Weekly Journal - Moderately terrible people

Hey everyone,

This week, the team continues on final content integration and the beginnings of polish and bug fixing. We have received the results of the playtest from two weeks ago, and are really happy with the improvements we have made, particularly on the onboarding and the comprehension of Arthur’s story. The extra time we have spent on these aspects of the game has really paid off.

That doesn’t mean we’re done, though. We have a list of issues to deal with on this front, so as we finish up the content, we’ll also be tweaking things here and there to respond to the issues raised. Playtests are so important, and we’re very glad to have the team at Gearbox here to help.

Narrative Team - Alex and Lisa

Lisa

As part of finishing the game, Alex and I are running around trying to make sure that we have everything written that we need.

This week, I’ve been writing “pensive barks,” which are things our characters say to themselves while you’re playing the game. The idea is to give you a deeper sense of who the characters are and how they feel -- without having to stop the action for a cut scene. With Sally, pensive barks are a fun challenge, because the face she presents to the world isn’t necessarily the same as how she feels inside.

The danger is that we have promised you characters who are “moderately terrible people,” so I have to avoid falling in love with characters so much that I make them too good.

Design Team - David, Hayden, Antoine, Adam, Ben, Eric, And Benji

Eric

The level design team is a collection of busy bees this week, integrating, fixing and finaling the level content we have in the game. That means a lot of polish, but also a lot of meetings to review the content we’re finishing up.

As for what I did this week, I fixed some Arthur main story bugs and blockers, worked with Alex to make sure VO and narrative was both present and made sense, and the rest of my time I spent finishing some levels that came in late and just weren’t fully finished. Plus I got to hook up a sweet Arthur shower scene. So that was fun!

Engineering Team - Matt, Serge, Michael, Lionel, Rob, Evan, Maarten, Céline, Neil And Guillaume (Sometimes)

Michael

We've been working on upgrading the HUD elements. Some of it is revising old pieces that need some new polish, or presenting in better ways. The rest is finding ways to represent important information that was previously hidden from the player, for example we want to make a bigger deal of when curfew starts and when you enter a trespassing zone. (Everything is optional, for those who want a clean screen).

So after Sarah has finished doing her mock-ups in Photoshop over a screenshot from the game, we take an element and break it down into it's moving parts ( for things that fill up and move ) and then I create a widget object in Unreal's widget designer and hook it into the game so that we can review it, and iterate on it further. Often with a good deal of programmer art filling in the gaps and making the artists cry.

Céline

Hi everyone ! The bug season has started so this week for me it was mostly the following : finding a long-existing bug which questions everything, fixing it, observing that related features are broken/need rebalancing, supporting level designers, adding a skill which questions everything, adding it, observing that related features are broken/need rebalancing… etc. Hopefully the game will end up more fixed than broken at the end, I am confident!

Animation Team - JR, Rémi, Vincent, Mike P, Jules, and Raph

Jules

Hi everybody! So this week for me I mainly worked on the Doctor. I've finished polishing his different heal and resurrect animation. As you can see on the Gif... if you want to interrupt him during his resurrection you better have enough stamina for a run or be ready to be hit by his bone saw! See you guys next week!

Art Team - Whitney, Emmanuel, Tito, Marc-André, Sarah, Guillaume, Cary And PH

PH

We have a huge spreadsheet where the designers have gathered all the pickups, crafting recipes, wearables, weapons, components,etc… It’s huge! There are 900 entries in it. So this week was dedicated to pickups for me (pickups are the 3D models of items in the game, when you drop an item on the ground). I worked with the Level Designers to provide them the last ones for the game, and they’re now almost all ready to go. For example, I’ve done texturing work on different versions of a canteen and some modeling work to create key cards.

Guillaume

It’s been a while since I showed you guys what I worked on, as it has been mostly story locations that I don’t really want to spoil before the game ships. But this time I have a little teaser for you.

This location is specific to Sally’s playthrough and some scary surprises are waiting for you there.

Marco-André

This week I’ve been finalizing work on the new special bridge and, for the most part, doing a bridge refactoring. This purely aesthetic change means that some bridges will now look as if they are dirt paths alongside a cliff, making them more interesting and more unique. I modified the levels and also created new modular pieces that will repeat to create the “bridge”/cliff path.

Thanks for tuning in!

Compulsion Team

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