We Happy Few Update

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!

And here's our video from our PAXcapades:



Rest of the update here.

A word to the efficient is sufficient.

Try to get to the point where you not only accept criticism in your creative work, you seek it. Life, too, come to think of it.

We Happy Few Update!

Well, we're back from PAX, where we had some pretty nifty cosplayers, even though the game isn't out yet:

I learned a bit at PAX. First of all, that people are over the moon about our game. People were lining up for an hour and forty minutes to see it. Actually, the line was capped at 1h40; you had to mill around to wait for a chance to jump onto the 1h40 line. And when you reached the head of the line, you could play the game for twenty minutes, if you didn't get yourself killed first.

Also, details. Watching new people play our game, I noticed that players were not always aware they were wearing the wrong clothes. So I wrote some barks for Wellies to get bent out of shape if you’re wearing rags, and Wastrels will mock you for being dressed all fancy.

More excitingly, I finally got a PC on my desk. I write on a Mac, but I can’t use our tools in Unreal Engine 4, which means I can’t tinker directly with the game; I have to impose on the Level Designers. Since then I’ve been rewriting journal entries into Arthur’s voice — a job I’ll have to repeat with the other playable characters.

And, of course, I’m continuing forward on editing our audio cutscenes whenever I have some spare cycles. The animators seem to like our actors’ work:

The animators have to listen to the scenes hundreds of times, so it means a lot when they dig the audio acting. 

Often when you're casting, you find someone who's a thrilling actor, but just all wrong for the part. You file that information away for later. Juliette Gosselin, who starred in my short film ROLE PLAY (and would have starred in my proposed feature ALICE IS PERFECTLY FINE NOW), was someone we auditioned for YOU ARE SO UNDEAD. She was terrific, but way too real for YASU. But we brought her back for ALICE. So too for K______ K_____, who was wonderful, but not right for Twiggy With Hypodermic. 

Rest of the update on our Kickstarter site...

10 Best!

 

Perhaps my favorite of all of these TV writing books is Crafty TV Writing. It’s universally applicable, accessible, and yet also dives into the fine, granular details when the topic warrants it. Chapters 1-3 are must read as is page 236, How To Run A Writer’s Room.

Well, this is lovely and I feel honored. Stephanie Palmer, of Good In a Room, wrote a post listing her ten favorite TV writing books, and she names my now ten-year-old book her favorite of all of them.

Thanks, Stephanie! I'm honored!

Stephanie will also send you the "10 most wanted TV Pilot scripts" as PDFs, so reason enough to go to her site. 

So people are now taking pictures inside the We Happy Few game engine. Here's one by Nautilus...

in-game photo by Nautilus

Stories: The Path of Destinies is Out on PC and PS4!

So I wrote this game last year. Looks sweet, huh? It has a branching story, and I got to direct the brilliant Julian Casey again.



Oh, and it's a wee bit on sale on Steam!

Exegesis

"Scarborough Fair" is a really pretty song, especially as Simon and Garfunkel sing it. But it's one of those deceptive songs. It's a really, really angry song:

Are you going to Scarborough Fair?
Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme;
Remember me to one who lives there,
For she once was a true love of mine.

Tell her to make me a cambric shirt,
Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme;
Without any seam or needlework,
Then she shall be a true love of mine.

Tell her to buy me an acre of land,
Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme;
Between the salt water and the sea sand,
Then she'll be a true lover of mine.

Tell her to reap it with a sickle of leather
Parsley, sage, rosemary & thyme
And to gather it all in a bunch of heather
Then she'll be a true love of mine


If you're just listening to the melody, you might not notice that the singer is basically saying, "Yeah, if you see my ex? Tell her I'll take her back when ... y'know what? Never."

The traditional version has both the man and the woman setting each other impossible tasks. It doesn't seem to have ended well.

There are a lot of songs that are a lot sadder or angrier than they sound. "Bye Bye Love," for example.

You can get a lot of mileage out of these. Chantal Kreviazuk took the lyrics to "Leaving on a Jet Plane" seriously and got a hit out of it. John Denver, who wrote it, makes it sound almost chipper. She's not the first; Peter, Paul & Mary really got into it.

I tend to think that "Walking After Midnight" -- which almost always goes down as a perky ballad -- is about a woman looking for her alcoholic husband after the bar closes. But maybe she just misses her ex. Either way, it could the Chantal Kreviazuk treatment.

Point is: listen to the lyrics, too.

I like to say that Shakespeare's plays are bulletproof -- if the actors understand what it is they're saying. Shakespeare's characters want stuff from each other. They say stuff to each other in order to get it. The poetry is there because sure, why not, but the plays are never "about" the poetry.

Interestingly, exegesis (the art of unpicking the knot of meaning) is a valuable skill to a creator. No one starts with a fully-fledged world. We start with a hook or a premise. What makes a coherent whole out of the work is that the rest of it proceeds from interpreting what you already have. We started WE HAPPY FEW with some premises: England, 1964, everyone wears happy masks, everyone takes happy drugs.

Building the world from there, we asked, why would people be taking happy drugs? Why are they wearing happy masks?

I pick up details about the world by thinking about them. Why are they taking happy drugs and wearing happy masks? Isn't that redundant?

Well, that suggests that they tried one and then added the other when the first didn't cut it. Doesn't it?

If there are people who aren't taking their Joy -- well, why not? Maybe it doesn't work for everybody. If it doesn't work for everybody, then presumably they've tried reformulating it. That's where we got the chocolate, vanilla and strawberry flavors of Joy.

If they have nowhere to call, then what do they do with all those phone booths?

Of course, sometimes you don't get to build the world from scratch. On CHARLIE JADE, we came on board as the replacement writing team. We had to read eight episodes and ask ourselves, "if these all made sense together, what sense would they make?" Since we were not in contact with the previous administration -- and since their episodes sometimes seemed inconsistent -- we did a lot of retconning.

And, a lot of exegesis. If Charlie is the enemy of Vexcor, why haven't they killed him? Aha, they must want to know who he's working for. Or they want to know what he knows.

I find it exhilarating when I "figure out" something about the world I'm creating. There's an "aha!" moment sometimes, when I realize, huh, if this, then that. And "that" can often be horrifying. But because it stems logically from what came before, it is inevitable and it is not gratuitous. And when the audience reaches it, they'll realize the same thing: "Oh, God, I hadn't thought of that. Of course that's true, too."

Attitude

I've been trading a few emails with a young writer who's upset about some of the lack of respect in the biz.

My feeling is, in showbiz, you can have a good attitude about things or a bad attitude. Lots of people have bad attitudes. It does not help. If you want to have a happy life, either you decide, f*** it, I’m going to have a good attitude about all this stuff, and just laugh at the disrespect and hard knocks and bad luck and nepotism and so forth … or just go into a business where merit is more consistently rewarded. Talent and hard work will, eventually, get you where you want to go, but it can easily take ten years. 

Look, it's showbiz, Punky. Everything they say about it is true, both the good and the bad. Talent does get rewarded. Talent does get disrespected before it's rewarded. 

Also, find one other thing that you like to do, and do that regularly. I've heard that Harrison Ford was a carpenter before he was a movie star. Apparently he’s still a carpenter. When he turned down bad acting gigs, he’d tell his agent, “I’ll just build another cabinet.”

Whether or not that is accurate, it is still true.