bastille Day to our French players!  

Cheers!


Michael

I spent a lot of the week putting new tips into the game. If you’ve played the prologue you can see how we tutorialise the movement mechanics, but when you reach the open-world area it becomes harder to do tutorials for the important survival elements of the game, as every player’s journey is different. In case you are having trouble keeping yourself alive we will have some new handy in-game tips for you.  

David and Morgan put together a document that listed a load of tips and when they should be displayed. After updating the data table that holds all the tips for the player, I then worked through the list looking for the place in the our code when we could detect that you were in a state that corresponded with the triggering event for the tip. If you’ve just left combat mode and your health is low, now would be a good time to give you the hint about healing items.  

It was an interesting task as it took me through a lot of different sections of the gameplay code, a real adventure.



Chris

Hi all! Haven't given an update in a few weeks due to vacation, but I'm pretty excited to be back at work. Why? Because I received a nice big 4k/HDR TV this week. My desk is getting a bit crowded now with a giant TV and devkits, but it's definitely worthwhile. The best part is that I was able to get a first pass at HDR working on our PC build. We still need to do some tweaking, but I'm happy with the first pass. Unreal's SDR tonemapper is already excellent, so most of the changes are subtle. This is a good thing... we don't want the game to completely change when you enable HDR! The most noticeable differences are that there are more details within the very bright and very dark areas, especially when there are bright areas right next to dark areas.  

I think we still have some work to do on this feature and we also have to make sure that it's worth spending the extra computing power. I'd love to share some screenshots, but unfortunately, I don't have a good way to showcase HDR in a regular screenshot on a normal monitor. The best I could do was take pictures, but even that doesn't do it justice.  

Here's a simple example (you'll have to ignore the reflections from the window on the left side of the TV screen).

SDR:



HDR:



In the picture of the SDR game, the detail of the yellow filing cabinet gets washed out because the lighting is too bright. In the picture of the HDR game, we still see the details and - here's the part that doesn't really convey in the pictures - the cabinet is actually as bright as in the SDR picture. Unfortunately, we lose that information in the pictures and it just looks different. We can easily debate which picture looks better, but everybody at the office seeing the difference in person has said to me that the HDR version of the game looks better (at least for this simple test case).

Guess you'll just have to see it for yourself!


Carylitz

This week was again a rollercoaster of changes on the props I was working on, but all for the better! I did the last big machine, and the console to control them, so spent a lot of time bothering Eric :D. And for a change i'm working in a new location! It's been a while, so I will be working on this location and the props of the encounter! I don’t want to reveal what this is all about, so here’s a crafty image hinting at what is to come:



Thanks for tuning in!  

Compulsion Games

Hey everyone,  

Another week, another journal! Things are advancing very well over here. Did you happen to see the Uncle Jack takeover on our twitter this week? Sometimes Uncle Jack pays us a visit and decides to answer some questions on twitter. He changes our name for his and even our profile picture; at this point he should probably just open his own account.

It turns out, Uncle Jack likes:  

• Strawberry Joy 
• Hansel and Gretel by the Grimm Brothers 

 And does not like: 

• Downers 
• Cold tea 

No surprises there, then.


Alex

This week we had our beloved Uncle Jack into the studio, Julian Casey himself. However, no Uncle Jack did he record! Instead he added to his already sizable cache of Bobby barks. And, he gave his grave voice to a ... character that you will meet at the end of the game.  

And so, I was able to edit the last cutscene of the game. I hope you dig it.

Over the weekend I finished up writing lines for the creepy doctor convention. Hayden gave me a bunch of lines to rewrite for two encounters in the Parade District. Much of the time, I’m writing lines for an encounter before it’s finished blocking, so I’m guessing what lines it will need, after consulting with David and the LD. It’s much easier when the LDs can give me, line by line, a rough draft of each line they need. However, when I’m guessing, sometimes I notice logic issues, and sometimes I go off on an interesting toot. So one is easier, and the other is more creative.

In other news, Lisa and I will be giving a talk at the Montreal International Game Summit in November about creating the world of Wellington Wells. Come on up!


Valentino

Hey, I'm Valentino and I'm a Sound Designer! Wait what? An audio department?? After all these years? I know, I know... it's the first weekly from us...well... it's better late than never right?  

This week I imported a lot of lines (Give the lines to the LDs from Wwise (our audio middleware) to Unreal): 672 lines for the Parade district and 265 lines for a main character. Usually, I import 300-400 lines each week after 3-4 sessions with the actors. After that, I had to mix each lines in the game (to make sure all lines are audible).  

At the same time, I worked on the "crash effect". I wanted to create a new, very creepy atmosphere. For example, I added a "demon effect" for the VO on this state. I hope you will like it :)


Eric-ric-a-ric-arick-rolled 

Well, fixed a bunch of schtuff this week. Biggest thing was blocking in a new quest for the Parade District. A big rube goldberg type puzzle or monstrosity if you are Guillaume. The rest of the week has been polishing tons of bugs in old encounters so the next update should bring in some good stability to those old encounters.  

But most importantly Adam comes back on Monday!!! I miss you papa bear! 


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lL4L4Uv5rf0

Hayden

Hello folks, This week I had the opportunity to revisit some of our older encounters and fix bugs, which also means I had the opportunity to go back through those same blueprints and clean up any boneheaded decisions I made previously—I’m probably the weird-o in the pack that actually enjoys this; there’s something about iteration that makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside.  

That’s all I got, have a good weekend!


