Kev couldn’t physically make it to Gamescom 2025 — but that’s not stopping us from sharing some Happy Bastards updates with all you happy bastards out there! After all, it’s been one year (!!) since we revealed our new game in development. Well, the work continues and we’re here to give you inside info as well as a scoop: An opportunity to play a special combat test from our game! Got your attention? Good! Keep reading. (Wanna skip straight to the opportunity to sign up for the Happy Bastards combat test? Go to our Discord !)
CATCHING YOU UP
So, a lot’s happened since we announced Happy Bastards last summer.
You saw our first trailer to give you a taste of what’s coming.
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Kev hit the road, seeing the sights in Cologne (Gamescom 2024) and Boston (PAX East).
Annnnd the more savvy, way classier among you already joined our HB Insider Discord. There, our pals got an advanced look at the character generator we’re using in the game. For those of you that haven’t joined up (yet), let’s catch you up.
PROCEDURALLY GENERATED, BUT HAND-CRAFTED, BASTARDS
What you’re looking at here — this rogue’s gallery of mercs — is all procedurally assembled based on a pool of visual elements we created for Happy Bastards. Let’s be 100% clear. This is NOT AI slapping together disparate parts. This engine we built pulls from a huge pool of assets we created by hand for the game: Arms, legs, body types, expressions, props — you name it. We created a bunch of rule sets on how our generator randomly assembles characters for coherence, origin, gender, race, and so on. That means the type of characters you encounter in one town, in one part of the world, will be consistent. It does all this by assembling from all the different art we created.
This collection of bastardized elements is there for a reason: It’s a fantastic way to create variety in the game! We want you to get attached to your mercs in your party and needed to make sure it wouldn’t be bland, repetitive slop that gets spit out to players. That’s the LAST thing you’d want when interacting with wacky characters in the world.
This same system also manages facial expressions, health, morale conditions, and more. It is super flexible and allows us to randomly generate not just all of the mercenaries, but the NPCs, monsters, and animals of the game.
So, in the image that you see here is quite literally the first batch of characters to come out of that character generation engine back in March. Using this generator, we created six males and six females with an equal proportion of body shapes. What you see is what we got. Rather than go into the sheer volume of combinations, the important part is the COHERENCE of these combinations that we built into the generator so that everything that comes out makes sense visually in relation to the kind of character they are and where they hail from in the world. So, for example, avoid having an elongated torso with giant arms and a round head.
It’s fantastic that this generator we created can save us some time, sure, but our first priority is that the player buys in and does not feel like this is some Frankensteined-together set of random parts.
CLEVER PLAYS, CLEVER CODING
Last year, we worked on prototyping the concepts and system. It was a LOT of work, but it helped us build a great foundation for everything going forward. Now that we have a good idea of what we want to do and how, 2025 is about pre-production, which includes building our tech (like the character generator we just talked about above) and solidifying the code base in preparation for production.
Two quick examples of what we’re talking about:
The tech for the world map had two aspects we needed to tackle. First, we needed to find a solution to get around Unity's limitations. We have a whole continent that can be viewed at all times by the player (there is a free camera and it can be fully zoomed out) – and, trust us, that quickly becomes a real performance challenge. Second, we needed to create a tool that would manage the map and its regions in terms of gameplay, the pathfinding of AI characters on it, the spawning of locations, NPCs and items, and still allow us to dynamically change the visuals of parts of the map if something happens in that region. We now have our own multi-function tool to manage all of that.
Also there’s the way we prototyped out several versions of combat, one after another.
For example, early on we experimented with something more akin to an auto-battler, but found that this was not right for this game. We tried having each team go one after another, but again, that did not work that well for us. So we decided to use a turn-order bar with combatants of both sides mixed in for more fluid fights. Finally, late last year, we nailed down our final combat concept! It was time to rewrite the code base from scratch to start clean.
We'll soon start a series of posts describing combat, but why wait for blogs describing combat? How would you like to experience it for yourself and actually HELP US with the development process? You can be a part of it! All you need to do: jump over to our Discord and sign up to be an HB Insider!
SCOOP: HAPPY BASTARDS INSIDERS AND THE UPCOMING COMBAT PLAYTEST
We’re happy with the combat depth now and we’re iterating on the finer details of it now – but we can’t do it without the community. That’s you. Coming “soon” we’ll be able to share with our awesome Insiders a SUPER-early first look opportunity to play. Forget the press, forget streamers, it’s all about you!
Want to get notified when the time is right? Hit the link and we’ll see you soon!
…As for the next Gamescom? Well, Kev has promised to not contaminate the currywurst at the Koelnmesse (again) after this year’s "ban" is lifted.
The future is happy!
~Kev and the Clever Plays Team