How Relationships are Defined in Paralives (Patreon)

I hope everybody is having a good Friday! Jérémie here, with today’s Patreon post about a topic we have been working on for a while now and that I’m super excited to reveal; how relationships will be defined in Paralives (as the title said!). As usual, this post is for Patrons only, so if you want to keep a good relationship with us, please do not share it, haha :)

👩‍🏫 The Basics

In Paralives, here’s how you develop relationships:

• 📊 Relationships aren’t just defined by one progress bar.
• 🏷️ Instead, relationships are defined by multiple specific labels that you unlock as you play.
• 📈 These labels can be upgraded so that players can tailor each relationship.

On the left, you can see all of Sebastian’s connections (we still need to add a way to see how close you are to each character, at a glance). On the right, after selecting Jason, we can see the labels that define Sebastian’s relationship with Jason.

🔖 Labels

Something we wanted to do in Paralives was to make relationships between characters unique both to allow for storytelling opportunities and to give players different reasons to build relationships between characters in order to accomplish certain goals. A concept that we landed on is the idea of Relationship Labels. Two Parafolks are more than just “friends”, or “roommates” or simply “family members”, they can have a multitude of labels that represent their relationship. They can have friends that they hang out with to chill and relax and friends to share their deepest secrets and insecurities. They can go fish often with one of their coworkers, or have a secret crush on the lady that works at the library. All of these concepts will be identified as Labels.

Here are some labels that we could have in the game:

• 👨‍👨‍👦‍👦 Labels that define family links: Mother, Father, Sister, Brother, Aunt, Cousin, etc
• 🤝 Labels that define types of friendship: Friend, Confident, Cooking Buddy, Party Partner, etc
• 💖 Labels that define romantic relationships: Love Interest, Secret Crush, Lovers, Married, etc
• 💼 Labels that define professional connections: Boss, Coworker, Business Partner, etc
• 😈 Labels that define enemies: Rival, Bad Neighbor, Mean Ex, etc

⭐ Combo Labels

To represent multifaceted and evolving relationships, if two Parafolks are high level in two specific labels, you could gain the opportunity to unlock what we call a Combo Label. These are powerful labels with better gameplay effects and bonuses. Some examples could be:

• Friend + Confidant = ✨Close Friend✨
• Coworker + Creative Buddy = ✨Productive Duo✨
• Friend + Rival = ✨Frenemy✨
• Friend + Mom = ✨Best Friend Mom✨
• Close Friend + Lover =✨Life Partner✨

When two Parafolks have Combo Labels, you know that they have a history together!

🎮 How Labels Affect the Gameplay

This idea allows us to do plenty of interesting things:

• Having one-sided labels, where characters might feel one way about another, but the feeling is not mutual.
• Giving the player bonuses, such as cooking being easier, going faster or granting more skill experience when done with a “Cooking Buddy”.
• Allow characters to progress in different directions than the ones you might be used to (enemies, rebel teenager, nosy neighbor) without feeling that you’re “failing” at something.
• Labels having a level allows us to make relationships progress over time which can be pretty satisfying, especially if you get different bonuses along the way.
• Unlocking new interactions, having impacts on careers and school-related activities, and much more!

Being used to baking together, these two are more efficient at it since they have leveled up their “Baking Buddies” relationship label quite a bit!

We really feel that such a system will allow for a large number of unique relationships where two pairs of Paras won’t exactly have the same labels and thus won’t have exactly the same past together. It also allows players to weave stories using the labels and the mechanics they will provide.

In this scenario, a Para has a secret crush on someone, so they can send them a secret love letter. The other Para will never know who it is from!

This is just a small introduction to our relationship system, of course and we can’t wait to detail more aspects of it later in the future. How labels are unlocked and leveled up as well as more mechanics related to them will be revealed in a later post.

I wish you all a good day and end this post by asking; What kind of Relationship Label would you love to see in Paralives, and what could that do on the game?

Jérémie out!

Edit - February 7, 2024: This post is now public, feel free to share it!