2022 Recap (Patreon)

Hello everyone! Jérémie here with this week’s Patreon post. As the year draws to a close, we wanted to take a look at everything we’ve done through 2022, go into more details about some aspects of the game that we haven’t talked much about and overall reflect on how things went. We are super grateful for your continued support and you allow us to make this game a reality. This post is for Patrons only, so please do not share it, thank you! Also please note that this is not the last post of the year, but the timing was right for this one!

Live Mode Planning

After focusing on the Paramaker last year, we decided that this year was going to be focused on the live mode. We spent some time in January deciding how we would proceed and then separated the Live Mode planning into chunks to do one after the other. We calculated that one of these “chunks” might take about five to six months, based on how our Paramaker planning went. There was way more game design and meetings for live mode tasks than what we were used to, and we still needed to do some work on older systems like the Paramaker and the Build Mode. It was a wild ride! We’ve managed to do a lot, but there is still quite a bit of work on the live mode that will carry over in 2023.

Being able to select a Para, open an interaction menu and have the Paras do things when that happens are all basic things, but they require a lot of thought, planning and design.

Interactions, Skills, Personality

Being able to create interactions using our mod system was something we started this year. Using this framework, it’s going to be easy to create interactions that allow characters to do things with the world around them. We still need to add a lot around this core, but we have a solid base to build on.

Mustache Man has a lot of thinking to do

We also brainstormed about Skills and Personalities a whole lot and we have some very exciting stuff brewing! Our skill system design is almost there - we could talk about some of our ideas in the future - but Personalities are an especially vast subject. What are personalities in Paralives? Is it a trait-based system, a point-based system, is the personality of your Para about the “small” things or the “important” things? We could’ve spent an extra month brainstorming that subject, which wasn’t time we had. We’ll go back to it next year and conclude this brainstorm for sure!

Music and Audio

In 2022 we worked on establishing the musical style for the Paramaker (the tracks in that post are not a perfect example of the final style we’re going with, but they were a great reference) and the Build Mode, we’ve also done a lot of tests to see how music could work in Live Mode. We also did a lot of brainstorming and testing on the overall sound design (UI sounds, ambient layers, character voices and movement noises). We also started building our audio system to allow us to add all these sound and music tracks in the game, which will be available to modders when the game comes out. Lastly, Andrei created a bunch of sound effects for both the Paramaker and the Build Mode.

Paramaker Improvements

A lot of work was done on the Paramaker in 2022. This makes sense because our fantastic artists did a lot of work on new clothes, testing fabrics, testing new sliders and trying to create new characters. As they did so, they came across issues and bugs that needed to be resolved immediately or otherwise it would hinder their progress. We also added the tattoo system, where you can move, resize and rotate tattoos, moles and other birthmarks on your Paras in a simple-ish manner.

I’ve made the tattoo small :)

A lot more things were done too, like being able to have multiple categories shown at once, scrolling to the equipped items so they are easy to find, adding layering for specific clothes and much, much more!

Codebase Tweaks

Something we didn’t talk much about that I (Jérémie) spent a good chunk of time this year was re-writing some of our Build Mode code. Not to get into the small details, but there was a piece of software we used that didn’t fit our needs anymore, so we had to take it out. That took me a few weeks, and I’m glad it’s over! I wish I could’ve spent this time creating new features instead, but that’s how these things work sometimes - it allowed me to improve some parts of the game that we hadn’t touched in a while and we feel much more confident about the codebase, neat!

Character Animations

This year, Alice worked on a lot of different animations for adults, toddlers and babies. She worked on locomotion animations, emotions, sitting animations and reactions as well. Many of these animations are already integrated in the game as live mode interactions. Anna also worked on the procedural adaptation system for animations, making sure that they work for Paras of different heights.

A few different ways to sit, both on a couch and on the floor!

Paras of All Ages

We’ve worked on old Paras and on very young Paras: both on the design of their appearances, what extra things we needed in the code to support them, and animations as well. We need to do our big aging design so we can have characters growing up - in a way we would call ‘gradual’ (more details will come later) - and decide what they can and can’t do.

I’ve made Para-Toddler climb on Para-Elder using our photo mode tools (something we also did this year!), there is no “climb on adult” interaction... yet ;)

Environments, Vegetation, Items

A bit like with the Paramaker, there was a lot of work done on items, environments and vegetation. The artists really got to work on creating new stuff, and we saw there were problems and certain features were missing or lacking in certain aspects. For the art team, being able to take what they’ve made and import it in the game has to be simple, flexible and as easy to use as possible, so we had to improve a few aspects of the Item Editor, amongst other things. I think we’re almost there!

Because we want to offer great modding tools for players, we have to make the tools at the same time as the game, and that takes extra time. We are quite a small team!

You might remember this house from last week’s post, it’s the culmination of our efforts on that front so far!

Genetics

Anna did some work on genetics in the past, but we wanted to give things another push in order to solidify our design and genetic features. This is required to create children from two Paras, create siblings and much more. There is a lot to think about when designing a genetic system. What exactly is the part that can be inherited from your parents? How is skin color decided? Eye color? Hair color? Do we pick one randomly? Try to use some advanced algorithm to figure something out in a more complex manner? We have the answers to some of these questions now. We will have more info on that in a future post!

Still very much a work in progress, but we can create fully grown adults from their parents.

The Town Map, Households and Lots

I really would’ve loved to show you the Town Map today, but the user interface and visuals are not ready. I designed and implemented the system, but we didn’t have the time to remove placeholder images and make it pretty. I can, however, tell you these things; when zooming out very far, you will see the Town Map overlay over the game view. It’s not a separate menu and you will be able to access it pretty much anytime you’re in Live Mode. In this view, you will be able to switch the household you are currently playing, buy lots and view where your characters are, amongst other things. We’re really excited to think about everything else that we will add in this map!

In addition, for the moment, we have decided that a household can have one, more than one or zero lots. This means that if you have enough money, you could buy multiple lots for the same household. It also means that if you want to try to set up some challenge for yourself, you’ll be able to start without a lot and rely on things like community bathrooms, restaurants and the like to fulfill your needs. This is of course subject to change, but this is where we are at at the moment. We still need some extra features, like being able to split and merge households and edit a lot without having a household selected, but this is a good first step. Again, we’ll show the town map and household management in a later post.

Some Finishing Words

There are so many more things we’ve done this year, some that you’ve already seen, others that we aren’t ready to reveal yet, but we had to take some long and hard looks at our priorities multiple times during the year in order to progress on some key components of the game. As such, we won’t have an end-of-year video like we did last year with the Paramaker, nor do we have a video planned for the holidays. Some people would’ve needed to stop forward progress a month ago and focus their energies and time on that front, but we wanted to keep the momentum going. When we come back from the holidays, we will give things a big push to be able to release a longer video showcasing many Live Mode gameplay elements.

I’m super excited to see what’s coming in 2023 for Paralives, and I hope you are too!

Jérémie out!