Rémi

Hello world! Last week, this week and next week are rigging weeks! I was quite productive and got to finish lots of rigs so far. I’ll be able to show you some screenshots this week, but I’ve also been recording ALL of my work, so Clara and I will be working together to make a nice time lapse video and hopefully share it with you guys sometime next week. Also got to rig and implement the first person arms for our 2 additional player characters! Before that, we were simply using Arthur’s arms with a material override. It feels waaayyyy better with the real arms now :)  

In the meantime, here are some screenshots of the rigs we’ll be showcasing next week!



Mike (New guy #2)

Hey folks! I spent this week learning the ropes and banging out my workflow in MOBU. Made my first gameplay animation for some NPC’s (Yay!) that is very dramatic! One might even say overly dramatic. Going to keep chipping away at some NPC animations for the next week.  

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

Jules 

Hi everybody, This week I mainly focused on conversation animations. Bringing characters alive during hilarious dialogue. I hope you’re going to enjoy it as much as I.


Clara Clara bo Bara Banana Nana fo Fara me mi mo mara Clara!

Hello all!  

I spent my week balancing between Unreal and After Effects, working on the User Interface and loading screens for the next update. With Evan, one of our Snowed-In programmer friends, we are focusing on the crafting screen right now. It's always satisfying to see the progression throughout the week, as it is slowly but surely coming together.



Meanwhile, I finished the new loading screen for the Garden District islands! Hurray! If someone had told me three years ago that I would go back to animation and motion design, I would have probably laughed and watched After Effects burns.  

But eh, here I am now, having a lot of fun making those cameras work.  

Onto to the Village now! And a happy Bastille Day to our French players!  

Cheers!


Michael

I spent a lot of the week putting new tips into the game. If you’ve played the prologue you can see how we tutorialise the movement mechanics, but when you reach the open-world area it becomes harder to do tutorials for the important survival elements of the game, as every player’s journey is different. In case you are having trouble keeping yourself alive we will have some new handy in-game tips for you.  

David and Morgan put together a document that listed a load of tips and when they should be displayed. After updating the data table that holds all the tips for the player, I then worked through the list looking for the place in the our code when we could detect that you were in a state that corresponded with the triggering event for the tip. If you’ve just left combat mode and your health is low, now would be a good time to give you the hint about healing items.  

It was an interesting task as it took me through a lot of different sections of the gameplay code, a real adventure.



Chris

Hi all! Haven't given an update in a few weeks due to vacation, but I'm pretty excited to be back at work. Why? Because I received a nice big 4k/HDR TV this week. My desk is getting a bit crowded now with a giant TV and devkits, but it's definitely worthwhile. The best part is that I was able to get a first pass at HDR working on our PC build. We still need to do some tweaking, but I'm happy with the first pass. Unreal's SDR tonemapper is already excellent, so most of the changes are subtle. This is a good thing... we don't want the game to completely change when you enable HDR! The most noticeable differences are that there are more details within the very bright and very dark areas, especially when there are bright areas right next to dark areas.  

I think we still have some work to do on this feature and we also have to make sure that it's worth spending the extra computing power. I'd love to share some screenshots, but unfortunately, I don't have a good way to showcase HDR in a regular screenshot on a normal monitor. The best I could do was take pictures, but even that doesn't do it justice.  

Here's a simple example (you'll have to ignore the reflections from the window on the left side of the TV screen).

SDR:



HDR:



In the picture of the SDR game, the detail of the yellow filing cabinet gets washed out because the lighting is too bright. In the picture of the HDR game, we still see the details and - here's the part that doesn't really convey in the pictures - the cabinet is actually as bright as in the SDR picture. Unfortunately, we lose that information in the pictures and it just looks different. We can easily debate which picture looks better, but everybody at the office seeing the difference in person has said to me that the HDR version of the game looks better (at least for this simple test case).

Guess you'll just have to see it for yourself!


Carylitz

This week was again a rollercoaster of changes on the props I was working on, but all for the better! I did the last big machine, and the console to control them, so spent a lot of time bothering Eric :D. And for a change i'm working in a new location! It's been a while, so I will be working on this location and the props of the encounter! I don’t want to reveal what this is all about, so here’s a crafty image hinting at what is to come:



Thanks for tuning in!  

Compulsion Games

Hey all,  

Another very busy week here at Compulsion. On the non-development side we are finalizing some very exciting marketing details for the future. It might sound odd, but there is a lot of fun in looking after marketing details - particularly pieces that will be seen by potentially millions of people. As you can imagine, something might work for someone but not for someone else, so which is best? Is it too artsy? Not artsy enough? What does this convey to someone who has never seen the game before? All that fun jazz.  

This week we also welcome 2 new animators to the team! Jules and Mike. The team has grown a lot in the past 2 years. When we first started this project we were 9 and now we are 30 employees! The game has also grown a lot thanks to your support and feedback. Rest assured that we will support you and the game back after we release the final version :)


Sam

One of the less talked about topics in our weeklies is how we structure and organise tasks. Like many other teams, we use JIRA to help organise, plan and manage the thousands of tasks that we need to do to build the game.  

We’ve used JIRA since early 2016 (creating 7000 tasks in this time), but we’ve had a pretty loose structure - assign tasks, have a bit of chaos, and then try to tighten things up as we approach an update release. We also have only been writing up significant issues - eg cosmetic issues for AI, UI, world generation, etc weren’t worth bugging because those systems would change before release, and fixing them now would be a waste of dev time. However, now that those systems are reaching their final design, it’s time to record and fix these things… but this leads to information overload.  

