Updated Dog Art Style + Visual Effect Tests + More! (Patreon)

A good Friday to everyone!

Jérémie here with an insider look on something we did during a whole week last June - a “Hack Week”! As usual, this post is for Patrons only, so  do not share it, thanks!

What’s a Hack Week?

A bit like a game jam - where people work intensely during a short period of time to create a game - our Hack Week was an occasion for all of us on the team to pick a feature, an idea to develop or something we just really wanted to work on and dedicate a whole week doing so. Usually we plan our weeks based on the overall planning of the project, working on top priority features, but this really was a time to work with a bit more freedom, autonomously for the week, on ideas that inspired us but might not have been priorities at that point.

We had a few constraints: the idea had to be something needed for the game, it had to be doable in about a week without requiring more work afterwards, and we had to be prepared for our work to not be used if it wasn’t up to snuff (as is sometimes the case in game development!). Everyone submitted a few ideas and got to work, and I wanted to share some of these Hack Week projects with you today!

Alice: 2D Animations

As you know, Paralives’ art style is a bit paint-y and has a hand-drawn effect to it. To fit with that, we are considering using hand-drawn 2D animations throughout the game for various visual effects and interface elements.

During Hack Week, Alice wanted to explore and test out ideas related to that. What follows is some of the work she did over the week!

The arrow could be used to indicate specific interface or game elements during tutorials. The 3 dots could indicate that something is being loaded or that the game is being saved. The light bulb could be displayed next to tips and tutorial prompts.

This effect could be used for tutorials or information popups.

This one could be nice to show the players that an option can be activated.

When an object has been cleaned by a character or when a new piece of furniture has been purchased, sparkles could appear.

Animated arrows could be used as part of tutorials to show the players that some furniture can be resized or that the character’s height can be changed, for instance.

Various effects that could be used to indicate the current status, mood or emotion of a character.

We can’t wait to integrate some of these animations into the game to see if it fits with the rest of the visuals but it’s looking really promising so far!

I know a lot of people liked the below effect when we showcased the censor visuals that we have tested and if we choose to go that way, Alice’s animations would fit pretty well with that style!

Léa: Heckin Good Pupper

Léa sure loves dogs, no one will be able to deny that. During Hack Week, she wanted to create a new version of Paralives’ iconic bernese mountain dog in our updated art style.

At the very beginning of the development, Alex quickly made the following dog which was very simple with flat colors and no texture details.

Old version of our dog.

Below is Léa’s new version that she created during Hack Week. As you can see, the 3D model is a lot more detailed and there is now a texture and an outline effect, in the style of our human Parafolks.

New version.

More angles. Don’t you want to hug this dog?!

Left: The old version. Right: The new version.

We hope you like this new prototype of what dogs could look like in Paralives. For now, the work on pets is on hold so that we can focus on everything related to humans of various life stages, until the early access release of the game. Then, during early access, we will resume the work on dogs, cats and horses and I’m sure it will be a lot of fun so I’m looking forward to it!

Anna and Jérémie: Photo Mode

Anna and myself decided to work on the Photo Mode that we presented in a previous Patreon post. With a game like Paralives, we strongly felt like having a Photo Mode would be an helpful way for us developers to share screenshots from the game while working on it and also eventually for players to share their creations, so we split up work! There were a lot of things to do, creating the user interface, functionality, filters and other neat camera tricks you would expect from such a mode. The result was quite satisfactory and we can’t wait to see what people do with it!

I could spend so much time creating funny pictures in Photo Mode, but I got a game to make!

And Everybody Else...?

As you can see, this only covers four people on the team, but what about everybody else? Some people worked on things that have to remain secret for now, while others did things at the brainstorming level that won’t turn into real game features for a while. Keep your eyes peeled in the future, we might reveal a new feature or talk about something surprising that originated from this very Hack Week! It was a cool experience and I really enjoyed doing it, personally. It might become a yearly event for us :)

And with that, have a great weekend!

Jérémie