⚡💧 Bills in Paralives: How they Work (Patreon)

Hi, hope you had a great week!

In today’s post, I (Alex) will share a first look at the in-game billing feature that Alejandro has recently developed. We’re not talking real life money here, just in-game Paradimes! This system will be used by your Parafolks to pay things like lot taxes and electricity bills. 

Before we get started, I wanted to show you a picture from a team activity we did recently. It was a lot of fun!

The weather was gray but it didn’t affect our happiness level!

Our Goals with Bills in Paralives

In Paralives, any household who owns a lot will have to pay bills. Why are you adding one of real life’s worst features into a video game you might ask? Well, there’s many reasons!

• 1️⃣ Adding a bit of challenge to the game by inciting you to find sources of income to cover expenses
• 2️⃣ Having to manage and think about how the objects you place in your house will impact the costs
• 3️⃣ Find interesting ways to reduce the bills and cut expenses while playing

Demo

How does billing work exactly? Let’s take a look at it using the lot and house we showcased a couple weeks ago!

As you can see, this place has many items that consume electricity and water. These will need to be paid for on each bill, in addition to the lot taxes.

I hope the bill won’t be too high! Should be good though, the size of this house is nothing compared to the 3 story high mansion I started building the other day…

The bills are coming in once every 7 days. This number and many other parameters such as the price of electricity and water are tweakable using the modding tools of the game.

The bill interface. It shows a breakdown of the cost, the total amount to pay and a button to easily settle the bill. The costs will be tweaked as we test and play with the values of the in-game economy.

Okay, okay, good, not too expensive but I have a feeling my Parafolks would prefer to pay less if there’s any way to reduce the next bills. Investing in objects that generate electricity could be interesting…

That should help! You might remember these objects from our Earth Day 2020 Patreon post. They have been revamped since then.

Great! I went a bit strong with my investment in energy production, I’m now making money out of it by selling the surplus to the city. Maybe there’s an item that could provide water? Spoiler: there isn’t (yet, at least)!

Another idea we are testing is receiving a small amount of money per child who currently lives in your household. This could help players who like to raise big families and need a bit of extra money to buy furniture and various items for the kids.

Sebastian is receiving 100 Paradimes each week which helps him with the many expenses that come with taking care of Eli.

That’s it for today’s demo! Right now, Alejandro is working on service outages. If you don’t pay your electricity bill, the city is going to cut your access to it until you settle the bill.

Going Further

There are various additional features we’d like to explore with the billing system in the future. Some examples:

• 💰 Receiving a small amount to help when none of your Parafolks have a job, to help you out a little bit while you find other sources of income
• 🎈 Paying more taxes so the town can organize more festivals and activities.
• 💧 Adding the ability to live on “off the grid” lots which do not consume any electricity or water
• ⚡ Having events such as power outages during a big storm
• 📉 Showing a graph of the cost of the bills overtime
• And more ✨

Those are just ideas for now though! Maybe those could be voted in an in-game political system? This will be interesting to explore in updates after the initial release of the game, perhaps!

That’s it for today’s post. Tell us what kind of additional features you would like to see regarding bills, taxes and energy consumption/generation in the comments below 🔽

Have a great rest of the day!

Alex

Edit - August 3, 2023: This post is now public, feel free to share it!