I decided a couple of months ago that this wouldn’t work as we were trying to finish, polish and ship 1.0, so I have spent time in the last few weeks cleaning up the database, organizing, and doing all the OCD things that make me happy.  

Except the long weekend, where I spent Canada Day and its friends combing through our 1400 open tasks, prioritizing/questioning/chasing as necessary, and merging our story and Early Access databases to prepare for what is to come. I did not enjoy that so much. But, things are much better organized, and hopefully this will mean the next update will see a good increase in quality and in useability.   

I did have one great task I found though. The elusively named “sarah”, which had no description. I will ponder the meaning of this task forever.


Alex

I spent much of the week writing up the creepiest medical convention you’ll ever willingly attend. Annnnnd we’re scheduling recording sessions for Arthur, Miss Thigh Highs, the Mad Scotsman, his Special Friend, and particularly creepy Doctor.


Eric

This week has been stubbing in part of a mini boss fight before going back to working on the level I was working on before. It’s the big puzzle map from a week or two ago. The hard part (the puzzle) is done now, so I’m just stubbing in the rest of the quest itself, and working with Guillaume, Cary, and Whitney to art it up and create some custom machines for this puzzle.


Carylitz

I can finally show some of the props I have been working on! YAY! So for this week I tried to go a little bit faster and not lose quality in the process (my brain is dying), but I think so far so good. I did 3 big machines made out of other props and some new pieces. I have been following some concepts from Whitney and checking with Eric to see if the asset will work in the scene and the functions for the gameplay. I also did some corrections on secret props for Remi, so he can rig them! I think that's all for me this week, have a nice weekend!



 


Rémi

Hello all! This week started off slowly as we began planning our upcoming weeks. We did a huge clean up in our tasks and rearranged them. We also welcomed 2 new junior animators! We helped them setup their PCs and had them play the game. A little bit more formation on our animation pipelines and they should be good to go! It’ll be fun to see what they can do.  

During the other half of the week, I got back to rigging. Sadly most of the props I rigged this week were Narrative/Story related. The only one thing I can show you is this magnificent Fire Extinguisher (Modelled by Marc-André):



I also took some time to fix some rigging bugs. Bugs that used to slow down our animation process. For example, the feet controller orientation on one of our Narrative Rigs was facing the wrong direction. Which obviously makes it more complicated to pose.  

That’s it! There’s more rigging to come in the upcoming weeks and I’ll try to keep you updated as much as possible.

Mike (*Whispers*One of the new guys)

Hey folks! I’m Mike one of the new Junior Animators that joined the team this week. It’s been a great week full of getting to know the game, getting to know all my new teammates and getting settled in. Not much else to add right now other than I’m super stoked about joining the team and having had the chance to play the game a bit, let me assure you, you won’t be disappointed! I’ll be working hard to bring you the best animation I can muster! Have a good one!

Jules

Hi everybody, I'm one of the new animators! I’m really happy to join Compulsion Games and this amazing team. This week I mainly met people and played the game. I didn't know We Happy Few before joining Compulsion, but now after playing many hours I'm totally addicted. At every new game I discover a new epic situation or dialogue that makes me laugh.

Thanks Pudge  

Compulsion Games

Hey all,  

Another very busy week here at Compulsion. On the non-development side we are finalizing some very exciting marketing details for the future. It might sound odd, but there is a lot of fun in looking after marketing details - particularly pieces that will be seen by potentially millions of people. As you can imagine, something might work for someone but not for someone else, so which is best? Is it too artsy? Not artsy enough? What does this convey to someone who has never seen the game before? All that fun jazz.  

This week we also welcome 2 new animators to the team! Jules and Mike. The team has grown a lot in the past 2 years. When we first started this project we were 9 and now we are 30 employees! The game has also grown a lot thanks to your support and feedback. Rest assured that we will support you and the game back after we release the final version :)


Sam

One of the less talked about topics in our weeklies is how we structure and organise tasks. Like many other teams, we use JIRA to help organise, plan and manage the thousands of tasks that we need to do to build the game.  

We’ve used JIRA since early 2016 (creating 7000 tasks in this time), but we’ve had a pretty loose structure - assign tasks, have a bit of chaos, and then try to tighten things up as we approach an update release. We also have only been writing up significant issues - eg cosmetic issues for AI, UI, world generation, etc weren’t worth bugging because those systems would change before release, and fixing them now would be a waste of dev time. However, now that those systems are reaching their final design, it’s time to record and fix these things… but this leads to information overload.  

I decided a couple of months ago that this wouldn’t work as we were trying to finish, polish and ship 1.0, so I have spent time in the last few weeks cleaning up the database, organizing, and doing all the OCD things that make me happy.  

Except the long weekend, where I spent Canada Day and its friends combing through our 1400 open tasks, prioritizing/questioning/chasing as necessary, and merging our story and Early Access databases to prepare for what is to come. I did not enjoy that so much. But, things are much better organized, and hopefully this will mean the next update will see a good increase in quality and in useability.   

I did have one great task I found though. The elusively named “sarah”, which had no description. I will ponder the meaning of this task forever.


Alex

I spent much of the week writing up the creepiest medical convention you’ll ever willingly attend. Annnnnd we’re scheduling recording sessions for Arthur, Miss Thigh Highs, the Mad Scotsman, his Special Friend, and particularly creepy Doctor.


