Hey everyone,
We are getting closer and closer everyday to our Early Access launch! We haven’t announced a date yet but once we are ready to announce it, worry not, we will post it everywhere :)
In the meantime as a reminder, you can always add the game to your Wishlist on Steam. Doing so will send you a notification once the game launches:http://store.steampowered.com/app/320240/
PAX East
In case you missed it, we released a video this week about our experience at PAX. We had an amazing time at PAX showing We Happy Few and meeting the community and our backers. We wanted thank you all for your support.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XabpH8xJOgE
BackerKit Rewards
For our backers on BackerKit, there has been a mix up in the orders and therefore a slight delay in sending you your T-shirt/poster order. However, this has been resolved and your rewards are now on their way to you and should arrive next week.
Narrative Team
Alex
The past two weeks I’ve been primarily writing and recording (and occasionally editing) encounters. Also more systemic barks, and more passive conversations you’ll overhear if you stealth around. (I don’t think any are in the game yet, but we’ve recorded a passel.)
Encounters are odd beasts. I get the bones of them from David. He’ll say something like “a bunch of Wastrels are cooking a rubber ducky in a stew pot. If you get the duck, you get a recipe for Rick the Stunt Duck.”
Then I’ll say, “Okay, what’s the nonlethal version?” (We have been making progress towards the functionality that would allow a nonlethal playthrough; I think you’ll see it working in the next build. Although playing nonlethally will be a huge challenge, I think it introduces a moral dimension to combat.) And David will say, okay, if you talk to all of them, you get the ducky. And if you talk to all of them the next day, you get something else.”
So now it’s in my court. Why are four Wastrels cooking a rubber duck? What do they think the ducky is? How does your talking to them make them give you the ducky? (And by “talking,” I actually mean, “clicking E to interact.”) What changes in their perspective on life now that they’ve given up their ducky? How can I make that ridiculous and yet somehow humanly truthful?
A fair amount of my job is retconning David’s designs. “If this made sense, what sort of sense would it make?”
Meanwhile, the team keep me busy with questions like “what should be scribbled on this rock” to “what should we call this park on the map” to “what’s the tooltip for a bucket? Okay, how about a bucket full of Motilene?” to “what do you hear when you pick up a phone in the Garden District?” to “what do you call the hole a Bobby pops out of?”
Fun!
Programming Team
Camille
A friend of mine has been saying that since I don’t write in weekly updates, it must mean I’m not working. Sadly, the truth is, I haven’t been doing much visible work lately. But I’ve working heavily on UI this week, and I’ll soon be able to show off something that I can at least tease with the updated tooltips:
I’ve wanted a better display for stack count and durability for a while. But the more astute observers will ask, “Camille, why is there a pound value on this tooltip?” Combined with being able to find shillings in the game world, early access players might be tempted conclude that there is a merchant system in the works!
Art Team
Sarah
Hey all! This week I've been primarily making little pieces to support the different encounters, as well as some more fictional ads and some HUD/UI assets. Here are a couple of tid-bits from my week!
Marc-André
These past weeks I've been working really hard on some exciting locations for Early Access that will add a lot of value to the game. Gameplay wise, it's going to provide you guys with a lot of new experiences. Art wise custom locations are a joy to play with. The artists get full control of how things are getting laid out (composition and lighting). Working on these locations means thinking creatively to use the most of what we have to create something new and fresh.
Since the week before PAX, when I first started to work on compositions and lighting, I've learned a lot. Since I receive a rough blockout of the scene/location by the level designers, I had to learn to break free from what's already in the level to make good level art. It's important to imagine the scene in your head by yourself and see it with a fresh perspective. I'm really happy to get blockouts though. Since we have different game designers, everyone has his/her own style so each blockout is unique and full of different ideas I probably wouldn't have thought about on my own.
The key to good environment art is making it look reasonably believable and functional, while adding what I like to call the "We Happy Few Touch", which is basically to add some cartoon/comical elements to the scene that only make sense in our world. Doing level art also means dealing with technical constraints like making sure the navigation mesh for the NPCs is big enough.
Recently I've been giving some love to older locations like the Butcher Shop to bring them to the high quality standard we're establishing and to secret locations I sadly can't show you guys yet - but they're awesome.
Design Team
Vince
Hey there! We are working our way to Early Access and getting everything setup properly. And of course that means, new islands setup. I spent some time populating the islands with all the new content you’re gonna be able to play. Of course, it can never work the first time… so there was a lot of back and forth with Matt, our procedural world magician. In the end, I finally got the new map working! It contains a lot of new and crazy NPCs and encounters :)
And of course, finalizing some of those encounters and reviewing them with David. Making sure all the little details are in such as all the crazy sounds, wacky animations, and of course, making sure the pathing still work as intended. Can’t wait for the big reveal!
Mike
This week I worked on finalizing gameplay in more levels, here’s two of them:
The portal attracts you in and then something weird happens ;)
This guy right here will give you a series of missions!
Thank you for tuning in!
Compulsion