MCV/DEVELOP News, events, research and jobs from the games industry
Compulsion Games, the team behind We Happy Few, has announced its releasing a documentary about the development of the Joy-ful game.
Premiering on December 19th, 2019, The Cost of Joy will “take viewers along the We Happy Few journey, providing a raw, behind-the-scenes look at the game as well as the plucky bunch of creatives behind it”.
“When you go from a handful of indies to the world stage, it’s not all Joy,” explains the teaser trailer below. “In this documentary, Compulsion Games takes you on the studio’s origins, the development of We Happy Few, and their introduction as a Microsoft studio through archival footage and new in-depth interviews.”
Compulsion Games and Gearbox Publishing recently launched We Happy Few’s final DLC instalment, We All Fall Down. This instalment “removes the survival elements and focuses on storytelling and intense gameplay with the introduction of rooftop traversal and additional combat options”.
The Cost of Joy is just one of several feature-length documentaries focussing on Triple-A development released recently. In May, PlayStation published a new, two-hour documentary chronicling the development of Sony Santa Monica’s critically-acclaimed God of War reboot. Raising Kratos documents how the game came to be, following the team from the game’s earliest conception to its nail-biting E3 reveal trailer to finally going gold. It offers a fascinating insight for players to see how a video game moves from merely an idea to a fully realised product.
Playing Hard, a docu-movie that went behind-the-scenes as Ubisoft developed For Honor, came to Netflix UK earlier this year and described the movie as giving “unprecedented access to a highly secret world” of “the biggest entertainment industry in the world”.
The documentary follows the creation of the game For Honor across a four-year period, including what happened when, part-way through the project, “the director’s access to For Honor’s production floor was revoked” and it took “many months and discussions for Ubisoft to reverse its decision and give the documentary’s production team carte blanche”.
