Censored Effect: Giving our Parafolks Some Privacy! (Patreon)

Hi there, happy Friday!

Alex here. How was your week? I hope you have nice weekend plans ahead of you!

In Paralives, you manage and watch your characters living their lives. And just like in real life, sometimes, Parafolks will have private moments and they would be shy if you could see them naked or partly naked. Today’s post is about the censored effect in Paralives, a rectangle overlay that we created to display on top of Parafolks to give them some privacy! This post is for Patrons only so please don’t share it :)

When a Para takes a shower or maybe when they choose to sleep naked, we need to hide private parts of their body:

Showcasing the censored effect on Marvin in his birthday suit. Note that the animated GIFs in this post might not play for you if you are using the mobile Patreon app.

Using the toilet is also a moment where a Para might require some privacy, even if they are not fully naked. We hadn’t shown these toilet interactions yet so it’s a good moment to reveal them!

Maggie uses the toilet and the censored effect appears. The toilet seat doesn’t animate yet! It will open in the future when we will work on object animations. We don’t make the pants go down because that would be really challenging technically and also, the censored effect hides most of what is going on under.

Sebastian uses the toilet and the censored effect appears.

Bonus bug: Cool people flush the toilet like this.

Right now, the censored effect is a pixelated effect which is common in games and media. However, we are still unsure if we will keep it that way or choose a different visual style. Our modding tools support changing the visuals in many ways and here are some styles that we have tried so far:

Different censored effect styles that we have tested.

We thought of other effects like soap bubbles hiding private body parts when taking a shower but we wanted a way that would work in any situation to avoid having to create too many different effects for many situations.

One more thing: I tried to add the censoring effect to the photo mode of the game. It could allow players to create funny scenes or make some people anonymous on pictures.

I played with different effects in photo mode! The stickers and effects are not final. Modders and players will also be able to add their own.

In conclusion, this censored effect will be frequently used in live mode so I’m glad I was able to make it work even if it was a bit trickier than I thought on the technical side! I’m sure some of you are curious and are wondering what will happen if a modder decides to remove the censored effect! Parafolks are like dolls so they don’t really have much to hide under their clothes anyway!

Have a good weekend and take care!

Alex

EDIT - January 10, 2023: This post is now public. Feel free to share it!