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

Hey everyone,  

Winter has finally arrived in Montreal. It’s cold and night falls at 4:30pm but the party doesn’t have to stop! It never starts, that’s the real secret. We just hibernate.  

We will be attending a convention here in Montreal called MEGA, so if you are in the area, come say hi to us! We’re really just here to meet you guys, so we’ll have a few consoles showing Life in Technicolour, and we’ll be showcasing alongside our friends from Red Barrels (creators of Outlast).  

Production wise, this week has been all about subtitles in preparation for localization, more rating submissions and reviews of all the playthroughs.


Lionel

This week (and the week before actually), I worked on offering a bit of closure to the hamlet and Village in the game. One common reproach from our beloved artists was that those had an abrupt outline: it was either nothing and then the wilderness or buildings and then the wilderness. They were obviously right, so I took my robe and wizard hat and looked to see if we could do something about that. I had a bit of luck, and adapting for the outlines the current system of generic buildings was quite easy. The impacts it had on other parts of the world generation system was not. After a lot of coffee, head scratching and scribbling on paper and in code, the new placement system is there.
 

Lisa

This week I feel like the Easter Bunny! I finished the first draft of the time capsule book HOW TO BE HAPPY, and it is chock-full of Easter eggs. I even read through the text one last time, just to see if everything would make sense to someone who hadn’t played the game yet. Hopefully the text works on two levels, for both newbies and longtime Downers.  

We’re also still dealing with odds-n-ends that came up after content lock. For instance, every type-o I made in the past year in a lore document is getting pinged by the QA folks, but fortunately it’s only a handful at this point (thank you, Spell Check!) But it looks as if I’ll have more time to play the game now (and cross your fingers that I don’t find other things I need to fix!).

Alex

This week I’ve been mostly reviewing the game. I’ve been playing as Arthur. Anyone who’s wondering if there will be enough game, well, I’ve logged about 550 hours in the game, I know how the game works, and it’s still taking me the better part of the week to play through Arthur. That’s not blockers, although there are some places where progression is blocked; that’s stuff to do and places to go and weirdos to talk to and things to find out.  

Probably the most fun part was when an elaborate, phantasmagorical encounter we’ve been working on for three years came to full fruition. It was hilarious. And weird. And yet, I think, at some level true.  

“It never happened; yet it is still true. What magic art is this?” says the Puck in Sandman 34, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” That’s the writing I aspire to.  

We also spent a good bit of the week rejiggering the opening island, so that when the player comes out of the shelter for the first time, he is “onboarded” through a curated experience. Some new players were getting lost when they hit the open world – what do I do? how do I play? where am I supposed to go – and we’re hoping to fix that.


Jules

Hi everyone! This week I've worked on the Doctor and his powerful bone saw! The gif I am sharing with you is the new doctor light attack. I've also made a new custom hit reaction for the player.


Apart from that I've spent my week tweaking the navigation of the doctor, his idle animation with the bone saw and a lot of other small animations.

Just Mike, and the rest of the animation team

Sup! Been working hard to try and blow your socks off with some cinematic/cutscene love! Unfortunately I can’t show you anything or talk about it… so yeah. But I’m confident y’all are going to like it! Sorry not much other than that to report this week. So tune in next week, same Bat Time, Same Bat channel!


PH

I finished a really cool weapon that the Doctor will use in combat to resurrect people and I can’t wait to see it in action. I will put my props time period on hold for a moment because I really have to help Marc refine the art side of the procedural system. We are really optimistic on this but it’s going to take several weeks. In the meantime, here’s a little picture of the Resurrector:



Michael

Hello All,  

I’m Michael, Gearbox Publishing’s Submission Specialist, and I’d like to share a little bit of information on something I worked on this week for We Happy Few.  

As the Submission Specialist, I work with the Publishing Producers, Developers, Marketing, and Functional and Certification QA groups to gather information and materials that are required by first parties (such as Microsoft and Sony) to publish a game on their respective platforms. After these groups plan and carry out their tasks, I take the finished materials and bring them to the first parties for approval and ultimate publication.  

Titles that are published through Microsoft and Sony go through a Certification process (which is the last step before a game goes “Gold”), which helps ensure the games are stable and meet performance requirements and work with system-level features without issue. There’s also a “Pre-Certification” process that is provided by both Microsoft and Sony to help the developers understand where their product stands and what items need to be fixed before the title enters the final Certification process.  

This week I’ve been working with Microsoft to address a unique situation that we ran into when planning for the Pre-Certification process. We Happy Few is currently part of the Game Preview program and the Game Preview build is already live on the Xbox Marketplace. This means, in Microsoft’s systems, I can see the product and all its parts and pieces-- but what happens when I need to change something or add something new? For Example, we will be submitting a new build (of the final release game) to Microsoft; however, the location we would normally submit the build to (for Certification) is already occupied by the Game Preview build.  

Which leads me to my task for the week—How do we get this build to Microsoft for Pre-Certification without that original upload location. Part of why this is so important is that we don’t want to risk uploading a build that is not final to the original location and have it accidentally published to the public. We also want to leave that original location untouched in case there is a need to patch the Game Preview version before the game official launches. Ultimately, working with our Producers, Sam at Compulsion, and Microsoft, we successfully found an alternative that provides a solution that works for everyone. We made a new upload location! While it sounds easy on paper, there’s some work that goes into getting this setup, with the communication and planning between our internal groups and with Microsoft. But we have amazing people at Microsoft who are very responsive and creative, as well as those at Compulsion Games which have the patience to help us work through these kinks.

Thanks for tuning in!

