The Compulsion games story.

1) Why was the company called what it was called? When was it formed? How many people

were involved with the initial formation on the company?

The company was formed in 2009 by Guillaume Provost and the company is called complusion games due to their desire to work on games.

2) What was the initial financial plan for the company and what were the incentives for

setting up a development studio in this country? How did global events affect this?

The initial plan was to get funding from a Taiwanese company from tai pei. Guillaume signed the contract and he and other people quit their job to move to Montreal to get to work however, the financial crisis happened and they all moved to Montreal with no money.

3) When was their first title released? How many people were in the team at this time?

The team was comprised of about 5 people working on the game and they worked on contrast.

4) Who is the Creative Director? What is their role in the company?

Guillaume Provost

Who is the Producer? What is their role in the company?

Sam Abbott

Who is the Narrative Director? What is their role in the company?

Alex Epstein

Who is the Art Director? What is their role in the company?

Whitney Clayton

Who is the Community Developer? What is their role in the company?

Naila Hadjas

5) Name some of the key mechanics of this game?

Contrast was a puzzle based platformer that they developed and they used things like shadow mechanics

6) Identify the narrative genre of the game? Identify the game style genre (e.g action,

platform, first person)?

We happy few is a first person social survival horror and fighting game set in 1960's England.

7) What worked well with the game? What did not work so well?

The game had a very memorable style and story which made people very interested in the games lore however, people took issue with things like the very shallow combat in the game

8) What was the name of their second, larger project? How long did it take to complete and

release?

We happy few was a their second title and development took around four years to develop and was released in august 2018.

9) Discuss some of the inspiration for the game? Where did the ideas come from – name as

many of the films as you can?

Inspirations for the game came from a range of different sources from Clock work orange, Brazil, doctor who and hot fuzz for example the idyllic English village where everyone must be perfect or they could ended dead.

10) How did the small development team evolve the game design to compete with triple A

titles and larger development teams?

They wanted to focus on the story of the game so that they could set themselves apart and make their game more of a unique experience

11) What crowdfunding platform was used? What are the risks of this? What are the

benefits?

They used kickstarter in order to fund the production of their games and it was going well until things like Fallout and Star wars battlefront which resulted in the kickstarter flat lining and not really progressing much further however due to community engagement fans were able to get the campaign back on track and exceed the goal.

12) How important was community involvement? How were communities engaged with the

development of the second title?

The community helped with getting the second game funded and during development people at compulsion would post updates weekly so that fans could see how development is progressing and how they could make improvements to the game as development carried on and some fans where even given early access.

13) How did having a publisher onboard affect the development of the game? What were

the consequences of this? Who was the publisher?

Having a publisher created a lot more confidence for and within the studio as it showed that a big publisher was interested in what they were making and with that it could keep the studio open.

14) How was the second title received?

The games story and designs were received well however gameplay and the game itself weren't received as well reviews talked about how glitchy the game actually was and and how it was too ambitious as things like procedural generation meant that the AI was either too predictable or too unpredictable and broken at times.

15) What valuable lessons were learned from developing the second title?

One important lesson was that the game has a lot of fans and a downside of that meant that each of them had different expectations for what the game would be, people thought it would be more of a fighting games and other thought it would have more horror so a lesson that they learned was to have reasonable expectations and make sure to appeal to a more a certain demographic.

16) How did the involvement of a large publisher such as Microsoft change things for the

better?

Having Microsoft as a large publisher meant that they could focus on the more creative side of developing instead of having to wonder how they are going to pay for development of the game.