Nevertheless, the team soldiered on to craft narrative from chaos. "You're asking a random system to give you this answer you already expect," said Robinson. The initial results were promising, but sometimes changes would break the system: end points spawned too close to their goals, story moments became confined to one tiny area, NPCs behaved erratically, etc. The team got to work retooling their systems with the new narrative structure in mind. The system was trying to adapt all the time." Lionel Barret de Nazaris, Senior Programmer, Compulsion Games "The artists and designers were very creative using the tools they had. "If you feel you really need to change a system, just do it," said Matt Robinson, Technical Director at Compulsion Games. Compulsion had a promising procedural generation engine and solid core gameplay. A narrative-driven game required more robust interactions with NPCs, and the quest system needed to be modified to allow for a more complex series of events. The task of bringing a procedural system into the confines of a linear story was a dizzying one. Now, the team moved to reshape We Happy Few into a substantial narrative-based game that most players would take their time to complete in a single playthrough. The procedural-generation systems that Compulsion had in place were designed to be endlessly replayable. After E3, the team came up with a plan to let players have it both ways. The game was not meant to be story-driven it was meant to be played over and over again, in short bursts. However, based on the demo, the audience expected We Happy Few to be a narrative adventure, not the procedurally generated rougelike that Compulsion had in development. It was a tone-setter that focused heavily on story – and the audience loved what they saw. At E3 2016, the team used the Xbox stage to showcase the game's core plot and darkly psychedelic world. At a certain point in the development of We Happy Few, Compulsion Games came to a crossroads feared by game devs all over the world: the decision to change course.
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