Hey everyone,
Last week we released Pre-Alpha Build 12, so we hope that you are enjoying the changes! Balancing the different items and your progression through the game is going to become more and more difficult from this point on, so if you’d like to let us know what you’re finding good, bad, or confusing, please come visit us on the forums.
This week, in addition to looking at your feedback from the latest update, we are beginning work on our next update, which is focusing on developing the game’s response to death. Sounds a bit morbid, but we’re beginning with touching up a few atmospheric pieces, and will eventually progress to things like “what happens when you die?”, “how should people respond to corpses?”, and improvements to non-lethal gameplay. Very exciting!
Narrative Team
Alex
This week I’ve been working on passive conversations. These are conversations that you might hear while you are very stealthily not interacting with Wastrels or Wellies.
We have two kinds of these. One I’m calling “Atmosphere.” These are the sort of conversations you might hear dozens of times. “Oh, there you are!” “Were you looking for me?” “Not at all – but there you are. Hahaha!” “Hahaha!”
These sorts of conversations are standard in video games. However, we’ll also have showcased conversations. These are conversations you’re probably only going to hear once in a playthrough. They’re longer, and they are about people’s distinct desires and problems. We’ll rig these conversations to play in specific encounters where you will, for example, have to stealth your way through a specific location in order to achieve a goal. So your reward for not killing everyone in the house, in addition to whatever loot we give you for being non-homicidal, will be learning about someone’s life.
The showcased conversations really came about because in my first effort at writing atmosphere, all the conversations came out very specific and personal – all way too memorable to be conversations that you might hear from any number of totally different people in totally different places. Asking a screenwriter to write undistinctive dialog is like asking a singer to sing off-key: all their ten thousand hours of training are telling them not to do what you’re trying to do. Fortunately, rather than scrapping the memorable conversations, we’re going to use them along with some more general conversations.
All of this represents yet another metastasis of the amount of recorded narrative in this game! This game is going to have a lot a lot a lot of voice work. Should be fun.
Art Team
Marc-André
These past two weeks I've been working with Shawn to create the new trees for the beautiful world of We Happy Few. I've been in charge of everything going on with the leaves, from their textures to the color variation as well as technical stuff (generation in the world, creation of multiple levels of detail, etc.) Although creating levels of detail is pretty boring, it has to be done and is a very important part of optimization to make sure that the game runs smoothly on a wide range of hardware.
Design Team
Mike
This week I worked on a new quest that’s gonna take place in the Garden District.
A Wastrel couple wants to move to the village, and you need to help them move...
I also updated descriptions for several items in the game… you should now get a better feel of how useful the item is from reading it.
Antoine
Oh hi there! Been keeping it quiet for a bit, because I was working on a special secret encounter. Once it goes through realization (voice, effects, animations, art) I bet it will be something you’ll remember. As a tease, I’ll say that there is a really strange reunion happening at night (in the village) and, if you conform properly, you might be invited. I’ve been developing some kind of street barrier which you’ll be able to exploit by reversing its polarity. Hilarity and chaos will ensue. I’ve also been opening old village encounters and noticed that they needed some love. So I relit the The Butcher with the permission of the environment artists until they do a real light pass on it. Here’s what it looks like :
Vince
Hey there, folks! Now that the build was released, I had much more time this week to pimp my encounters up! I made a whole new house layout for the “Hallucinogenic Salad” encounter and added more NPCs running and yelling. I tested the level a lot after adding hiding spots and each time I play it now turns into a nice hide and seek game with those loonies! Just to recap, there’s a house where some Wastrels ate some bad mushrooms (or good, that depends on if you’re hungry or are wanting to hallucinate) and run around doing weird stuff, basically. It was really cool to place furniture at weird angles to create this mayhem-ness and it really adds to the atmosphere.
I did also finally re-add something I started quite a while ago, the deadly night fog! All the systems are now in place and working, so we can set the density of these patches of deadly fog for each zones, meaning that there will be more of it (and it will be more deadly) as you progress to new zones.
Programming Team
Camille
I’ve been working on an upcoming part of the UI. Our alpha players will have noticed a long disabled icon in the player menu:
It needs lots more aesthetic and functional polish so I’ll only tease it for now, but expect a new screen and functionality in the next update.
Animation Team
Rémi
Hello everyone! Remember last week’s update that I gave about Drunk Bobbies? I told you there was more coming up and I wasn’t lying! Here’s a few more animations that I made this week. I’m not sure if they are final yet, but I think it’s good enough to show to the community. Enjoy!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UCoagCHQ6ow
Thank you for tuning in!
Compulsion Team