Multitasking + Translation Tools + Key Rebindings (Patreon)

Hi!

Alex here with various Paralives development updates. Let’s get into it!

Multitasking Progress (For Patrons only! Please don’t share)

We have been working on multitasking lately. It’s a pretty complex system to develop but a very interesting one for sure! We have to create rules to determine if interactions are compatible for multitasking, we have to improve our animation system to support playing and combining multiple animations on a single character and there are many other challenges like that as well.

So far, we are making good progress! We already have some interactions that can be multitasked together. I’m looking forward to sharing many examples in a future Patreon post but for now, here’s Sebastian dancing and speaking on the phone at the same time (or pretending to speak on the phone because there is no phone in the game yet)!

Friday night at the club but you just realized you forgot to call your grandma this week.

Game Translation Tools (For Patrons only! Please don’t share)

Paralives will be available in multiple languages so that as many people as possible can enjoy it. To support that, we needed tools and systems to translate the game. Most often, games are translated by having a big Excel file where each row corresponds to a specific text in the game and each column is a language.

We made it so it’s possible to load an Excel file like that for translations in Paralives. This works well but it requires a lot of back and forth when you see a missing or erroneous translation in the game and need to edit it. To make that process easier, we made it so developers, modders and translators can directly edit texts or translate them while playing, seeing the changes immediately. Just press Ctrl+T over any label in the game to translate it.

In this GIF, I am translating parts of the main menu of the game from English to French. Note that the design of the main menu is not final.

Aside from translating the game in different languages, this tool allows developers, modders and players to change texts in the game very easily. This should allow people to customize almost any text to their liking and even submit these changes as a mod on the Steam Workshop if they wish!

Editing the name of the Dance interaction shown in the interaction queue while playing.

Key Rebindings (For Patrons only! Please don’t share)

Recently, I added a menu to allow players to change the keyboard mapping. This will be very useful because even though the game will try to have the best keyboard layout and shortcuts by default, many people have their own preferences. We hope this customization option will make the game easier to play for everyone.

The key rebinding menu. Click on a key binding and then the game will ask you to press a key or a combination of keys on your keyboard to assign it.

July 2022 Development Recap

On the development page of our website, we post a recap of the work we did each month. Here’s the recap for July 2022:

• 🎨 Started working on skin textures for senior Parafolks
• 🎨 Created more vegetation for the game and improved its art style
• 🎨 Created more furniture and objects
• 🎨 Worked on two hairstyles
• 🛠️ Created and integrated various character animations
• 🛠️ Made optimizations to character texture loading
• 🛠️ Worked on refactors and improved workflow for furniture and object integration in the modding tools
• 🛠️ Added a section to rebind keys in the option menu
• 🛠️ Created a censored effect to hide parts of a character in private moments
• 🛠️ Worked on supporting interaction multitasking
• 🎶 Created music for the game’s soundtrack
• ✨ Secrets!

You can also check out our full development roadmap to see the tasks that we are currently working on what’s coming next.

Thank you and have a great weekend!

Alex