Hey There Good Lookin’ - Preview Branch - 29524

[Captain Scarlett]

Hi everyone!

Welcome to our second preview branch update, which is the testing version of our September update: Hey There Good Lookin’. This update focuses on making the world a more believable place, by including better coasts, lighting and vistas, AI behaviours in the Village, and a bunch of bug fixes and balance changes.

To access this build:
• change to the preview branch on Steam (right click on We Happy Few in your Library -> Properties -> Betas tab -> select preview from the drop down list), or
• change to the preview branch on GOG.com (click on We Happy Few in your Library -> More -> Settings -> change channel to preview).

We have two known issues in this build right now:
• Continuing progress from previous save games might cause some weirdness. Very old saves might crash. We’re looking into this, but new games should be just fine.
• The safe in your shelter is not always accessible. We will be fixing this in the next couple of days.

Here’s the list of what’s in today’s build:

Encounters
• A blanket pass on creating the “indoor lives” of Wellies was implemented. Now you will not always find them standing around their foyers just waiting on you to walk inside. They move around their houses with what appears to be an agenda. This lays the foundation for the stealth playthrough axis of house looting - eventually you will be able to observe NPC behaviors, hide in containers or side rooms and avoid detection while you explore their houses.
• Ongoing bug fixes related to map markers not appearing, dig spots not getting map markers, encounters breaking in annoying or mysterious ways.
• House of the inventor: Added speakers and intercom so Faraday can yell at the houseboys from her cage. Faraday now completely sealed in her cage. Objects are exchanged with Faraday via a new pneumatic tube system with a port to the right of her cage. Addresses issues with quest objects sometimes falling behind Faraday’s cage window and being unobtainable.
• Fixed TV Altar "Uncle Jack" not sitting on his chair.
• Victory Garden now overgrown with vines rendering it more secret which is good since it was supposed to be secret in the first place.
• Lilies of the Field: fix the first bark from the crier that was not playing. Also, mission giver should no longer lose her mind if the player perpetrates violence nearby and thus allowing the quest to be completed. She will still be angry if you hit her however.
• I Need a Pipe: removed most suspicion stimuli from Floyd so he doesn’t aggro unless being attacked. You can now "greet" him as much as you want while the quest is not finished and he'll repeat his VO.
• Lovebirds: tweaks to animations (WIP). Fix pop-in with the bouquet prop notify.
• Unkind Dead: fix the missing loot after loading a game. Added a savegame variable to remember if corpse was already looted or not.
• Motilene spills now exude tenacious motilene fumes which are toxic. Use a gas mask to avoid taking damage while in these areas.
• Crazy legs and Misery Parade fixes: support for higher liveness radius for specific characters, fixed follow patrol behavior to persist even without a navmesh.
• Hey, what’s this Misery Parade anyway? It’s an encounter that has been in the game but completely invisible since launch. Now it should start to show up. And probably kill you. Let us know if it shows up and kills you.
• Altar of the Yam: slight improvement of the begin play logic and repopulate script.
• Fixed objective not appearing as being completed when it was completed in Sweets.
• Disabled refrigerator POIs globally since the NPCs were pretending to look inside refrigerators that do not actually open.
• Created the Village desk writing POI.
• Player and NPCs can now sit on most chairs and couches in Village houses.
• Villagers now cook on stoves.
• Tweaks to continuous suspicion for Village radios/TVs so that they work as intended. NPCs should walk over to the radio/TV now if they hear it or come into range.
• Linked Village house TVs with couches and chairs in front of them so they can be opened/closed when NPCs want to watch television.
• Added the Look In Mirror POI for male + female NPCs in Village houses.
• Added some gramophones (temporary model) that can be used to play 45 RPM records and attract multiple NPCs.
• Wellies should start to use “wipe countertops” POIs.
• Wellies freak out less when a TV or radio is turned on in another room and simply go to enjoy Uncle Jack or music.
• Set all Village house TVs and Radios off by default.
• Can now also use Village house bookcases to search inside as well as take visible objects from shelves.
• Playability modifications to second Garden District island houses: adjusted layout, added beds, added tripwires and alarm, increased loot value for alarmed areas.
• Added open/close sounds for Village loot containers (cupboards, stove, shelf tables, etc.). They didn’t have any. Tripwire alarms use instant suspicions targeted towards the player. Generally ensures that nearby AI are alerted to the player’s presence.
• Iron chest digging spots now available.
• Improved drinking at sink animation.
• Lowered outdoor televisions so that Wellies watching them no longer appear to be staring at a wall.
• Wellies will sometimes knock on house doors as if hoping to find their friend’s home. They are not home even if they are home. They are just ignoring the knocker because they might be selling something. Or they’re dead, but you probably knew that.
• More hunting down and fixing map marker bugs including adding the correct text for labeling encounters.
• Fixes to prevent bypassing bridges in some cases. Sorry speedrunners :/ It was breaking our streaming systems.

