Live Mode Progress + Loading Screen + Edit Your Relationships (Patreon)

Hi! Alex here. How was your week?

On the program today: a short update about our progress on the live mode and a showcase of three Hackweek projects made by the team back in June ✨

🎮 Live Mode Update: An Internal Playtest

In the coming weeks, we are organizing an internal playtest! The whole team will be playing a first version of Paralives’ live mode featuring fulfilling needs and wants, building relationships, leveling up skills and many secret features that we can’t reveal just yet. We’re looking forward to sharing more with you soon! For now, we need to fix a few more bugs.

This Parafolks is displaying strange behaviours…

🌱 Loading Animation

During this year’s Hackweek, Alice chose to focus on creating cute hand-drawn animations that we will be able to display in the corner of the loading screen of the game. Here’s how they look:

How cute is that!

Paralives is all about growing: your Paras’ personal growth, relationships evolving and of course, your garden too will be growing!

You can take a look here at other 2D animations that Alice did before and that we are planning to use in the game.

🔃 Loading Screen and Optimizations

Jérémie and Alejandro’s Hackweek was all about adding a proper loading screen when we load a save file in the game and making sure it loads everything as fast as possible.

The loading screen with a progress bar and a gameplay tip. The look, color and style of this screen is placeholder and will be reworked.

How were you testing the game up until now without having a loading screen you might ask? Well, the screen was simply becoming black and the game would freeze for many seconds while everything was being loaded at once!

Jérémie wanted to optimize the processing time when loading a game that has a big town in it. Since our town is not created yet, Jérémie quickly made a script that generates a terrain with many randomly built houses on it.

These look like colorful warehouses!

The interiors are also filled with randomly placed objects.

Don’t worry, our town and houses will be hand crafted! However, this was a great way for Jérémie to see how the game performs loading a big save file so that we can start optimizing all this and make sure your save files will load quickly when the game releases!

🤝 Defining Pre-Existing Relationships in the Paramaker

Anna’s Hackweek was centered around allowing players to edit the relationship between your Parafolks when creating a new household in the Paramaker. Read more about how relationship labels work in Paralives in this previous Patreon post.

In this GIF, you can select any relationship label to define a relationship between two Parafolks. However, in the Paramaker, just after creating your household, advanced labels such as “best friend forever” won’t be available and you won’t be able to increase the level of the label so that you can instead do that while playing in live mode. However, a cheat will activate full control over the labels!

That’s all for today, don’t hesitate to tell us what you think in the comments below and have a good rest of the day! ⛅

Alex