Hello everyone,
Before we start with our usual weekly update, we wanted to let you know that the latest pre-alpha update for We Happy Few is now live on Steam! You can read the build notes here.
This week we also made IGN’s list of most anticipated horror games of 2016! While We Happy Few is more creepy than horrific, it’s really exciting to be included with the many cool games in this list :)
Programming Team
Marc
Hi all, I haven't given an update for a while as for the last month I've been mostly involved in the migration to a new sound engine: Wwise. It is an excellent sound middleware used all over the industry, including by major studios. We needed to change as Unreal 4 sound engine has got some limitations (for the moment), in terms of features, workflow, and performance, and Wwise is much better suited at the moment to bring top quality audio to an extensive open world game like ours.
It meant a lot of assets changes, and a lot of code modifications to replace calls to the Unreal sound engine by calls to Wwise. You will notice some regressions in the game audio but you cannot make an omelette without breaking a few eggs.
I am still fixing actively various sound issues with the help of our sound designers, but I now finally had time to start working on a variety of gameplay features. We will be introducing a lot of new items, and some of them require extensions of our gameplay and AI framework. Lots of behind the scenes work that is only impressive when it finally materialises, that's why programming is often less glamorous than art, where you can easily present your progress :)
Design Team
Antoine
Hello dear people ! I’m a new addition to the We Happy Few level design team. So thrilled to be able to put my weird mind into this crazy game. The last couple of weeks, I was tasked to build and script the new bridge encounters from David (design director). We had a lot of fun seeing those things come to life and chuckling at the odd situations we’ll put you through. Conformity, joyfulness and special items will be needed to cross those now life threatening bridges. Be ready to be roughened up with a smile if you don’t meet the criterias to pass. I can’t wait to show you explicitly what those look like but for now we’ll need to keep these under top secret wraps *hush hush*.
Mike
This week I worked on a bunch of encounters that are not in the game yet… but you will see them soon enough! I made it so they appear with a specific shape of terrain, like a unique, hand-made hill for example. That way we can control how it looks and plays, while keeping it random and rogue-like ‘ish.
Adjusted a couple things related to the loot, especially in the 2nd wastes and 2nd village area. For instance, rubber ducks will now spawn in bathtubs :P
Made a bunch of adjustments and bug fixes to make sure the tutorial experience is smooth and fun!
Art Team
Sarah
Marc-André
This week I made a new grass texture that will be used for the new updated ground material, 3 grass Levels of Details (For optimisation purposes, so the grass doesn't slow the game down), and some small assets like darts and syringes. I quickly pimped up the fireplace with new buckets and wood pieces, and recycled Shawn's amazing rocks (TM) and Emmanuel's wood texture.
Animation Team
Vincent
Ahoy! This week, in addition to the usual secret cinematic staging and animating, I took a bit of time to make two animations for the player character. One will be giving feedback for our favourite in-game status : Food Poisoning! So yeah, it’s a vomiting animation, and I hope we’ll have great sound effect to do it honor. The second one is a ‘Shocked’ motion, that’ll play when you get struck by various electrical devices.
Can’t wait for you guys and gals to get sick and shocked! In-game, preferably.
Thank you for tuning in!
Compulsion
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