Hey all
In this week’s update you might notice some fresh names. The team is growing!
As we’ve been gearing up for the crazy year ahead of us, we’ve been expanding the team and bringing on board some amazing new people to help us. Soon we’ll be moving to a slightly bigger office across the hallway, which means a lot of running around before the holidays! We are really excited about the new additions and will be posting a proper introductory blog post about it very soon :)
This week, some of us also attended the Montreal International Game Summit. MIGS is a really cool conference where game developers from around the world come together to speak at panels. Guillaume, the head of the studio, even gave a little talk on his path in the industry. (See main picture - he's the one on the right, not on the screen)
Programming Team
Camille
The last two weeks were spent completing the quest system, journal and associated map features. Namely, I’ve implemented proper controller support for those menus so controller and mouse control schemes are on parity once again.
Also, since the map markers weren’t always sufficient, let alone helpful, I added a few different ones as well as retooled the existing ones to hopefully be a bit less ambiguous. There’s also an interactive legend which allows filtering out certain map elements if it gets a bit too cluttered.
On the quest side of things, I added logic for designers to mark quest objectives on the map. For now, this isn’t very thrilling with the single test case of the An Odd End scenario, but the system is robust enough to allow Mike to start putting together some encounters. In order to provide proper feedback for completion and progression of objectives, I created a new HUD notification system which will clearly indicate when new quests are started or when objectives are completed or failed:
The same system will also be used for things like status effects or weapons breaking.
Gameplay Team
Vince
More intro goodness! We are putting a lot of effort on that scene, and there's quite a lot of things going on in that particular area.We did the layout of the space last week, and this week I added some props to make sure the player navigates and sees what we want them to see. I wired in all the placeholder animations so that we can actually run through the whole scene without any showstoppers and have a first impression of how it will turn out in the end.
This particular process is very important because I'm building the foundations of the scene. Then the animators can just upload new, polished versions of the placeholder animations, the artists can go in and make it all pretty, the sounds and special effects can be added, etc... In the meantime, I'm still ironing out the little bugs and making sure interactable objects and triggers all work as expected. It's also at this stage that we can gather around and go through the scene to make sure we like how it all flows and feels in case we have to make any necessary changes, because making them later will mean a lot more work.
Next step: make the whole thing spawn in the actual game world.
I also sat down a good while with Mike, our new Level Designer, to show him how we are set up and how to use our custom tools in the game engine, so he could start right away at making some levels!
Mike
Hi! My name is Mike Gonthier and I am a new level designer here at Compulsion Games.
For my first week I spent time learning the level design tools, and blocked out three new encounters for the game:
Well Fisher
A wastrel is sitting in front of an old well, fishing in it with a rod
Mushroom Log
They mostly come out at night, mostly...
Campfire
Duck à la rubber never tasted better!
These encounters appear in the Garden District at a random location. Of course they are just “placeholders”, so later on they will have proper visuals and animations. I also started to work on a fourth one but it’s not yet complete so, more news about that on the next update! :)
Narrative Team
Alex
This was a short week for yours truly, as I went to the Montreal International Games Summit to increase learnings. I also interviewed industry giant Warren Spector as part of his master class in Game Narrative, which I wrote about on my blog.
However, Thursday I was back in the recording studio, recording a certain character’s invisible friend. I’m not sure how much I can tell you about her, but as you know, Compulsion Games is required by law to have at least one invisible friend in every game. This actor is particularly adorable, and I chose her out of 72 candidates from across Britain. So that was fun.
And now, I’m cutting out crazy things Arthur can say in the Garden District…!
Art Team
Marc-André
This week I've been working on colorful 1960's patterns for the car, a new improved litter bin, optimizing old assets and integrating special new decorations in the build.
Emmanuel
Thank you for tuning in!
Compulsion Games
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