Gameplay
• NPC health bar prototype added - still a prototype, but I cannot stand the eye anymore [Marc, the programmer]. Will also communicate NPC status effects such as bleeding in a visual way.
• Gifting cannot be done from behind. Choking is done from behind.
• Suspicion reduced for when player forces coin box.
• Changed the drowning detection to be based on height (Z==0) and the absence of a gameplay volume.
• Bleeding uses different rates on NPC compared to the players, much more punitive on NPCs (2% per second).
• Increased probability of contracting infection from a bare hands attack to 25% for wastrels on second Garden District island.
• Updated/created hold sockets for a few pickups such as tea cup and canned juice. Makes the sight of a character holding these pickups less unintentionally comical.
• Wardrobes in Village houses now function as hiding spots.
• NPC health bar prototype added - still a prototype, but I cannot stand the eye anymore [Marc, the programmer]. Will also communicate NPC status effects such as bleeding in a visual way.
• Certain Village and Garden District houses have new dressers. Floating candles now no longer float.
• Set map marker to use new toxic fog category for toxic fog zones.
• Set map marker to use new motilene category for sources of motilene.

Weapons/Tools
• Player weapons can now impart some of the same status effects as weapons when used by NPCs. What? Right. Remember how an NPC with a cleaver could whack you and cause you to bleed? Yes. Now you can use the same weapon to make them bleed too. First pass implementation.
• Jimmy bar now breaks after 4 uses, up from 3.
• Renamed psycho dart to berserk dart.
• Berserk dart applies berserk effect for 30 seconds, berserk syringe for 1 minute.
• Added a transition to berserk behavior (same animation as the feral wastrels) for berserk syringe use; fixed getting stuck for a short time after injecting someone.
• Added berserk syringe to the list of pickups for the crash syringe combat move.
• Crash syringe: Added instant suspicion of "suspicious" when Arthur yells that the injected target is a downer.
• Increased durability of rusty shovel.
• Reduced rubber duck suspicion lock to 5 seconds.
• Power cells now stack in lots of 5 (same as empty power cell).
• Pump repair recipe now requires 2 adhesive, down from 3.
• Vinegar now only takes up 1 inventory block.

Recipes and Resources
• Generally made key resources more plentiful (if only you search, you shall find), streamlined recipes, and improved the yield for recipes that create “batches” or items when crafted:
• Garden District stoves have increased chance to contain rare mushrooms. Added more charcoal.
• Garden District fireplaces have more charcoal.
• Garden District toilets and bathtubs may contain rare mushrooms.
• Added doctor doll and doctor doll recipe, tweaked recipes to yield three dolls. Doctor will only accept doctor dolls as a gift. Added dolly recipe to crafting manager. Foundational work for ways the player can deal with the dreaded doctor soon to come.
• Black powder recipe is now one saltpeter + five charcoal to yield three black powder.
• Food Poisoning cure: removed berry ingredients requirement.
• Tweaked dolly recipe to require two cloth and one sewing kit.
• Adjusted bandage recipe to yield five bandages from five dirty bandages and one alcohol.
• Added berserk syringe and recipe to crafting manger.
• Removed red pills which did…nothing. Goodbye stupid artifact object.
• Added a pickup spawner for 45 RPM records on top of the table in Village houses but under the book.
• Made adhesive common and power cell uncommon in Village houses.
• Tweaked yield amount of berserk dart recipe and berserk syringe recipe from 5 to 2 (and adjusted required amount of components to craft).
• Adjusted breakdown bomb recipe: replaced mechanical parts ingredient with phytosteroid.
• Added charcoal to series of crash recipes (dart, syringe, bomb). Charcoal absorbs the toxins as charcoal tends to do.
• Crash effect (forced downer effect) is now permanent (neutralizes joy in an character’s system).
• Added crash bomb and crash dart recipes.
• Added explosion and trail effect for crash bomb.