Compulsion Games

Hey everyone,  

Winter has finally arrived in Montreal. It’s cold and night falls at 4:30pm but the party doesn’t have to stop! It never starts, that’s the real secret. We just hibernate.  

We will be attending a convention here in Montreal called MEGA, so if you are in the area, come say hi to us! We’re really just here to meet you guys, so we’ll have a few consoles showing Life in Technicolour, and we’ll be showcasing alongside our friends from Red Barrels (creators of Outlast).  

Production wise, this week has been all about subtitles in preparation for localization, more rating submissions and reviews of all the playthroughs.


Lionel

This week (and the week before actually), I worked on offering a bit of closure to the hamlet and Village in the game. One common reproach from our beloved artists was that those had an abrupt outline: it was either nothing and then the wilderness or buildings and then the wilderness. They were obviously right, so I took my robe and wizard hat and looked to see if we could do something about that. I had a bit of luck, and adapting for the outlines the current system of generic buildings was quite easy. The impacts it had on other parts of the world generation system was not. After a lot of coffee, head scratching and scribbling on paper and in code, the new placement system is there.
 

Lisa

This week I feel like the Easter Bunny! I finished the first draft of the time capsule book HOW TO BE HAPPY, and it is chock-full of Easter eggs. I even read through the text one last time, just to see if everything would make sense to someone who hadn’t played the game yet. Hopefully the text works on two levels, for both newbies and longtime Downers.  

We’re also still dealing with odds-n-ends that came up after content lock. For instance, every type-o I made in the past year in a lore document is getting pinged by the QA folks, but fortunately it’s only a handful at this point (thank you, Spell Check!) But it looks as if I’ll have more time to play the game now (and cross your fingers that I don’t find other things I need to fix!).

Alex

This week I’ve been mostly reviewing the game. I’ve been playing as Arthur. Anyone who’s wondering if there will be enough game, well, I’ve logged about 550 hours in the game, I know how the game works, and it’s still taking me the better part of the week to play through Arthur. That’s not blockers, although there are some places where progression is blocked; that’s stuff to do and places to go and weirdos to talk to and things to find out.  

Probably the most fun part was when an elaborate, phantasmagorical encounter we’ve been working on for three years came to full fruition. It was hilarious. And weird. And yet, I think, at some level true.  

“It never happened; yet it is still true. What magic art is this?” says the Puck in Sandman 34, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” That’s the writing I aspire to.  

We also spent a good bit of the week rejiggering the opening island, so that when the player comes out of the shelter for the first time, he is “onboarded” through a curated experience. Some new players were getting lost when they hit the open world – what do I do? how do I play? where am I supposed to go – and we’re hoping to fix that.


Jules

Hi everyone! This week I've worked on the Doctor and his powerful bone saw! The gif I am sharing with you is the new doctor light attack. I've also made a new custom hit reaction for the player.


Apart from that I've spent my week tweaking the navigation of the doctor, his idle animation with the bone saw and a lot of other small animations.

Just Mike, and the rest of the animation team

Sup! Been working hard to try and blow your socks off with some cinematic/cutscene love! Unfortunately I can’t show you anything or talk about it… so yeah. But I’m confident y’all are going to like it! Sorry not much other than that to report this week. So tune in next week, same Bat Time, Same Bat channel!


PH

I finished a really cool weapon that the Doctor will use in combat to resurrect people and I can’t wait to see it in action. I will put my props time period on hold for a moment because I really have to help Marc refine the art side of the procedural system. We are really optimistic on this but it’s going to take several weeks. In the meantime, here’s a little picture of the Resurrector:



Michael

Hello All,  

I’m Michael, Gearbox Publishing’s Submission Specialist, and I’d like to share a little bit of information on something I worked on this week for We Happy Few.  

As the Submission Specialist, I work with the Publishing Producers, Developers, Marketing, and Functional and Certification QA groups to gather information and materials that are required by first parties (such as Microsoft and Sony) to publish a game on their respective platforms. After these groups plan and carry out their tasks, I take the finished materials and bring them to the first parties for approval and ultimate publication.  

Titles that are published through Microsoft and Sony go through a Certification process (which is the last step before a game goes “Gold”), which helps ensure the games are stable and meet performance requirements and work with system-level features without issue. There’s also a “Pre-Certification” process that is provided by both Microsoft and Sony to help the developers understand where their product stands and what items need to be fixed before the title enters the final Certification process.  

This week I’ve been working with Microsoft to address a unique situation that we ran into when planning for the Pre-Certification process. We Happy Few is currently part of the Game Preview program and the Game Preview build is already live on the Xbox Marketplace. This means, in Microsoft’s systems, I can see the product and all its parts and pieces-- but what happens when I need to change something or add something new? For Example, we will be submitting a new build (of the final release game) to Microsoft; however, the location we would normally submit the build to (for Certification) is already occupied by the Game Preview build.  

Which leads me to my task for the week—How do we get this build to Microsoft for Pre-Certification without that original upload location. Part of why this is so important is that we don’t want to risk uploading a build that is not final to the original location and have it accidentally published to the public. We also want to leave that original location untouched in case there is a need to patch the Game Preview version before the game official launches. Ultimately, working with our Producers, Sam at Compulsion, and Microsoft, we successfully found an alternative that provides a solution that works for everyone. We made a new upload location! While it sounds easy on paper, there’s some work that goes into getting this setup, with the communication and planning between our internal groups and with Microsoft. But we have amazing people at Microsoft who are very responsive and creative, as well as those at Compulsion Games which have the patience to help us work through these kinks.

Thanks for tuning in!

Compulsion Games