Weekly Journal - Shifting gears

Hey everyone,

This week we finally made our big announcement on the release date (April 13th 2018!), that we’ve increased the scope of the game and we’re coming to Xbox One and PS4 retail, and our partnership with Gearbox Publishing! We also released the Life in Technicolour update, so we hope you guys are having a great time.

It was a pretty crazy week. We’ll never be able to recap this fully, so here are a ton of links that might help:

for an introduction and summary of what’s been going on, read our blog post, the release date trailer, the Life in Technicolour video and update notes, an article from Engadget about the announcement (although there are plenty more), an article from GamesIndustry.biz on the business side, if you’re into that sort of thing, and a really cool behind the scenes video on how the trailer audio was created.

We’d had a huge response to this announcement. Most of it has been fantastic - the support from you guys has been amazing, and the feedback so far on the update is really really good. Seems like we’re definitely going in the right direction.

We’ve also had a lot of questions/comments about the DLC, partnering with Gearbox, etc. Many of these questions are from people who see the price increase but don’t read about the scope increase, or from people who vehemently dislike Gearbox. For the first people, if you could please read our blog post, it answers a huge number of your questions, and is very frank and open about what we’re doing. For the second, Gearbox publishing is a new initiative run by a separate group of people. They are not funding the game, but are helping us a great deal with QA, localization, ratings, user research and marketing support. They’re working very hard, doing a great job, and care very much about helping us to make We Happy Few the best it can be. They’re always open for feedback, just like us, so if you have any concerns you can let them or us know and we’ll do our best to address them.

In the meantime, we’re back to work, excited to build the rest of the game. Our weekly journals will continue, although you’ll see a lot of [story redacted]. If you’re interested in specific parts of what we’re doing, let us know and we’ll make sure to include whatever we can (without spoilers).

We’re very proud of our game, of our team, and of you guys. Thank you for being here on this ride with us.

Narrative Team

Lisa

I’ve always been terrible at keeping secrets. When I find a present for someone, I always really, really want to tell them. That’s what work feels like now as we head into the final stretch of We Happy Few. So many story secrets! Soooo hard to keep quiet until April 2018! Aarg!

What I CAN tell you is that I wrote the update’s newspaper, which gives you clues to what’s happening in Wellington Wells, as well a suggestive Easter egg (English majors – this one’s for you.)

I’ve also wrote dialog for the Odious MacLears – a family squabbling over the will of their patriarch who is still alive. (The temptation to add a Monty Python “I’m not dead yet!” joke is intense!) Plus, I started working on a new Uncle Jack show -- we wouldn’t want to play repeats, now would we?

Art Team

Carylitz

Crazy update week! This last part of the update for me was more focused on story so It wasn't as crazy as for others in the office. I got to work on 2 new locations that I can't show and 1 new character with its sidekick! They are gonna be really funny. I also spent some hours reading news and watching streamers and youtubers playing the new update!

Animation Team

Mike

Hey party people, Mike here. Nothing crazy to report this week. Still working on some character animations that I can’t tell you about. So far so good. I think it will contribute greatly to one of the character playthroughs. So instead of a long and elaborate paragraph detailing all the things I can’t tell you about, here is a joke: “What do you call a fake noodle? An Impasta” Have a great week, see you next time same Bat time, same Bat Channel!

Vincent

Ahoy! An update week is always a special week! If only because I can take a bit of time to play the game… which is not something I often get to do, what with all the work we have on the story’s secret cinematics and gameplay animations! Well I must say… that game is getting pretty big and pretty cool to roam about in.

Hope you’re all enjoying the update, and I’m back in my secret cinematics lair.

Jules

Hi! This week I have finished the animation of our new weapon the famous "BeeCannon"! You can see here the "Suck bee" sequence:

So that's how you reload your weapon. Find some Bee and just inhale them for having some ammo. Now the most important part, the "Shoot Bee" sequence:

As you can see, the bee cannon is hard to control :). But so powerful with its long range and its area of effect !

Ed note: A bee swarm is VFX created separately to the cannon, so you’ll need use your imagination for now...

During the next part of the week, I made a few variation animations for our NPCs. Before when they detected you, they would just point at you with their right hand. For more flavor we gave them few different gestures. I hope you like the update of the game, we worked hard on it!

Programming Team

Rob

This week was spent bug fixing and making improvements to the between level loadscreen video code, especially fixing issues related to loadscreens that would sometimes not complete. Also, much of this week was spent ramping up on HDR tech for all platforms which Chris is handing over to me to take over.

Serge

Hello world, I hope that you are enjoying our last update! This week has been pretty intense, mainly bug fixing related to NPC behaviors for me. You might notice in the update that we iterated on their perception of the player, making it more clear why they are suspicious of you. The system will continue to evolve but that rework of our core AI logic will help us to achieve our ambition for the final product. General game performance and streaming strategy was also top priority for that milestone, and we are proud of the progress we made in the last few weeks.

Lionel

If you look at those images, you'll see both the future and my current work. The dynamics of procedurally placed encounters and something, a little something we would like to add. Time will tell.

First image:

Second image:

I should say that with the procedural system, there is a lot of trial and error. Some of these more theoretical things might get into the final game if they turn out not to work in practice. But we’re very excited to see what we can do.

Design Team

Adam, Eric, Antoine, Hayden, Ben, Roxanne and Benji

The entire design team has been wrapping up bugs and hot fix issues since we released the update. Aside from that, we are all currently back onto creating Story Content. Ed note: as we approach release, I’m going to have to apologise to the level designers because we will not be able to share their level design work. Everything at this point contains significant spoilers. We’ll do our best to fill you in on the general nature of what we are doing, but [story redacted] now applies to the whole level design team, and not just Antoine and Adam (who have been on story on and off for a long time).

Thanks for tuning in!

Compulsion Games

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