Eric

This week has been stubbing in part of a mini boss fight before going back to working on the level I was working on before. It’s the big puzzle map from a week or two ago. The hard part (the puzzle) is done now, so I’m just stubbing in the rest of the quest itself, and working with Guillaume, Cary, and Whitney to art it up and create some custom machines for this puzzle.


Carylitz

I can finally show some of the props I have been working on! YAY! So for this week I tried to go a little bit faster and not lose quality in the process (my brain is dying), but I think so far so good. I did 3 big machines made out of other props and some new pieces. I have been following some concepts from Whitney and checking with Eric to see if the asset will work in the scene and the functions for the gameplay. I also did some corrections on secret props for Remi, so he can rig them! I think that's all for me this week, have a nice weekend!



 


Rémi

Hello all! This week started off slowly as we began planning our upcoming weeks. We did a huge clean up in our tasks and rearranged them. We also welcomed 2 new junior animators! We helped them setup their PCs and had them play the game. A little bit more formation on our animation pipelines and they should be good to go! It’ll be fun to see what they can do.  

During the other half of the week, I got back to rigging. Sadly most of the props I rigged this week were Narrative/Story related. The only one thing I can show you is this magnificent Fire Extinguisher (Modelled by Marc-André):



I also took some time to fix some rigging bugs. Bugs that used to slow down our animation process. For example, the feet controller orientation on one of our Narrative Rigs was facing the wrong direction. Which obviously makes it more complicated to pose.  

That’s it! There’s more rigging to come in the upcoming weeks and I’ll try to keep you updated as much as possible.

Mike (*Whispers*One of the new guys)

Hey folks! I’m Mike one of the new Junior Animators that joined the team this week. It’s been a great week full of getting to know the game, getting to know all my new teammates and getting settled in. Not much else to add right now other than I’m super stoked about joining the team and having had the chance to play the game a bit, let me assure you, you won’t be disappointed! I’ll be working hard to bring you the best animation I can muster! Have a good one!

Jules

Hi everybody, I'm one of the new animators! I’m really happy to join Compulsion Games and this amazing team. This week I mainly met people and played the game. I didn't know We Happy Few before joining Compulsion, but now after playing many hours I'm totally addicted. At every new game I discover a new epic situation or dialogue that makes me laugh.

Thanks Pudge  

Compulsion Games

Hi everyone,  

Things are going well in the old Compulsion factory. We are working and planning the August update… and something else ;)  

As you know, the Joy related update will be the last major content update before the final release of the game. Some key features of that update are: new UI, new Joy effects, fast travel, AI overhaul and much more! But let’s not spoil it all, we need to keep some of it for the update release video :)  

Lately a lot of players have been asking us why we didn’t participate in the Steam sale, or in sales in general. The reason for this is because the game is currently already at a reduced price for Early Access, both because the game isn’t finished and also because we’re holding back the main story content of the game. We make a point to mention it periodically, but the price will go up as we get closer to the final release of the game. We also believe that discounting now would not be fair to the Early Access and Kickstarter players that have supported us so far, when the game had even less content than it has today.  

We want to be as open as possible with you guys about our decisions and always make a point to explain them. If you have any questions about why we do things, we are here ready to answer.


Guillaume

Today I can proudly show you what I have been working on for the past week. Tree variants!  

I know, I kind of showed you some WIP in another weekly but this time I’ve finished the different leaf and bark textures and they are spawning in the world.  

This is gonna change the way the Garden District looks and hopefully will make the game feel better and more alive.







Marc-André

These past two weeks, I’ve been doing the ground floor lobby of a very special upcoming encounter. It is my first time working with a brutalism interior and it’s been really fun to experiment with the architecture style! As we move into the new biome, buildings are much taller which allows us to create very nice shapes and composition. For the lobby, I created forty-five new custom meshes, including a new set of railing and new textures, such as marble for the floor.  

But… this location is so special I can’t show it to you guys. Be patient and one day you’ll get to discover it! Today I’m moving to the upper floors of said encounter. I have a good vibe about this! It will be one of a kind.

Whitney

Hi everyone!  

I don't post very much because my days generally consist of meetings, spreadsheets, reviews, feedback, planning, collecting references, crudely painting over 3D locations, and hastily throwing together concepts collaged from random photo sources that are purely for internal reference and in no state for public viewing. That’s the sad truth about so much concept art. Either that or the concepts are for unreleased, super secret and exciting locations that we can't talk about :( So I apologize, but rest assured, we're very busy working hard to make the game beautiful!! And soon, I promise, we'll have beautiful concepts to show.

Sarah

Well shucks, it's been a while since I've posted an update. I've been knee deep in UI mockups and meetings for what feels like an eternity now, but things are starting to take shape in a really sexy way. Here's the Map screen and Fast Travel screen Mock-ups I finalized not moments ago!  

I was featured with Michael in a video about the new Inventory Screen a couple of weeks ago, but what the video failed to include was Clara's heavy involvement in its development and realization. This is entirely due to the fact that Clara is the one making these videos, and is too camera-shy to take any credit for the great work she's doing, so shout out to Clara. You go, Glen Coco.  

Speaking of Clara, together we're juggling back and forth between the other UI screens AND some faaaaaaaancy fancy 2D animations (unrelated to the UI screens), so stay tuned!








Chris and Rob

Hi all! So we've almost finished the work to get a UWP build to QA. Right now, we just have to rebuild a few third party libraries to fix some app certification errors. Good news is that this means that we've begun working on our next task: HDR! There's lots of math involved to get this working properly, but luckily we have lots of Unreal examples to work from. Personally, I think that the art and style of this game is very conducive to the increased colour range and contrast of HDR. So I'm really excited to see how this turns out! But first things first... math and shaders. We'll keep you posted on our progress in the next updates!

