👨‍👩‍👧 Togetherness: Developing Complex Relationships in Paralives (Patreon)

Hello, Alex here!

In previous posts, we have told you how relationships in Paralives will be defined by a variety of labels that will be unlocked as you develop your links with other characters. We have also explained how doing interactions as a group will be pretty easy in our game. Today’s post is all about the gameplay that will make your characters develop relationships when doing interactions together. This post is for Patrons only so please don’t share it, thank you! 🔒

👩‍🏫 The Basics

• 👨‍👩‍👧 Togetherness: As long as they are spending time together, the relationship between characters can develop
• 🃏 Together cards: When characters spend time together, you can periodically select a development for their conversation and their relationship as a whole

🤝 Togetherness

To develop a relationship, instead of queuing many social interactions like you would do in other life simulation games, you can make two or more characters do any interaction together and during that time they spend together, their relationship can slowly evolve.

Our character Sebastian is hanging out with two townies, Jason and Maggie. They are doing push-ups.

⭐ Why we like this gameplay mechanic:

• You can develop relationships with a whole group of people at once, not just with one-on-one interactions (thanks to Paralives’ mechanic that allow you to quickly select many characters and make them easily do something as a group)
• Characters will stick together and do interactions as a group instead of the player having to queue many interactions or else the characters will stop interacting together

🃏 Together Cards

When characters do interactions together, from time to time, you can choose developments for the conversation and how the relationship evolves. This is what we call the Together Cards.

When spending time together, the Together Bar fills up (it currently is set to take 1 in-game hour).

Every time the Together Bar has filled up, the player can click it and is then offered a choice of 3 Together Cards that can evolve the conversation and relationship in different directions. In this image, you can see that our character Sebastian can ask the townies Maggie and Jason what their job is because they don’t know each other a lot yet. Sebastian can also share tips about push-ups because that’s what they are currently doing. This will give a small gain to the fitness skill of all 3 Paras in the group.

⭐ Why we like this gameplay mechanic:

• The game can smartly suggest relationship developments that are appropriate for the current context and throw curve balls that will create interesting events that will impact the relationship.
• You don’t have to navigate an overcharged interaction menu to choose a specific social interaction and repeat that many times in a row if you want to develop a relationship between characters.
• Evolving a relationship will be done somewhat slower, over multiple days. Flirting with someone and marrying them all in under 30 in-game minutes will be a lot more rare in Paralives.

🎮 More Examples

After Maggie left for work, Sebastian kept doing some workout with Jason and started to get a bit flirty. On the right, you can see that the conversation became romantic as well as being focused on their common interest for fitness. Some Together Cards have a success chance, like the ones for flirting. The more romantic the conversation is and the higher compatibility two characters have, the better the odds. Also, notice how the second card has a blue border and the label “Energetic”. This Together Card is tied to one of Sebastian’s personality traits (see last week’s post for more info about personalities in Paralives).

What we really like about this system is that from time to time, townie characters that you do not control can take an initiative that you can react to in different ways. For instance, here, Jason wants to kiss our character, Sebastian and we can choose a Together Card as a reaction.

As discussed in a previous Patreon post, labels that describe the relationship between two characters can be unlocked and upgraded to a higher level. This is done through Together Cards. The blue rectangle represents relationship labels that will be unlocked or upgraded if you select this card.

I chose to unlock the “Fitness buddy” label! When looking at the social menu, we can see that this label has been added alongside the other labels that already defined Sebastian’s relationship with Jason.

I hope you enjoyed this first glimpse at the gameplay to develop relationships in Paralives. We’re eager to share more about all the situations you will be able to experience with this system!

Bye!

Alex

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