Progress on Stairs + Bug Compilation + Let’s Paint with our Parafolks (Patreon)

Hello, hi!

Alex here to share various development updates this week. ✨ Please don’t share this post because it’s for Patrons only, thanks 🔐

Progress on the Painting Skill

Sonia and Chloé are creating a lot of illustrations that will be used for the painting skill. When clicking on the easel to start a new project, you will be able to choose the size of the canvas and the painting style (abstract, impressionist, portraits and more). Then, you will see what your Para comes up with!

Here, Chloé is showcasing how paintings made by Parafolks at a low skill level versus Parafolks of higher skill level do not have the same level of detail and polish.

Last week, Sonia made some surrealist paintings (left and bottom right), a lovely balloon dog painting (top right) and the small abstract one (center) is inspired by the bucket fill tool in Microsoft Paint!

You can see more paintings we’ve made so far in this previous post.

Stairs Development Update

Jérémie, Chloé and Richard have been working on the build mode tools to place stairs, creating stair objects in different styles and making sure that characters can go through stairs to move to a different floor inside a house.

When placing stairs, they snap and adjust themselves to the height of the closest wall. This way, it’s easy for players to connect split level platforms and floors together with stair objects.

Players can choose to have a ramp on the left of the stairs, on the right, on both sides or either. Also, some stair objects have the option to toggle the walls underneath.

Using the split level tools, you can raise a platform and choose to remove the walls underneath to create an open space. A problem with that is that we do not yet create a thickness for the floor object because most times, it’s not needed since the walls hide the edges of the floors. We will be working on that eventually to add borders.

One of the other big challenges that we will be addressing soon is how to animate characters using stairs. Because of the height slider which allows players to have characters of different heights, a taller Para will take a bigger step than a smaller Para, even if they play the same animation. We will have to adapt the stair animations dynamically, like we have done for other animations. I’m looking forward to having that up and running!

Bug Highlight Reel!

Bugs are always a fun part of game development (unless you have to spend days trying to track down and fix a difficult one)! Today, we thought we’d share three of the best bugs we got recently.

Ever felt so bored that you’d prefer if everything was on fire? Me neither but this funny bug happened to Alejandro while he was working on the features around fires in Paralives!

What is happening with these hands?! Sometimes, one small error in the 3D model file of a clothing item can create quite a bit of trouble for our Parafolks!

Am I the only one who Moonwalks on the way to the Café everyday? That’s an animation bug that Richard got while working on the animations to turn around at the start and end of a walk!

I hope you liked today’s post and have a good weekend!

Alex