Exclusive Look at Our First Social Interactions (Patreon)

Hi, Anna here!

Today I’m excited to show you new interactions we included in the game! Those are all basic interactions between characters, which are crucial to start implementing all the social systems needed for a real life sim game. Relationships are a big part of the game and this one of the biggest parts of live mode we are tackling right now.

This post is for Patrons only so please don’t share, thank you!

💑 A Preview of Three New Social Interactions

Without further ado, here are the three new animations we included in the game!

Handshake

This animation will eventually be used for formal greetings and maybe sealing a deal with a client or negotiating with your boss to get a raise!

Your favorite mustache man is a very polite person!

Hugging

This hug animation might be used for more personal greetings or interactions between your Para’s loved ones.

A warm hug makes everything better.

Kissing

This kissing animation was designed by Alice to be a basic kiss (maybe a quick “kiss goodbye”) animation between two lovers, but there will be more passionate animations later down the line!

It’s almost Valentine’s Day, hope you have some chocolates ready!

🎯Mini Dev Diary: the Height Adaptation Challenge

I don’t know if you noticed on those previous GIFs, but our animations are now working with characters of different heights!

Indeed, one extra challenge we have in Paralives is the effect of the height slider on the animations. The interaction animations created by Alice are made using two characters with fixed size, so if we just put them as they are in the game and change the height of the characters, the animation will look weird!

Handshake animation on two different sized characters before procedural adaptation.

Kiss animation on two different sized characters before procedural adaptation. That kiss on the forehead is very cute, but that’s not what we wanted to do!

We cannot possibly ask Alice to do an animation for every size of character with the correct hand positions, so this is where procedural animations come handy! (see what I did there 🤝) I’ve talked a bit about it in a previous post quite some time ago. For now we’ve managed to automatically adapt the Kiss and the Handshake animation for small height differences. We will probably need other animations for “extreme” height differences: just as in real life, very small people can’t just lean towards their tall partner to kiss them but need to get on their toes or maybe need their partner to bend a lot more!

During the adapted handshake animation (at the beginning of this post), you can notice that the hands are adapted to meet, but also that the heads rotate a little bit so the character can look at each other when shaking hands. For the kiss animation, both the heads of the character rotate towards the lips of the other character, while hands need to be placed at precise points on the body of the other character, as Alice intended to in the original animation.

That concludes my post for today. Hope you liked those new animations!

We can’t wait to show you more things from the social part of the live mode!

Anna

ʕ ꈍᴥꈍʔ