AI
• Many more lip synched lines of VO added.
• Wellies accept 45 RPM records as gifts.
• Character attacked event (beginning of attack move, independent of hit).
• Bobbies place “nothing to see here” sign immediately on beginning corpse investigation; reviewed placement of sign so it spawns more reliably.
• Wellies ignore corpse as soon as a bobby starts investigating it…because there’s nothing to see there. The sign says so.
• NPCs are not attracted to POIs based on their needs anymore, but on a schedule, per need; POIs only define the need type which keys what schedule to use, no more thresholds, advertised need, etc.
• Fixed issues with characters ping ponging between the same two POIs.
• Improved reliability of POI usage, including bed usage.
• Fixed (hopefully once and for all) unsynched NPCs (floating next to bed) and “no collision” NPCs that were immune to death but totally capable of killing you. Which they really seemed to enjoy doing.
• Addressed liveness issue with restoring collision and movement when unpausing NPCs when they're still using a POI.
• Improved NPC access to the ludicrously gigantic round beds POI so they're actually usable. POI can now define a specific target point for navigation different from the animation entry sync point.
• Integrated begging animation for beggars.

Art
• New lighting! Wellington Wells now looks better, generally.
• New jerky (food) mesh.
• New juice can mesh.
• New toilet and sink assets for Village.
• Updated brick material.
• Reduced explosion glow.
• Improved hit impacts.
• Fix moonlight not being used as atmospheric light.
• Fixed position of water VFX in Village bathroom sinks. Made variation of water stream VFX that • doesn’t go through the sink.
• Properly placed floating toilets. They are now on the floor. No more air toilets.
• Minor fixes to visual artifacts such as low resolution textures on some characters and objects, floating signs, floating boards, etc.
• New and jaunty signs added to Village.

World Generation
• Added mountains/terrain towards the horizon.
• Added new cliff geometry so that edges of islands do no longer resemble grassy brown whale skin.
• Cleaned up shore planner and handle selection of pieces in planning stage (rather than spawning) to avoid weirdness in-game.
• Allow foliage planner to plan overtop of extra terrain features from static meshes (only specific ones--allows foliage to go over top of cliffs).
• Check for bridge overlaps when placing cliff pieces so we ensure that we don't protrude through the bridges themselves.
• Removed Village fillers with only a single corridor or staircase. Basically, building interiors that led to nowhere have been removed.

Miscellaneous
• Implemented method of partial game updates eliminating need to completely download a new version of the game for most updates. Expect greatly reduced download times/sizes, especially for hotfixes.
• Subtitles: removed all action descriptions from subtitles.

[Eχis†enƵ]

WoW nice thanks you

[Leo']

Thank you! Keep up the good work and the news/updates! :)

[KemuNalle]

Sugar and Yam we need to find a frying pan

[Xenomorph113]

sweet, looking forward to playing through and seeing the additions, keep up the great work guys :)

[msjoville]

great! thanks

[UWUBIS]

GOOD ♥♥♥♥ YALL OMG :))

[MestasDeejay]

great work

[PeachBomber]

Great job. Loving it!

[Pinky]

Started playing the preview branch yesterday. SOOO much better! Awesome job, guys! :)

[BoopDaSnoot]

"because there’s nothing to see there. The sign says so."
This sounds like something out of a Douglas Adams or Terry Pratchett book - love it!

[Necroscourge]

The new update shows where all that steam money went for sure. Everything looks nicer, things that didn't work before work now, and in general you can see an evolution of the games design.

One thing I want to stress to the developers is a method of seeing what types of collectibles spawned where. Like you can craft a suit that let's you detect books and recipes (Scholarly Labcoat?) or some other way that you can quickly look at a building and go "Ok, I grabbed all the books and stuff in there so I don't have to sneak in again"

My notes for the preveiw build
1. Raincoat shreds spawn too much for how few recipes seem to use them.
2. Bobbies have a tendency to turn invisable, can still alert others to the player but cannot attack or interact with the player. They can turn visable again if you run long enough and revisit them.
3. The off limits island both always seems to have the broken spanker encounter. There should also be more visual indications that the player will lose health over time while around the structure. There also seems to be no real purpose to this mechanic yet besides punishing players that forget to stock up on healing items and don't realize they are dying in this area.
4. Are there plans to do more with the fourth island? There are downers that spawn there and there is always a plague quarentine encounter seperating Luds from it. Are there going to be more encounters and buildings in this area? It's just run-through space right now.
5. Thank you so much for the Electro-Shocker prompt! I just assumed there was no way to get through personal safes before without realizing electro-shockers were used for it.