Weekly Journal - An update for ants

Hi everyone,

Wow this is our 80th journal entry! Every Friday since we launched our campaign on Kickstarter, we’ve been writing these post to keep the community updated on what the team has been working on. Some updates are smaller than others depending on the stage we are at in development (bug fixing vs. adding new content) but we are dedicated in never missing an journal entry (except during Christmas break or when we are away at a convention). We hope that you enjoy these as there will be plenty more to come! We are also thinking in starting a podcast. If there is something you would like us to talk about or see from the team, let us know!

As you know, the November update is an important one that we have been working toward for the past three months. At this point, the majority of the team is fixing bugs or working quietly on the story, which is why our post this week is a bit light. However, it’s getting very close to done, and we should be releasing this within the next two weeks.

In other news, we will be at Montreal International Game Summit on November 13th to 15th! With our friends from Red Barrels (Outlast), not only will we be showing our games in development, We Happy Few and Outlast 2, we will also be hosting 7 local indie companies! Our goal is to showcase the amazing talent coming from the indie dev scene in Montreal. If you are in the area, feel free to come see us!

Narrative Team

Alex

What I did, in between frantically rechecking http://fivethirtyeight.com, was write up the narrative playthrough for She Who Must Not Be Named. Last week was the rethink. This week I wrote it up, and I’ve started in on the scenes, including one with our Hammer [Films] Villain. There’s a fair amount of carnage; we’ll have to redo some minutes of animation. But the story will be better for it – more jeopardy, and more aligning of player objective with player character objective.

Also did the same for our Mad Scotsman, although his story is holding up a bit better. We can probably keep most of our animation, but some of the dialog in those cutscenes will change.

All of which means more recording sessions, of course. I’m looking forward to it!

Lisa

I’ve spent much of the week mulling our dystopian world, but aside from reading about the American election... I worked on environmental narratives, which means I’ve been writing propaganda posters, diaries, official memos, and letters that you can find in certain locations as you play the game. They’ll give you a little story about what happened there before the player character arrived. It’s a fun way to tie together different narrative elements from the game -- and you’ll see that many minor characters have mini-stories of their own.

I also helped Alex with story for She Who Must Not Be Named. But it’s all double-plus good.

Animation Team

Rémi

Sorry everyone if I didn’t give you any news for the past few weeks, but the reason is quite simple. I haven’t been animating much! We have been working to improve the realization of most of the encounters, which means we are spending most of our time fixing bugs, integration issues, tweaking existing animations, fixing animation pops, etc. These are usually very busy weeks and I hope you guys will be able to enjoy it all once the update is out!

Art Team

Sarah

My week revolved primarily around ~*ToP sEcReT~*~ story related concepts and illustrations, which sadly, I will not be sharing with you (but they were really, really fun to work on). I also made some new icons, helped welcome our new 3D artist Guillaume (aka Junior), and assisted Marc Andre in optimizing some wallpapers to take up less space in the engine. He'll go into more detail next week, as he is very happy.

Thanks for tuning in!

Compulsion Team

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