End of year 2018

Hi everyone,

It’s been a while since we last wrote a blog post - we’ve been hard at work on patching, DLC and figuring out what we’re doing next. But, the end of the year is here and 2018 being such a pivotal year for Compulsion Games, we couldn’t disappear into holiday break without a bit of a recap.

As everybody knows by now, this year we were brought into the Microsoft family as a first party studio! This is the biggest thing to ever happen to us, and quite frankly, we couldn’t be more excited for the future and all the possibilities it holds. We already wrote quite a bit about it so if you are interested in it, you can head here to read the blog post.

And then on August 10, after 4.5 years of tears, sweat and love, we finally launched We Happy Few. To say that We Happy Few had an unconventional development cycle would be an understatement - we started with 5 people (2014), showed the game a year into development (2015), Kickstarter (2015), Early Access (2016), publishing (2017) and finally launched this year. We’ve shared quite a lot of the behind the scenes of our development throughout the years through weekly updates, and we are always happy to talk about it with you. We think it’s important to explain and give nuances about what happens during game development, so feel free to keep asking us.

Being a Game Preview/Early Access title means that throughout the years the game kept evolving and improving thanks to the community’s continuous feedback. At launch, a lot of you kept that mindset and reached out to help us narrow down the most harrowing issues and for this we are really grateful, we have since we released 4 updates and are currently working on the 5th one which will contain our most fixes yet. Doing open development on a narrative game was quite intricate, during Early Access most people were unhappy thinking we had no story but as you now know, we were just careful with it as to not reveal any spoilers. After we launched the game, we received a tremendous amount of comments about the story which made it all worth it. We are so glad that you enjoyed the story.

Future plans

Once we launched the game, the programming team stayed on the main game to polish it and release updates while the rest of the team went into small groups to work on the DLCs. The team has been hard at work on them for the past few months, which is why we have been quiet about it, but we won’t remain quiet forever. Maybe even Weekly Journals might make a return, like we used to.

We do have some remaining Kickstarter promises to fulfil. These include sandbox mode, and Mac and Linux versions. We currently have a running Linux version that will be available for testing in the new year. We are also looking for development partners for the Mac version, as we are not Mac specialists. We understand this is taking longer than anticipated and we appreciate the patience with this; having a more solid core game (particularly on the optimization side) was critical before getting to work on these two versions. Sandbox is coming to the end of its development, and we’ll be sharing what this is soon.

We are also super excited about the coming Season Pass content, as this is an opportunity for the team to have fun and run wild with crazy ideas, while also celebrating some of the fan’s favorite characters from the main game. We hope you’re going to love them.

But, now that the holidays are upon us, we are going to take a little break to recharge our batteries after quite an extraordinary year. We are just as excited about stuffing our faces and play the amazing games on the market right now as we are about the future, and are looking forward to starting fresh again in 2019. To all of you who have been part of our community, we want to wish you a happy holiday season, merry christmas, happy new year and a good time with family and friends.

Cheers,

Compulsion Games

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