Animation Showcase: Repairs and Cleaning! (Patreon)

Happy Friday everyone, Alice here! ☀️

Now that spring has sprung, we thought you would enjoy viewing our most recent cleaning and repair animations! To showcase them, I made a short video that you can watch at the top of this Patreon Post. ⬆🎥 

Note that this Patreon post is for Patrons only so please don’t share it, thank you!

The Animations in the Video

• Cleaning surfaces 

• Cleaning vertical surfaces 

• Cleaning vertical surfaces while crouching

• Cleaning floors using a mop

• Plumbing repairs 

• Plumbing repairs while crouching 

• Electronics repairs

In case you missed it, you can find our previous animation showcase in this Patreon post. In addition, the lovely music in today's video is one of Andrei's compositions called Inner Child that we shared in this previous post!✨

I thought it would be nice to explain why we did these animations like that, what were the challenges, what upgrades we could have later, etc.

Details About our Current Animations

• As you know, for most of our interactions and because of our restricted resources as an indie team, we try to find generic movements that could work with as many situations as possible. With the Plumbing Repairs animation for example, we already have a few baths in-game but they all have their plumbing on different parts of the tub: sometimes on the left, sometimes in the middle and sometimes on the right. We might even have other variations later! We won’t have the time to create variations for each case before Early Access, so we needed an animation that could work for all. Even if this is not the most realistic, we can still understand what the Paras are doing and that is the main goal for now. :)  

• If you’re wondering, the Electronics Repairs animation will work with any electronic item that could be broken. That includes televisions, microwaves, computers and so on!

• Kids will gladly (or not) help your grown up Parafolks with household chores! They will be able to help when it comes to cleaning, but not so much with repairs. It might be dangerous and they’re just kids!!! Anna coded a cool feature that allows us to choose when we want an item, for instance, a mop, to be scaled according to the Parafolk’s height. This way, we don't need to create another animation variation and it will be useful for a lot of cases, like guitar playing!

Ideas for the Future

• When it comes to cleaning horizontal surfaces, it could be great to be able to clean other things than counters, like tables or desks! For this and Paras with different heights, we will need to dynamically adapt the animations using code a.k.a. using our procedural animation systems. It might come later on during early access.

• Here’s another idea: the animations made for cleaning vertical surfaces could be used later for other cases than the showers’ interior and exterior. For example, your Para could decide to clean visible handprints on windows or mirrors, or even walls if your kids decided to draw on them. 🙄

• Finally, I'd personally love to be able to have animations and special effects on items when they are being interacted with. Like having the fridge’ interior lights flickering while it is being repaired, or having some leaks appearing in the shower and the Para reacting to it while doing some plumbing maintenance!

This is all for today! I really hope you’ve enjoyed seeing some new things and are excited to clean (or make your Paras clean instead) in Paralives. Please feel free to share your feedback and ask any questions you may have in the comment section, I'm always happy to discuss ideas and hear your opinions. ❤

Have a great weekend and good luck with your own spring cleaning!

Alice (◔◡◔)/