Hey all!
Another week has come and gone here at the studio and things are getting busier by the day. Before we get to what the team has been up to we just wanted to remind you that the whole team is very much present in our forums. If you would like to ask someone a specific question, talk about the game or about video games and other fun stuff, feel free to drop by :)
Programming Team
Camille
I was exasperated at our placeholder effect for food poisoning still being in place after so long, so I finally caved in, took a break from my usual fare, and decided to do a polish pass on status effects. I always intended for food poisoning to be somewhat reminiscent of the real thing and also to try to capture the progression of food poisoning symptoms from the classic roguelike Nethack.
Should the player be foolhardy or desperate enough to eat bad food, there is a chance it will cause food poisoning. The worse the food, the worse the symptoms, though if the player keeps eating tainted food, a case of mild food poisoning can still develop into a lethal one.
The first symptom is dizziness, which causes blurry vision and slows down the player.
Mild cases will wear off over time with no further penalty. But more serious cases will eventually cause vomiting (courtesy of Vincent).
Left untreated, this only stops when the player has spewed out the entire contents of their stomach, reducing hunger to 0.
It doesn’t stop there! Truly hapless players who have managed to contract lethal food poisoning will keep on dry heaving, losing health each time, progressing to fainting and an eventual horrible, painful death:
Have a care not to let this happen! Gameplay wise, the idea is to have bad food be a viable but risky gamble in a pinch, but to have that risk balance itself out. For instance, if the player keeps gorging on raw meat, that mild food poisoning might develop into a case of vomiting, in which case all that short term hunger will be lost unless treated.
Narrative Team
Alex
Happy Imbolc, everyone!
The other day a narrative designer friend o’mine who works at a Big Studio tweeted, “Pro tip: if you design a narrative/audio heavy feature, loop them in early so they can spot potential problems before they happen”.
Compulsion is a strange beast - something in between a 4 person indie team and a 100-500 person AAA team.
This is an ambitious game for its narrative. It would be much easier for me to write generically. The more generic a bark (“Go go go!”), the more often the player can hear it without getting irritated. I’m writing distinctive barks. Hopefully we’ve got enough so they won’t get old. Let me know if they do get old.
And then, there are always the recording sessions and the cutscenes. I can’t tell you what amazing actor I recorded last Thursday, or what role she plays, because it’s all a Big Secret. But the animators are slowly chewing their way through several playthroughs worth of cutscenes. Tuesday and Wednesday I put together a cutscene for the Mad Scotsman’s playthrough; Vincent Schneider’s been storyboarding it since. I also spent a bit of time inserting new dialog in old cutscenes; sometimes there’s a line that doesn’t get recorded, or a brilliant idea that we have after the recording session, and I’ve got to wait until my next session to get it recorded. (Recording with union actors is crucial, but Not Cheap.)
It is a miracle to me that I haven’t fallen behind. Sometimes I wonder if it would be the end of the world if I, you know, left the text of the combat buffs alone; so what if they’re a bit gamey? But I count myself blessed to be in a team where I have the privilege of meddling like that.
Design Team
Mike
I spent all week making a terrain / visuals / foliage pass of around 14 encounters. So they should hopefully look better now :)
I also fixed some bugs and improved gameplay, so they are more fun!
Vince
After countless frustrated pre-alpha player reports, someone had to go back to the Garden District houses and make them more “navigation friendly”.
Once that was out of the way, I joined Mike in doing some more encounters! It was a nice change for me after being stuck in a single map (the infamous intro scene) for more than two months. These encounters are specifically for the second island of the Garden District, so they present a bit more challenge, but will also net more interesting and useful rewards, as well as introduce new items and NPCs.
One of the latter are the Sick Wastrels. Thanks to Marc and Camille’s work on status effects, the Sick Wastrels can actually afflict you with a nasty Infection! It’ll reduce your Max Health considerably. How to cure it you say? You can’t… yet! But I’ll get on that next week! :P
Antoine
Oh hi! I hope you people reading this are doing well. This week I was tasked to create a reusable system to make various type of traps.
Animation Team
Vincent
Only secret things have I worked on this week! So here's the video of the Vomit and Shock animation I told you about in the last update.
As you can see it's not in game footage, but a preview from the animation software we use, Motionbuilder. A little funny trade secret while I'm here, with nothing new to show: the shake on the 'Shock' animation is actually done by hand! I recorded the movements from my mouse, which I then tweaked and plugged into my animations, on different parts of the body! Poor man motion capture... it's a pretty common feature in 3D software but it's not used that often. But I still prefer that over procedural noise, it gives the movement some spontaneity... Cheers!
Thank you for tuning for another week, have a great weekend everyone and happy Valentine’s day, remember to treat yo'self!
Compulsion
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