The Team Plays a First Version of the Live Mode! (Patreon)

Hey there!

Alex here for another Patreon post and it’s the second one in our series of three posts where the Paralives team tests the game. This week: the live mode! This post is for Patrons only so please don’t share it 🔒

Live Mode Playtest: The Goals

Everyone was given the task of playing with a household of 3 adults in a prebuilt lot.

🧪 The scope was to test the following features:

• Fulfilling needs
• Fulfilling wants
• Leveling up skills
• Developing different relationships with different characters
• Optionally letting the characters autonomously perform interactions

🎯 Our goals with this playtest were to ask ourselves the following questions:

• 🎮 Is it easy to understand how the gameplay feature works?
• 😁 Are these features enjoyable and do they create an interesting experience?
• ✨ Are the new features and innovations that we are trying to bring to Paralives’ live mode promising so far?

Overall, many things went smoothly and were well understood by the members of the team while other gameplay features caused some friction. In any case, it gave us ideas of elements to improve. Everyone had fun testing this first version of our live mode and were eager to test the next iterations and the new features that will be added as we go!

Live Mode Playtest: A Day in The Life of 3 Parafolks

To give you an idea of how the playtest was, I’ll walk you through one day in the life of my characters. Let’s go!

I started by selecting my household of 3 roommates in the Paramaker and purchasing this prebuilt lot. Then, my Parafolks, Kim, Alex and Jason, started discussing together.

I told myself that Alex is an introvert who likes to practice many hobbies so I sent him to the piano where his skill level of 1 is clearly shown by the fact that he plays with a single finger. In the interface, you can see that Alex is performing the “Play piano” interaction if you look at the interaction queue and you can also see Alex’s thoughts.

Meanwhile, Kim and Jason visited the neighbors, Sebastian and Eli, to introduce themselves.

As Kim and Jason learned more and more about their neighbors, they all became friends.

Before, Sebastian was a stranger to Jason. At the end of the day, as shown by the relationship labels, they were now friends and they had connected over their common interest in cooking!

Back home, Alex spent the whole day working on his piano skills and had progressed a lot, to level 6! However, if you look at his thoughts, some of his needs started to require attention, especially hunger.

Jason being the cook in this household, he prepared some juicy burgers for everyone which were promptly eaten.

It’s already the end of the day. Good night sweet Paras, there’s another big day tomorrow. And the one after, and the next one too…

I hope you liked this look at my playtest session! This test was a big milestone for us and we’re looking forward to showing more of the live mode in the future as we work on personalities, careers, schools, having children and many more features, some of which are still secret ✨

Live Mode Playtest: More Highlights

Screenshots taken by different members of the team during the playtest:

Kitchen dance party!

At this size, the bed is supposed to have room for one Para only but it seems like it bugged and two people were able to get in it. I hope they like to sleep while cuddling!

Watching the morning news together.

When you don’t trust your hungry roommates and can’t leave your lunch alone for 2 minutes…

The house didn’t have enough beds so Sonia had to improvise and camp in the kitchen!

Ever eat something so good you just want to burst into a little dance? Maggie did.

Now, that’s dedication! Both Sofia and mustache man were practicing piano until late at night. These Paras in the bed really are sound sleepers!

Friends enjoying a sunny day.

“Talking to him is like talking to a wall” takes all its meaning here! We’re still working on character positioning and pathfinding so this bug wasn’t a surprise to the team.

That’s it for today’s glimpse at Paralives’ live mode and we’re very much eager to share more about the features presented today and those who are still secret and being worked on!

Have a great weekend! 🌱

Alex