🎹 Video: These Parafolks Can Play The Piano (Patreon)

Hi, It’s Alex again for another Patreon post!

Today, I’m excited to introduce Paralives’ piano skill! First, watch the video above if you haven’t already 🎥🎹✨

In Paralives, your characters will be able to play the piano and progressively get better at it as they improve their skills. They might play a piece poorly at first but you will be able to hear their progress and see their movements getting better and better. 

🎵 What Kind of Music Can Parafolks Play?

For the initial release of the game, Parafolks will be able to play various well-known classical music pieces from Beethoven, Chopin, Debussy and more. We chose to do that because this music is free from copyrights. Also, we thought most people would have fun recognizing them while playing the game. Furthermore, Andrei already has a lot of work creating the original soundtrack for Paralives so not having to compose new music for the in-game piano skill saves us a lot of time!

In the future, Andrei could compose original pieces for the piano skill and also, in addition to classical music, we could add many different styles that Parafolks could play with the piano like jazz, blues, pop and more. Maybe your characters could even play tracks from the Paralives soundtrack! ✨

👨‍💻 Behind the Scenes: Making of the Animations and Piano Tracks

Creating the piano skill for Paralives required good coordination and planning within the team. It was a fun project to work on! Here’s how it went.

1️⃣ Step 1: Making the piano itself

Chloé created this beautiful piano object that you can place in build mode. Andrei advised Chloé to make sure that our piano is realistic and up to the standards!

Chloé’s piano with some extra clutter which I much enjoyed placing. We are also planning to add a grand piano and an electronic keyboard to the game.

2️⃣ Step 2: Recording reference videos of Andrei playing the piano

To help Alice create the animations of Parafolks playing the piano at different skill levels, Andrei filmed himself playing difficult pieces as well as easier ones while acting like he was just starting to learn.

Wow, that’s fast! I’m guessing this is not for the low skill level animation… (Note that if you are viewing this post on a mobile device, the GIFs might not play for you).

3️⃣ Step 3: Creating the animations of characters playing the piano

For now, Alice has made three piano playing animations for different skill levels: low, medium and high. They required a ton of work because each finger moves quite a lot and very fast! More piano animations could be added in the future.

Props to Alice for animating all these subtle hand and finger movements!

4️⃣ Step 4: Recording the audio tracks for when Parafolks play the piano

Parafolks can play many different music pieces and Andrei recorded himself playing each of them. Alice didn’t create an animation for each music track, where we would see the character play the real notes we hear. That would have required a tremendous amount of work! Instead, to give you an example, Andrei plays all the medium level tracks at the same tempo so that it fits relatively well with the movement of the hands in the animation that was made at the same specific tempo.

Andrei is playing in sync with the movement of the character in Alice’s animation to record the audio you’ll hear when your Paras play piano.

💡 Going Further

Some more ideas we might explore in the future related to the piano or music in general:

• ➕ More instruments: We’re planning to add one other musical instrument for the release of the game but more could come later.
• 👩‍👩‍👧 Ability to play music as a group: Multiple Parafolks could perform together, each using their own instrument. Starting a band and playing at venues would be really fun!
• 🎤 Singing while playing: Parafolks could sing while using the piano
• 📝 Composing new tracks: Your characters could try their hand at creating their own masterpieces.

Please clap for the Parafolks who showed us their piano skills today!

Hope you liked this overview of the piano skill in Paralives! It was really amazing for me to see it come to life thanks to Chloé’s piano, Alice’s animations and Andrei’s recordings. Tell us what you think in the comments below!

Cheers,

Alex

Edit - September 14th, 2023: This post is now public, feel free to share it!