Message from Guillaume, Creative director.
Hey everyone!
My job mostly consists of helping all the other great people on our team do the work you see every week, but since Compulsion officially turned 7 years old yesterday, I thought I’d share a few pictures and thoughts about us throughout the years.
A rare picture of the team in our first office in 2010 - Derek (Producer), myself, Whitney (Art Direction) and Trevor (Level Design).
Great games are made when a bunch of awesome people from a bunch of disciplines get together, and the right financial conditions make it possible for them to succeed. But those same people are also attracted by studios that have already made such great games.
Paul-Étienne (Programmer), Sam (COO), Sylvia (Animator) and Whitney (Art Director) in 2012.
It is very difficult to magically assemble all of this when you’re starting out unless you’re some kind of charismatic industry veterans with a lot of money at your disposal. The alternative is to be patient.
And patient we were. It took 3 years for us to assemble a team, and accumulate money, to make our first project while doing contract work. It took 2 more years to produce our first game, Contrast.
Sam, presenting Contrast at the Sony PlayStation Press Conference in 2013.
And through it all the team grew and bloomed as we all learned how to work with each other. Contrast was never intended to be a big blockbuster title…
Accepting an award for Best Innovation at the Canadian Video Game Awards in 2014
But it cemented our team’s creative and artistic values, and helped us build a place where it was safe to try and experiment with new ideas.
Winning at the inter-studio championship with our friends from Spearhead in 2014
It inspired a strong culture of pride and creative ownership within the Studio. When I look back on it, I’m still not sure what we did right along the way … There’s no secret formula to good team chemistry.
Josh, Whitney and Emmanuel setting up for our first public showing of We Happy Few at PAX East 2015
But I do know that we are truly fortunate to consistently work on new and original ideas, and to retain our creative independence today.
The booth of We Happy Few at PAX East 2016
And that… is in no small part because of all of you guys. Thank you for supporting us, you are amazing.
Design Team
Vince
Hey folks! This week has been all about encounters! On the design side, we are trying to finish up as many encounters as possible so that they can be ready to ship for Early Access. Most of them were already underway, so it was mostly replacing those placeholder sounds and animations with the real stuff!
And of course, it always results in a bit of tweaking and scripting fixes… There’s always something different than we first anticipated, like a VO that is longer than the placeholder was, or an animation that is shorter than was expected. We just have to make sure that the flow stays mostly intact with a little bit of script magic here and there. After that, the artists are able to jump in the levels and make them all pretty. Also at this point, it’s much more easy to see if we are still missing some animations, audio or VOs or if some of the newly added stuff needs a bit of tweaking.
Mike
This week I worked on finalizing gameplay in some levels we’ve worked on before PAX, here’s 2 of them:
These are now fully playable and will soon have their visuals updated! :D
Animation Team
J.R.
Happy Friday! This week I come back to you from an extensive “narrative slumber”. I’ve been working a lot on story during the last couple of months, and then there was PAX and more secret story stuff… But here we are! And you’ll hear more from us in the next weeks leading to the early access, because we’ve got a lot of cool gameplay animations lined up! Without any more delay, here’s a little bit of what I’ve been working on lately! Enjoy :)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nXCtE_7hcC0
Rémi
Hey everyone! For this week, I spent the first two days on some Top Secret Character Rigging! So sadly, as usual, I won’t be able to show you any of that. But, for the rest of this week, I got back on some Gameplay Animations! Some of them to support new features, such as the Bobby Spawner and other ones for Specific encounters and systemic animations. Have a good weekend!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZe7CblayG4
VFX Team
Weili
Hello! My name is Weili and I recently joined Compulsion as their VFX artist :)
I completed a lot of VFX lately such as: Weapon Electrical Buff, Revision of the Tesla Coil and just finished a Tesla Coil Charge (bit worried that it might actually look too fantasy-ish).
Gas leak for Joy and Toxic have also been created. The Bobby Spawner prototype is ready but will need frequent tweaking to match the animation and timing. And last but not least, charmed bubble on NPCs, camp fire, Tikka fire, throw-able trails (ribbons!)and smoke and fire for the the molotovs.
Thank you for tuning in!
Compulsion