Serge

Not much to say this week, I focused mostly on bug fixing and iteration of conformity rules ... it doesn’t sound like much, and it’s a little boring to look at, but trust me... it’s interesting.  

Take the behavior around corpses left behind by the player; we had prototype where you can make them sleep (rather than kill them) so they can wake up at some point later in the game. While in theory it looks fun, the lack of feedback make it near impossible for the player to understand plus it conflict with other gameplay so I had to cut that out from the code!

Michael

I’ve been working on improving the systems behind the different states of Joy. David had written up a design a long time ago, and we’re finally getting round to working on it. The idea is to get it so that you are more aware of whether you will crash, overdose or go into a withdrawal when you’re taking Joy, and to make those states more punishing gameplay-wise, because remember: Drugs are bad!  

Joy is a big part of the game, so you won't want to avoid it all together, but you’ll have to be smart about how and when you take it.  

I’ve started off by separating out each of the four states (Joy, overdose, withdrawal and crash) into separate Unreal blueprints, so that I can hand them over to Emmanuel to make the effects of each of them more distinct, beautiful, and scary.


Alex

I’ve been editing a series of encounters for Miss Thigh Highs’ playthrough. She climbs a foggy crag to find a young woman, a middle-aged woman, and an old woman. They seem to know quite a bit about her present and her future. They use the word “hurly-burly.” Sometimes they speak in unison.  

An encounter hub is an encounter you keep coming back to for multiple missions, like Johnny Bolton, the lad in the treehouse.

One of the things I most enjoy about our game’s narrative is that we are in a town where everyone knows each other. Writers of games which start with the protagonist having amnesia don’t know what they’re missing. When people know each other, it’s easier to motivate quests. “I will give you this shiny new sword if you go to this dungeon and steal a goblet for me” becomes, “You owe me, you son of a bitch!” which makes for much more compelling television game writing, I think.


Adam

Well, I have been on paternity for 3 weeks now, but I still manage to check in with the team on slack every day or so. It’s actually been very nice to chat with the team about theory and rules without the backlash of actually being there. It gives me a new perspective on the whole thing.

Eric

Week 3 of Adam being out of the office. It’s been really good having him not be here. Jk. You know I love you Adam. This is essentially my weekly as I’ve been out of the office moving to Montreal most of the week. Either that or Quebec Holidays. I guess I did some bug fixing too, and I’m starting to work on a small boss fight.

Since Roxanne isn’t here I’ll mention what she was working on. While ramping up she was also working on an encounter called Love Birds that David has wanted in forever. There were already 2 other attempts at getting it in that just never made it. Roxanne has done a full block in pass on this and it looks pretty good. Once art/anim spread their love all over it, it’ll be pretty awesome.


Vincent

Ahoy! We spent some time this week doing some HR… Yup, we are going to welcome two new animators in our ranks… They’ll be presenting themselves in the coming weeks I’m sure. They will help us with all the animation needs for the next encounters, which will allow a part of the team to stay full time on cinematics.  

Speaking of cinematics, we are all three working on them at the moment, starting new ones and editing some on which the script has changed. To help with the latter, I worked a bit on a python script that allow to easily shift keyframes around on a whole scene and multiple animation layers… which is a pain to do by hand in Motionbuilder!

Thanks for tuning in!  

Compulsion Game

Hi everyone,  

Things are going well in the old Compulsion factory. We are working and planning the August update… and something else ;)  

As you know, the Joy related update will be the last major content update before the final release of the game. Some key features of that update are: new UI, new Joy effects, fast travel, AI overhaul and much more! But let’s not spoil it all, we need to keep some of it for the update release video :)  

Lately a lot of players have been asking us why we didn’t participate in the Steam sale, or in sales in general. The reason for this is because the game is currently already at a reduced price for Early Access, both because the game isn’t finished and also because we’re holding back the main story content of the game. We make a point to mention it periodically, but the price will go up as we get closer to the final release of the game. We also believe that discounting now would not be fair to the Early Access and Kickstarter players that have supported us so far, when the game had even less content than it has today.  

We want to be as open as possible with you guys about our decisions and always make a point to explain them. If you have any questions about why we do things, we are here ready to answer.


Guillaume

Today I can proudly show you what I have been working on for the past week. Tree variants!  

I know, I kind of showed you some WIP in another weekly but this time I’ve finished the different leaf and bark textures and they are spawning in the world.  

This is gonna change the way the Garden District looks and hopefully will make the game feel better and more alive.







Marc-André

These past two weeks, I’ve been doing the ground floor lobby of a very special upcoming encounter. It is my first time working with a brutalism interior and it’s been really fun to experiment with the architecture style! As we move into the new biome, buildings are much taller which allows us to create very nice shapes and composition. For the lobby, I created forty-five new custom meshes, including a new set of railing and new textures, such as marble for the floor.  

But… this location is so special I can’t show it to you guys. Be patient and one day you’ll get to discover it! Today I’m moving to the upper floors of said encounter. I have a good vibe about this! It will be one of a kind.

Whitney

Hi everyone!  

I don't post very much because my days generally consist of meetings, spreadsheets, reviews, feedback, planning, collecting references, crudely painting over 3D locations, and hastily throwing together concepts collaged from random photo sources that are purely for internal reference and in no state for public viewing. That’s the sad truth about so much concept art. Either that or the concepts are for unreleased, super secret and exciting locations that we can't talk about :( So I apologize, but rest assured, we're very busy working hard to make the game beautiful!! And soon, I promise, we'll have beautiful concepts to show.

