A week in the Developer Life of Jérémie (Patreon)

Hello everybody! Jérémie here! Today I’d love to talk to you all about what I did last week. Posts such as these are great because I feel like they give a better idea of what it’s like to work on Paralives, the kind of tasks I personally do and give some tidbits of info about upcoming things that I’ve been working on! I’ve done that in the past and it’s quite fun, and I feel like people enjoy reading about it as well! As usual, this post is for Patrons only, so even if you want to share the cat pictures, please don’t. Thank you!

Tuesday, May 9th

On this first day, I started by fixing a bug we had with underwear on our Paras where wearing certain clothes would cause them to disappear. Underwear is pretty important, because it’s the one type of clothing that always needs to be present on your characters if they’re not wearing anything else! It had been a while since I worked on the Paramaker, but this kind of bug cropped up because artists needed to add new types of clothing to the game that temporarily hid underwear when worn, such as a strapless dress.

Left: Maggie in underwear. Center: Maggie dressed with her bra still visible. Right: Maggie dressed with her bra automatically hidden.

Afterwards, we had a team brainstorm about food! What kind of food items we would love to have in the game, how they would be presented, served, eaten, all of that. It was a fun time! I think poutine was pretty much requested by everybody, so we’ll see if Léa and Chloé have added it to the list of dishes we’ll have for the release. I finished the day by working on some secret relationship system features. We’re testing a few things out and I feel that this is another aspect of the game where we can innovate and bring fresh and new ideas. We still have to test them a bit more before we can talk about them, but I personally can’t wait!

Wednesday, May 10th

On the second day of the week, I investigated a bug we have with our pixelated effect for censoring. You might have seen it in last week’s dev chat document (jump on our Discord if you’re not sure what that is!) This bug is quite tricky and I can’t explain it very easily, but figuring out complex technical issues is part of the job too! It’s not all underwear and secret relationship systems!

Here’s our mustachioed man again, showing the pixelated mosaic bug. It’s like the visual effect doesn’t see the character underneath at all anymore! We really gotta fix that one! Or find an alternate solution!

Then I answered the dev chat (hey, that’s why this bug is in there!). I love taking the time every week to answer your questions! Part of being a game designer is being enthusiastic about the features you’re working on, so I hope this transpires clearly in my answers there!

I spent the rest of the day continuing thinking about specific aspects of the wants system. You might have seen them in last week’s Patreon post, and we’re still tweaking some parts of the design! Writing design documents can be a daring task, but we have a recipe that we use more or less all the time. Strong design pillars to orient the rest of the document, an analysis of other games and how they deal with that specific feature, a comparison of the pros and cons of various solutions, then a description of what we propose. We’re currently testing ideas for more features and innovations related to wants.

Thursday, May 11th

On Thursday, I helped Alejandro with a very important feature we are currently implementing; the ability for Paras to find the right items when they want to do interactions. If a hungry Para wants to autonomously eat, if you want to throw trash in a bin, if you need to find the fridge, then oven, then the countertop in order to make the best poutine possible, we need an in-game system to help us do that. We’ll still tweak it as we go forward and add more interactions and items, but after today, it was in a good spot.

It’s clear that we need a sink to wash this dirty plate in. Which one should we choose? Hmm...

Later that day, I had a good talk with Alex as well about wants, so I did some more research into other games and made progress on having a first version of the wants system in the game and being able to test it more-or-less for real. Because we talked about it and had a solid game design document, this went really easily. Measure twice, cut once, as they say!

Friday, May 12th

Today I managed to have a first version of the wants system running. It wasn’t that complicated, and now Paras can get wants semi-randomly and fulfill them. Of course, we’re not working on having the real content for the game immediately, so things I added were just placeholders and tests, it is going to be a lot of fun thinking about everything that goes into this system when we are ready to add to it! What kind of wants would you like to have in Paralives? Tell us in the comments below!

Here, in Paralives’ modding interface, you can see the placeholder wants I was talking about! ...although sometimes after fixing bugs all day, I also want a hug.

Otherwise, I tweaked a bit of the character interaction code, had a meeting with Alex and then spent some time looking at the people’s reaction to our Patreon post, both on Discord and under the post itself. I was pretty happy with what I saw and we received great suggestions as well! Don’t hesitate to give us feedback on our ideas if you have some, it’s always appreciated! Keep in mind that we can’t answer everybody and most of the time we might have thought of something related to your feedback - we do overthink everything - but we do read it all.

Monday, May 15th

I started the day by sharing a great joke with the team about a task that Léa currently has, which is to create a new bikini for the Paramaker.

What a hilarious joke. You can see why they keep me at Studio Paralives!

Then it was a full day of tests; I had to play with some parts of our autonomy system to make sure that it worked well with the item finding system I’ve talked about earlier. I wanted to make sure that every option we currently have related to the wants are functional and behave as intended, and also had to tweak some stuff here and there in my code to support all of that.

The rest of my day was spent on... a secret feature that we’re not ready to talk about just yet... But I can say that if it works like we want, it will help spice up the gameplay and even have the potential to add drama and chaos in the game if players are into that. It’s still just too early to share anything about it though, since going from an idea to something confirmed needs multiple rounds of design, tests, and all that, and we’re not there yet. But eventually...!

I hope you enjoyed reading this! I love writing this kind of post, I could probably do it every week... But we have other kinds of stuff to show you all, so I guess I can’t really do that! ...oh yeah, I talked about cat pictures earlier, haven’t I?

My programming companions, Tofu and Soya 🐱

Have a great weekend!

Jérémie