Hey everyone,
A bit of a short journal this week as we are now more than ever in the middle of the super secret content and finishing the last bits of the game!
Production
Sam
Hi everyone! Continuing on from last week, we’re now approximately 2 weeks away from content complete. I think we’ll need just a little bit more time on this than we have previously planned for, because in our playthroughs we’ve been making changes based on things we have missed - eg adding in the new opening island, noticing gaps in player direction, etc. This means that the work slated for right now has been pushed off a little bit. That being said, we’re still on track to hit our ratings deadlines.
However, we have hit at least one important milestone this week: we have, essentially, 99% complete narrative material for the game! All the scripts, encounter dialogue etc for the game is now essentially done, barring some journal entries for encounters and the inevitable touchups we’ll make as we keep reviewing the game. We’ve collated this (thank you Alex!) and sent it off to Gearbox, so they can submit this to ratings agencies. Think of the children, everyone.
In other news, this week we had a series of playtests over at Gearbox, and early feedback is that we’ve made some good improvements on the issues raised in the previous report. Hopefully next week we’ll have the guys at Gearbox provide a bit of an excerpt of the report, so you can see the kind of information we’re looking at.
Ninja Team
Clara
Hello all,
We had a very interesting week. After a few months of being pulled out of the weekly videos for production reasons, we remove the dust on our film gear and went out to shoot the next Blade Runner movie. Well, that's what we told Sam anyway. What we really did was shoot a series of interviews with a few willing victims (aka select members of the team), talking with them about numerous subjects that we didn't have the chance to touch base yet on previous weeklies... It resulted in two full days of shooting, a great number of rushes and a fully-packed media drive which we can't wait to go through and properly edit.
These shoots always represent a lot of efforts in terms of planning, research, and obviously time spent by our fantastic team, who is taking time outside production to help us build all this cool content for the community. That said, it's always super rewarding and super motivating to hear them talk about what they love doing, creating and working on. Makes us appreciate their passion and efforts even more.
Animation Team - JR, Rémi, Vincent, Mike P, Jules, Raph and Franzi
Jules
Hey ! So this week I continued to work on the new combat animation. The animations now work well with our new process! But these animations are not yet totally finished. We need to tweak the timing during the windup to achieve good balancing. After all, we don't want to transform the NPC into an all-powerful killer! We want to use these new attacks to add depth into the combat and make it more tactical for the player. This is the new heavy punch, because I know you guys like gifs!
Next I take a break from combat animation to work on another super exciting task: ("drum roll") The Bonesaw weapon! That's our new weapon, it's very powerful and bloody (mouhaha). To activate this weapon you need two power cells and an activate card. I know that's expensive, but imagine being able to run into Wellington Wells and attack things with what amounts to a chainsaw made of spoons. Like really dull ones. Carnage! I think it’s a fair price, isn't it ? Next week I will able to show you the animation about this Bonesaw !
Mike
Hey folks! So this week was a short one due to the proper Canadian thanksgiving. I finished polishing up the transition cutscene from last week and started work on some custom animations for another one. Again can’t say much about it other than in the immortal words of Marvin the Martian: “There was supposed to be an earth shattering KABOOM!” Hehehehe. Also I animated a few obscene gestures. So that’s about it from my end folks, tune in again next week, Same Bat Time, Same Bat Channel!
Design Team - David, Hayden, Antoine, Adam, Ben, Eric, Roxanne and Benji
Roxanne
On top of working on some content, I’m starting to go through all of our items and categorise them, this will allow us to balance them and handle their repartition on each island.
Art Team - Whitney, Emmanuel, Tito, Marc-André, Sarah, Guillaume, Cary and PH
PH
Hi all! At the moment, I’m trying to help as many people as I can by doing small assets. That gives me the opportunity to work with all the departments and that’s awesome. Everyday is a new day with completely new art to make. Absolutely no time to be bored. This week for example, I made some crutches, various papers and letters with the awesome artworks of Whitney and Sarah, new clothes variations, a gate...
Engineering Team - Matt, Serge, Michael, Lionel, Rob, Evan, Maarten, Céline, Neil and Guillaume (sometimes)
Lionel
So with world generation, the thing is that despite all its advantages, it is hard to test. And the QA people are nice, but they don’t like untestable stuff. So they invited me to a meeting. Once we all sit, they just stared at me with a nice, silent pacino vibe and I stared back… for a while. I kept my poker face approximately 5 sec. In the end, I just built a better logging system for them to check the worldgen. Also hunted down bad data that was making the system barf. Of course, not everything is true in the above paragraph but who would read programmers’ reports if it was ?
Céline
This week I have been working on Miss Thigh Highs’ exclusive items. Physically, she may be a weaker character but she has particular talents that make up for any lack of brawn. These items are quite interesting to work on as they can involve several areas of the games (animation, AI, …etc.). I hope you guys will enjoy using them ! :D
Publishing Team – Steve, Jeff, Mike C, Mike R, Austin, Meredith, Elisa, Kat, Kelly, Nicole, Sean, Brad, and Erick (and more)
Elisa
Hi! I’m Elisa, the New Media Manager here at Gearbox. New Media is the umbrella term for all the cool new ways folks are creating content, such as podcasts, streams, and video. Right now, I’m starting prep for TwitchCon next week. At TwitchCon, I’ll meet with Twitch staff, streamers, and other game developers and publishers to learn as much as I can about putting together livestreams and working with streamers to make sure they can deliver a fun experience for their audiences. As a streamer in my (limited) spare time, I’m always curious to know what tips and tricks broadcasters have to make their streams unique, high-quality, and entertaining. I’ll eventually translate what I’ve learned to the streams we produce from our own space here at Gearbox Publishing. I’m also looking forward to meeting with broadcasters that are a perfect fit and would have a blast showing off We Happy Few to the world!Feel free to come say Hi!
Thanks for tuning in!
Compulsion Games