Sarah

Well shucks, it's been a while since I've posted an update. I've been knee deep in UI mockups and meetings for what feels like an eternity now, but things are starting to take shape in a really sexy way. Here's the Map screen and Fast Travel screen Mock-ups I finalized not moments ago!  

I was featured with Michael in a video about the new Inventory Screen a couple of weeks ago, but what the video failed to include was Clara's heavy involvement in its development and realization. This is entirely due to the fact that Clara is the one making these videos, and is too camera-shy to take any credit for the great work she's doing, so shout out to Clara. You go, Glen Coco.  

Speaking of Clara, together we're juggling back and forth between the other UI screens AND some faaaaaaaancy fancy 2D animations (unrelated to the UI screens), so stay tuned!








Chris and Rob

Hi all! So we've almost finished the work to get a UWP build to QA. Right now, we just have to rebuild a few third party libraries to fix some app certification errors. Good news is that this means that we've begun working on our next task: HDR! There's lots of math involved to get this working properly, but luckily we have lots of Unreal examples to work from. Personally, I think that the art and style of this game is very conducive to the increased colour range and contrast of HDR. So I'm really excited to see how this turns out! But first things first... math and shaders. We'll keep you posted on our progress in the next updates!

Serge

Not much to say this week, I focused mostly on bug fixing and iteration of conformity rules ... it doesn’t sound like much, and it’s a little boring to look at, but trust me... it’s interesting.  

Take the behavior around corpses left behind by the player; we had prototype where you can make them sleep (rather than kill them) so they can wake up at some point later in the game. While in theory it looks fun, the lack of feedback make it near impossible for the player to understand plus it conflict with other gameplay so I had to cut that out from the code!

Michael

I’ve been working on improving the systems behind the different states of Joy. David had written up a design a long time ago, and we’re finally getting round to working on it. The idea is to get it so that you are more aware of whether you will crash, overdose or go into a withdrawal when you’re taking Joy, and to make those states more punishing gameplay-wise, because remember: Drugs are bad!  

Joy is a big part of the game, so you won't want to avoid it all together, but you’ll have to be smart about how and when you take it.  

I’ve started off by separating out each of the four states (Joy, overdose, withdrawal and crash) into separate Unreal blueprints, so that I can hand them over to Emmanuel to make the effects of each of them more distinct, beautiful, and scary.


Alex

I’ve been editing a series of encounters for Miss Thigh Highs’ playthrough. She climbs a foggy crag to find a young woman, a middle-aged woman, and an old woman. They seem to know quite a bit about her present and her future. They use the word “hurly-burly.” Sometimes they speak in unison.  

An encounter hub is an encounter you keep coming back to for multiple missions, like Johnny Bolton, the lad in the treehouse.

One of the things I most enjoy about our game’s narrative is that we are in a town where everyone knows each other. Writers of games which start with the protagonist having amnesia don’t know what they’re missing. When people know each other, it’s easier to motivate quests. “I will give you this shiny new sword if you go to this dungeon and steal a goblet for me” becomes, “You owe me, you son of a bitch!” which makes for much more compelling television game writing, I think.


Adam

Well, I have been on paternity for 3 weeks now, but I still manage to check in with the team on slack every day or so. It’s actually been very nice to chat with the team about theory and rules without the backlash of actually being there. It gives me a new perspective on the whole thing.

Eric

Week 3 of Adam being out of the office. It’s been really good having him not be here. Jk. You know I love you Adam. This is essentially my weekly as I’ve been out of the office moving to Montreal most of the week. Either that or Quebec Holidays. I guess I did some bug fixing too, and I’m starting to work on a small boss fight.

Since Roxanne isn’t here I’ll mention what she was working on. While ramping up she was also working on an encounter called Love Birds that David has wanted in forever. There were already 2 other attempts at getting it in that just never made it. Roxanne has done a full block in pass on this and it looks pretty good. Once art/anim spread their love all over it, it’ll be pretty awesome.


Vincent

Ahoy! We spent some time this week doing some HR… Yup, we are going to welcome two new animators in our ranks… They’ll be presenting themselves in the coming weeks I’m sure. They will help us with all the animation needs for the next encounters, which will allow a part of the team to stay full time on cinematics.  

Speaking of cinematics, we are all three working on them at the moment, starting new ones and editing some on which the script has changed. To help with the latter, I worked a bit on a python script that allow to easily shift keyframes around on a whole scene and multiple animation layers… which is a pain to do by hand in Motionbuilder!

Thanks for tuning in!  

Compulsion Game

Hello everyone!  

We have a little update concerning future plans, more specifically our Early Access/Game Preview updates.  

Originally we were planning to release two updates before the final release of the game: the Joy related update, and an update that would have contained the Parade District (a brand new biome). We have decided to push out only one major update between now and final release. This will be the Joy update, a bit later in the schedule (it will now come out around mid August), to make it bigger and better, and keep the Parade District for the final release.  

There is, of course, a reason for this decision. Early Access is amazing, but it’s becoming very complicated to maintain both a regular update schedule and lock down the story. The Early Access build is currently separate to the story build; they share a code base, but the content is slightly different. So far, the content has been able to coexist side by side, but as we add polish and really lace everything together, but this is changing.  

The Parade District, in particular, is intertwined so heavily with the story that we don’t think we can deliver a good “Early Access” version, unlike the other biomes. By moving to only one final major update, we can merge the Early Access and the story builds earlier, so that we can concentrate all of our efforts on making the story the best it can be.  

