Hey everyone,
This week, the team continued their work on architecture, environment effects (lighting and fog) and pushing a new update to the pre-alpha community which will we are hoping to release today or early next week!
In addition, this week IGN has put a special spotlight on We Happy Few! This is really great for helping to build awareness of the game, and we’re very lucky to be featured. As you might remember, Guillaume went to San Francisco to talk about We Happy Few, and this is the result of this interview . You can take a look at it here.
We also know that you’ve been itching to know a bit more about the narrative. As part of the IGN spotlight, we took the opportunity to announce our very first player character!
So without further ado, we present you, Arthur Hastings:
Arthur is not your ordinary video game hero. You’ll notice he doesn’t even have stubble. He is weedy and apologetic, and he has never intentionally used a weapon in his life.
He used to be an archivist at City Hall. That means his job used to be erasing records of the uncomfortable past.
Unfortunately, now he’s a Downer. And it’s all coming back to him.
Weekly Update
Art Team
Whitney
A lot of this week was spent designing architecture sets for our non-intractable buildings for two of our biomes. This means designing buildings in different, iconic styles, then breaking down the building pieces into categories and sets. While creating a set, I need to decide on elements that are iconic to the architecture style (Gothic, Tudor, Georgian, Edwardian, Victorian) but that can be reused to make variation.
Emmanuel
A game is made up of many little, wonderful things. However, sometimes it is not so easy to notice them! This week I worked on improving our fog (to try and emulate better cold English atmosphere), the lighting in our shelters (a longstanding request from our community) and improving the reflections on our windows. I’m hoping these will improve greatly the atmosphere in parts of the game, but not affect performance too much.
Marc-Andre
This week I made a filler building and I started working on modelling a new architecture style (textures and materials yet to be completed).
Programming Team
Camille
Two more weeks have passed of mostly invisible work involving lighting, except indoors this time. After drastically remaking the lighting as we have been, it’s important to make sure it looks good everywhere. And, as it turns out, our indoor lighting had quite a few issues that needed revisiting, especially when factoring in lower graphics settings. For those who experienced pitch black shelters when running low Shadow quality, this is what I’m referring to.
Therefore, I’ve done quite a bit of reworking behind the scenes to try and make this play nicer as well as providing Emmanuel the tools to manually adjust lighting conditions specific to low quality settings. Obviously, it still won’t look as good as maximum quality settings, but at least there shouldn’t be any unplayable situations anymore.
Narrative Team
Alex
Another week editing cutscenes, and cutting out new barks (brief dialog lines) for NPCs. Also, we weren’t happy with a couple of the NPCs’ performances, so I’m recasting them. There’s always a certain amount of carnage in any creative enterprise.
Also, for fun, I named a whole bunch of stores that you will not be able to go into, in the Parade District, and I wrote a whole bunch of signs telling you that the proprietor will be right back, which he won’t.
Finally, if you listened to the latest IGN feature on our game, you now know that Sideburns Guy’s name is Arthur Hastings. Anyone care to guess why he has those two names?
Thank you for tuning in for another week for development updates!
Compulsion Team
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