Hey everyone,
Welcome to another Weekly Journal! Lots to share today as usual but before we get into it we wanted to share that we have recently hired in animation, level design, and QA and are now on the lookout for talented programmers and 3D environment artists, to help make We Happy Few as great as it can be.
Work on We Happy Few just keeps ramping up (as it has done for 2 years now!), and we are looking to bring on board new permanent team members to become part of the Compulsion team. These are full time roles based in our studio in Montreal, Canada. If you, or anyone you know, might be interested in joining us, feel free to take a look at our job posting!
Art Team
Sarah
I'll tell you what, if you were thinking "I simply haven't seen enough psychedelic wallpapers!" well shucks, you're in luck! If you weren't craving wallpaper, well I have some bad news: it's what's on the menu. This paisley jerk was a greater foe than I anticipated. Designing it in a way that fit our world while still maintaining some stylistic dignity was a challenge. It was important to capture the stuffy feel of paisley, while possessing some much needed ~*~GrOOvEy*~*~ flare. The swirly shapes were my response to that, but it was difficult to design shapes that didn't look, and I'm quoting Whitney here, "Too spermy, Sarah." On top of the visual decisions, making it believably tileable without noticing how and where it repeats was challenging also, but Emmanuel saved me a ton of time by showing me a little texture tiling trick (Offset Filter, where have you been all my life!).
I'm also developing another mid-century wallpaper pattern, but until I can get it to look less like a jar of cocktail olives barfed on an argyle Christmas sweater, I will spare you. Aside from wallpapers, I had some more marketing bits to assemble, and more UI menu mockups to design (heavy focus on the Inventory screen)! I've ALSO been conducting more research to shortlist some influential and iconic mid-century British fine artists, because the Wellies could really use some more paintings in their homes, don't you think? Have a great weekend, see you next week!
Warren
Just a quick update ... I've been away on secret projects but I'm back again for more We Happy Few fun! I've been doing some more prop work and this week saw the completion of the Compliment Machines, which are possibly the most complicated thing I've done on this project! But at least they say things that make me feel better about that.
And in case you want to save some of those things for later when you're not near one of these handy compliment dispensers, I made you a tape machine.
Marc-André
This week, I have continued to progress on the Village house interiors (existing houses as well as a brand new one). I worked on integrating new wallpapers from Sarah. I spent a long time tweaking room layouts, color palettes and lighting inside the houses. Instead of focusing on a specific area, I am working on the houses progressively as a whole.
Design Team
Vince
Hi! This week for me was mainly refactoring my encounters with the new quest system. I did pretty much all the easy quests right away, those that didn’t involve too many NPCs moving around, and it went pretty well and fast. I have now started tackling more AI heavy quests. I’m currently on the Hallucinogenic Salad quest since Wednesday, and it’s quite an endeavour. I’m basically going over my multiple pages of script that was previously done and analyzing everything bit by bit and thinking about the best possible way and place to move and optimize that snippet and then moving on to the next one.
Since Marc-André is working on new Village House furnitures and arting up my new house (that I finished making the layout of monday), I added some features to those props: all the kitchen cupboards doors are now separate models, which means I was able to add a little random openness to them to break all those straight lines. The doors will also open at a wider random angle when the player searches them, this way, you can just glance at a cupboard and see if you already rummaged through or not (not too much for the leg-level cupboards doors though, because I don’t want any AI to walk through them!).
Until next time!
Compulsion Team