If you have any questions about this, please let us know in the comments.


Roxanne  

Howdy! New designer here! Happy to be part of this great adventure. Ramping up this week, but also working on revamping a quest that never quite made it to the game: Lovebirds. Or did, briefly, but then we took it out to redo it. Hope you’ll like it! :)

Eric

Oh yeah, working on another new huge level that Guillaume is loving. He loves it when he gets these huge levels to art up. What a guy. Such a team player. I think he really likes working with me.



Or not…  

Anyway…….Instead of a crazy roller coaster this one is centered around a big slide puzzle in the center of a big facility. It’s been fun as hell to make. Should be pretty fun to play too, so yeah, that’s been my week. Scripting this beast.

Hayden

Hi folks.  

This week was a bit short for me, but I was still able to start on the block-out for a new Parade District encounter and it’s coming along swell. It’s one of my favorite type of encounters; another gauntlet of sorts…  

You can see your goal, just out of reach, but getting there is never as easy as it looks.

Designing this sort of encounter is more about striking the perfect scale for the area of gameplay (the game-field, if you will), timing elements, such as hazards, and creating safe locations for the player. Equally as important, is planning the routes of NPCs and the placement of loot and narrative objects that fall along paths most players would navigate - so it’s a lot like choreographing a delicate ballet of rewards, hazards, and… timing. I guess, something like that.  

Back to it!


Lionel

Not quite crop circles but the placement patterns I worked on this week might spice up the countryside areas around the Garden District. Procedurally generated but game designer controlled, they are far from complete but look promising. The goal of these things is to provide smaller, more systemic, areas for gameplay, to fill in the areas we currently have in-game and provide simple and varying challenges for obtaining different types of resources... 



Rob, Evan, and Chris (Our new friends from Snowed-In Studios in Ottawa, who are helping us ship the game)

This week was focussed on getting UWP's XBoxLive connection to work, so we can verify that our Achievements code will work. This has been a bit of a battle, with Microsoft's Achievement Sample (outside of Unreal) successfully signing in, but our code failing to sign in even while using the TitleId from the sample.

The good news is we had a breakthrough just this afternoon, and after setting up our own XboxLive sample based directly off of Microsoft's fork of the Unreal Engine, it appears the problem was in the Live (UWP) part of the Engine itself. So, I've grabbed the most recent version of Live for UWP, and been able to sign in to Live with the same credentials.

So the next task for next week is to merge these changes back into our engine and verify that sign in works, then to switch over to the proper credentials, and turn Live services on for our game. After that, we will focus on issues from the UWP stress test, and then on to investigation/merging to start to bring in HDR rendering. Finally, Evan is jumping on to the project today. He's a programmer who'll be helping out with the UI system.


Carylitz

Secret props for me again so I can't show, but I can say that I spent most the week sculpting, doing retopo and fighting with Maya to work with my decimated mesh and the retopo tool, but almost there!  


Alex

I have been off in the wilds of the Hamptons, but nothing stops progress! On Monday and Tuesday, we spent three and a half hours with the fabulous Samantha Lee, Woman of 1000 Voices. She is at least one of the voices of our Posh Wellette now, and she is at least one of the witches you’ll meet on a rocky crag.

I notice I’m recording a lot more lines per hour than when we started. At the beginning, I was getting something like 60-80 an hour. Now we’re up to 120-150 an hour. What’s happening?  

Mostly, we’re working with better actors. Over the years, we have found truly superb voice actors, who work fast and can do multiple voices. They’ve also learned our quirks. For example, typical voice directors seem to want the actor to repeat each line a bunch of times. I want the actor to put everything into the line once, and then tell him how it should change, if it’s not what I want. I find that when an actor does two takes in a row, often neither is right. There is a sort of quantum interference. They’re not deciding what delivery they most believe, they’re just trying to create a range of deliveries.  

We’ve also learned a lot about working with British studios and British agents. When we started, I didn’t know how to get a casting breakdown out. In the US, you can put a casting breakdown up on Breakdown Services and get a bazillion submissions. You can do that in the UK, too, through something called Spotlight.  

I would imagine we’re also benefitting from the game getting a bit of attention. We get submissions from actors who might not have given us the time of day some years ago.  

And now, I’m writing encounter dialog. That’s always fun. It’s also surprisingly hard. It is very easy to write “oh look at that I should do this” sort of lines, but creating surprising and compelling characters and offbeat encounters requires more thinking than writing.  

Thanks for tuning in!

The Compulsion Team

N.B: We also wanted to share this cute story from a member of the Reddit community.

"So I've played this game a lot over the last eleven-ish months. My boyfriend has watched me play it a bit and I'm sure he's picked up on a lot of the game by hearing it in the background so often.

So this weekend he proposed (yay!) and said some stuff about how he wants to spend the rest of our lives together and such. then he goes, "And I promise I will help you find peachy so you can get your ephemeral linen!" :)

So, thanks we happy few for being a part of a huge moment in my life. this game is awesome."

Hello everyone!  

We have a little update concerning future plans, more specifically our Early Access/Game Preview updates.  

Originally we were planning to release two updates before the final release of the game: the Joy related update, and an update that would have contained the Parade District (a brand new biome). We have decided to push out only one major update between now and final release. This will be the Joy update, a bit later in the schedule (it will now come out around mid August), to make it bigger and better, and keep the Parade District for the final release.  

