Weekly Journal - Remember November

Hey everyone,

We can’t believe we’re already in November! Wait, who are we kidding?! It’s Montreal, and already freezing cold, so we have plenty of reminders of where we are in the season! Before we know it, it will be Spring, and--after 4 years of hard work--we’ll be presenting our game to the world. This is both scary and exciting!

We received a lot of pictures from your We Happy Few Halloween costumes and thought they were all wonderful. Thank you for taking the time to make, wear, and share them! It warmed our twisted little hearts.

Production

Sam

After lots of hard work from the team, we're pretty much where we wanted to be with "content complete!". For us, this doesn't mean that content is done - it's not - but it does mean that we have every quest in the game, with its objectives, journals and VO. That's an exciting milestone, because we can now review the entire game, and entire story, to make sure that it works. That work begins next week, along with localization, more finaling, responding to UX tests, bug fixing, and all the final tasks that we have on the project. The team has worked really hard to get here, and it's really shaping up to be a lot of fun.

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

Adam

Holy Hell has this been a productive week. I’ve been working with Cary and Remi to blow stuff up. Big stuff. BIG boom... And you’re going to love it when you see it. That aside, as most of you know, I’m in charge of the Mad Scotsman in its entirety. I finished up plugging in all the dialogue last week, and this week I’ve been focusing on realization (making shit believable), and blockers (bugs which halt your progression). I have to say, I’m super proud of the Mad Scotsman’s playthrough… and I also find myself adopting a scottish accent from time to time. Gonnae git back tae it, ya weapons!

Roxanne

Lots of dialogue integration on my side this week. I also found some time to add five new “non-lethal” weapons, for those of you that want to avoid unnecessary deaths.

Eric

Well, Alex wrote a mountain of dialogue for Arthur, and we got most of it into the build this week. Thanks to Hayden, Benji, Ben, and Roxanne for helping me put in something like a thousand different Arthur lines across 30+ quests. Take that Alex!

Narrative Team - Alex And Lisa

Lisa

I’m...done? We’ve locked content for 1.0, so mostly what I’m doing for the game now is just dealing with missing bits and bobs, and making suggestions for polish. Happily, I am also writing the How To Be Happy book that will be in the time capsule, so I still get to live in the joyful world of Wellington Wells a while longer!

Animation Team - JR, Rémi, Vincent, Mike P, Jules, Raph And Franzi

Jules

Hey, everybody! So this week I've worked mostly on the doctor! Especially on his resurrect and healing ability. And also I've made a new hit reaction for the player when he carries the bone saw.

Somewhat Dangerous Mike

Hey guys! So this week I worked on some more cutscenes like last week for something again I can’t tell you about. But I REALLY REALLY want to though! Cause it’s great! But alas I can’t. Guess you’ll just have to play the game to find out. I’m on to something far more exciting now though. I know I know, you’re saying to yourself: “Self, this seems impossible, with all the awesome.” And you’d be right. But really though it’s not impossible! At least not for me. It’s super exciting. But again it’s all hush hush. So that’s it for me this week, so tune in next week, same Bat time, same Bat channel!

TL;DR: Super Awesome & Hush hush.

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

Céline

I’ve been working on the skills and skill menu with Evan, and we have a first working version! The team is also looking for the best skills that will improve and level the game experience. Additionally, they will be used to highlight some unclear gameplay features which are already implemented. It is progressing quite well and I hope you guys will like that new addition.

Michael

This week I’ve been taking a look at the conformity system to see how we can make sure the reasons for suspicion and detection are clear when we’re playing. I haven’t actually done a lot of work on it yet, it’s a big system and I need to get an understanding of how it all works before I start digging in and making changes. Thankfully, Serge has been patiently passing on his wisdom and teaching me the way the AI think.

I have made one change, which is to add some new icons to the HUD to better explain how you are perceived in game. Previously Suspicion was represented by the colour-changing eye and the notification that tells you when you’re suspicious, but we felt this was inelegant and still not giving enough information, so we’re trying out having 3 icons below the compass which reflect whether you can be seen, heard, and whether what you are doing is suspicious. The advantage is they also help at this stage to debug what is and isn’t working the way we expect, so we can flag bugs to fix later, for example if you were sprinting down the street and the noise meter says you are silent, we’ll need to check why.

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

PH

I continued my props series and this week, I’ve made some dynamite! I had the chance to work on a legendary item that I can’t wait for players to discover. And I also worked closely with the animators to provide them some small props. Pretty fun week for me!

Marc-André Voyer

This week I have been doing a lot of organisation and testing for the following weeks. Two other artists and I are going to be refactoring all of the Garden District terrains that are connected to roads, to better account for height variation and to add gardens and stone walls that will give it much more the feeling of being a real place. I created a spreadsheet with the list of every level that spawns and delimited which ones will require the refactoring - and eyeballed the worst-looking encounters - so we give these more love. I also created multiple roughed up versions of the plots to test various elements such as the transitions between the terrain and the sidewalk and see if we can get some height variation in these while avoiding the pitfall of adding extra steps.

Emmanuel

This week I continued the village refactor while also doing a major lighting pass by disabling auto exposure to get more control over every lighting scenario and specially reduce the skylight intensity to get less inside buildings. The contrast are much better balance and we’re really getting toward the final look for the game!

Publishing – Steve, Jeff, Mike C, Mike R, Austin, Meredith, Elisa, Kat, Kelly, Nicole, Sean, Brad, And Erick (And More)

Hey everyone!

I’m Austin, Gearbox Publishing’s PR Manager. This week has been a particularly fun week in PR, as I’ve been doing some story brainstorming!

During a game’s marketing campaign, there are a lot of major moments (announcement, gameplay trailer, story trailer, launch, etc.), but it’s beneficial to keep the conversation going between those moments; that’s where feature stories come in. By feature stories, I mean fun and in-depth looks at specific features in the game that different media outlets would be interested in covering.

We teamed up with PR agency Evolve to get some ideas down on paper. Some of the ones we’re excited to take further are:

Overview of improvements and changes made from community impact

Art direction for a procedurally generated world (Whitney did a talk on this earlier this year at GDC!)

A deep dive into Uncle Jack – inspirations, direction, actor interview

An in-depth look on the music of the game (can’t say too much more yet about this one but it’s exciting!)

Ultimately, our goal is to come up with features that will pique the interest and curiosity of you, the We Happy Few community! Feel free to let us know what in-depth features interest you!

Thanks y’all!

Compulsion Games

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