🔧 Breaking and Repairing + 🚶‍♂️ Better Character Animations + 🪑 Build Mode Menu Improvement (Patreon)

Hi, it’s Alex!

Today, I’m sharing two live mode updates and one about the build mode. This post is for Patrons only so please don’t share it 🔐

🔧 Breaking and Repairing Objects

In last week’s post, we’ve shown you how Alejandro made it so items can become dirty as you use them in live mode. Good news (or bad news for our Paras): some items can now break and cause a mess that you have to clean up! This also comes with the new repair skill so don’t worry, this toilet should be up and running again pretty soon.

A Parafolk will have to mop that… (please note that the puddle placement and water animations are a work in progress)

🚶‍♂️ Walking Around Smoothly

Richard and Alice are currently working on making the character walk more smoothly and naturally.

Up until now, when a character needed to turn, they just kind of rotated instantly toward where they were heading:

That’s a sharp turn! As displayed in the GIF above, the characters used to simply move toward the clicked location.

Now, we made it so the character turns around like you would in real life. So if you need to go directly behind you, you would first do a 180 before starting to walk. If you need to go to your right, you would start walking while rotating to your right:

Beautiful! You will see characters walking around all the time in this game so we felt this was an important improvement to do.

🪑 Build Mode Menu Improvement

In Paralives, there will be hundreds and hundreds of furniture and objects that you can place in build mode. To organize them all, the interface needs to be as easy as possible to navigate. In other words, players shouldn’t have to search for 5 minutes to find coffee tables in the menus!

At the moment, the menus are divided in main categories and subcategories. Each of them has an icon and a name. This creates a lot of text on the screen and takes up a lot of space. Last week, Chloé suggested that we change the look of the subcategories so that their names are not displayed:

This change would make the interface easier to parse because it has less text. It would also take less screen space. Finally, it might make it easier for players to memorize where objects are because it’s easier to remember icons than text. Please note that the icons are just sketches for now so it’s not the final look.

Have a great weekend!

Alex