There is, of course, a reason for this decision. Early Access is amazing, but it’s becoming very complicated to maintain both a regular update schedule and lock down the story. The Early Access build is currently separate to the story build; they share a code base, but the content is slightly different. So far, the content has been able to coexist side by side, but as we add polish and really lace everything together, but this is changing.  

The Parade District, in particular, is intertwined so heavily with the story that we don’t think we can deliver a good “Early Access” version, unlike the other biomes. By moving to only one final major update, we can merge the Early Access and the story builds earlier, so that we can concentrate all of our efforts on making the story the best it can be.  

If you have any questions about this, please let us know in the comments.


Roxanne  

Howdy! New designer here! Happy to be part of this great adventure. Ramping up this week, but also working on revamping a quest that never quite made it to the game: Lovebirds. Or did, briefly, but then we took it out to redo it. Hope you’ll like it! :)

Eric

Oh yeah, working on another new huge level that Guillaume is loving. He loves it when he gets these huge levels to art up. What a guy. Such a team player. I think he really likes working with me.



Or not…  

Anyway…….Instead of a crazy roller coaster this one is centered around a big slide puzzle in the center of a big facility. It’s been fun as hell to make. Should be pretty fun to play too, so yeah, that’s been my week. Scripting this beast.

Hayden

Hi folks.  

This week was a bit short for me, but I was still able to start on the block-out for a new Parade District encounter and it’s coming along swell. It’s one of my favorite type of encounters; another gauntlet of sorts…  

You can see your goal, just out of reach, but getting there is never as easy as it looks.

Designing this sort of encounter is more about striking the perfect scale for the area of gameplay (the game-field, if you will), timing elements, such as hazards, and creating safe locations for the player. Equally as important, is planning the routes of NPCs and the placement of loot and narrative objects that fall along paths most players would navigate - so it’s a lot like choreographing a delicate ballet of rewards, hazards, and… timing. I guess, something like that.  

Back to it!


Lionel

Not quite crop circles but the placement patterns I worked on this week might spice up the countryside areas around the Garden District. Procedurally generated but game designer controlled, they are far from complete but look promising. The goal of these things is to provide smaller, more systemic, areas for gameplay, to fill in the areas we currently have in-game and provide simple and varying challenges for obtaining different types of resources... 



Rob, Evan, and Chris (Our new friends from Snowed-In Studios in Ottawa, who are helping us ship the game)

This week was focussed on getting UWP's XBoxLive connection to work, so we can verify that our Achievements code will work. This has been a bit of a battle, with Microsoft's Achievement Sample (outside of Unreal) successfully signing in, but our code failing to sign in even while using the TitleId from the sample.

The good news is we had a breakthrough just this afternoon, and after setting up our own XboxLive sample based directly off of Microsoft's fork of the Unreal Engine, it appears the problem was in the Live (UWP) part of the Engine itself. So, I've grabbed the most recent version of Live for UWP, and been able to sign in to Live with the same credentials.

So the next task for next week is to merge these changes back into our engine and verify that sign in works, then to switch over to the proper credentials, and turn Live services on for our game. After that, we will focus on issues from the UWP stress test, and then on to investigation/merging to start to bring in HDR rendering. Finally, Evan is jumping on to the project today. He's a programmer who'll be helping out with the UI system.


Carylitz

Secret props for me again so I can't show, but I can say that I spent most the week sculpting, doing retopo and fighting with Maya to work with my decimated mesh and the retopo tool, but almost there!  


Alex

I have been off in the wilds of the Hamptons, but nothing stops progress! On Monday and Tuesday, we spent three and a half hours with the fabulous Samantha Lee, Woman of 1000 Voices. She is at least one of the voices of our Posh Wellette now, and she is at least one of the witches you’ll meet on a rocky crag.

I notice I’m recording a lot more lines per hour than when we started. At the beginning, I was getting something like 60-80 an hour. Now we’re up to 120-150 an hour. What’s happening?  

Mostly, we’re working with better actors. Over the years, we have found truly superb voice actors, who work fast and can do multiple voices. They’ve also learned our quirks. For example, typical voice directors seem to want the actor to repeat each line a bunch of times. I want the actor to put everything into the line once, and then tell him how it should change, if it’s not what I want. I find that when an actor does two takes in a row, often neither is right. There is a sort of quantum interference. They’re not deciding what delivery they most believe, they’re just trying to create a range of deliveries.  

We’ve also learned a lot about working with British studios and British agents. When we started, I didn’t know how to get a casting breakdown out. In the US, you can put a casting breakdown up on Breakdown Services and get a bazillion submissions. You can do that in the UK, too, through something called Spotlight.  

I would imagine we’re also benefitting from the game getting a bit of attention. We get submissions from actors who might not have given us the time of day some years ago.  

And now, I’m writing encounter dialog. That’s always fun. It’s also surprisingly hard. It is very easy to write “oh look at that I should do this” sort of lines, but creating surprising and compelling characters and offbeat encounters requires more thinking than writing.  

Thanks for tuning in!

The Compulsion Team

N.B: We also wanted to share this cute story from a member of the Reddit community.

"So I've played this game a lot over the last eleven-ish months. My boyfriend has watched me play it a bit and I'm sure he's picked up on a lot of the game by hearing it in the background so often.

So this weekend he proposed (yay!) and said some stuff about how he wants to spend the rest of our lives together and such. then he goes, "And I promise I will help you find peachy so you can get your ephemeral linen!" :)

So, thanks we happy few for being a part of a huge moment in my life. this game is awesome."