Name Customization + Poll + Cultural Survey Results (Patreon)

Hi there!

Thanks to everyone who voted and shared their ideas last week about the cooking system in Paralives! It gave us a lot of stuff to think about! And in case you missed it, we posted a short video yesterday to showcase a box fort that I built in the game, check it out if you haven't!


Cultural Diversity Survey Results

Christine worked really hard on gathering all your ideas from the survey and these data will be very helpful for us while making the game. Here's a little something she wanted to share about the survey results:

Thank you to the many who participated in the Culture Diversity Survey (over 8000!). It goes without saying that it took a while to analyze and summarize everything but we loved learning more about everyone’s culture! It really felt like a trip around the world.

The survey made it possible to highlight possible solutions in order to represent the greatest number of people. The ability to create your own holidays, celebrations or traditions is a great example. There’s a lot of cool gameplay elements to consider here: setting a date, decorating, inviting some Parafolks over and choosing specific actions and interactions (e.g. opening up gifts, fasting or dancing all together). Some people wanted to be able to remove their Para’s shoes when entering a house. How about setting certain actions as house rules? Another interesting example are the different greetings that exist around the world. Will your Para greet a superior by shaking his hand or bowing? Will it greet a family member with kisses on the cheeks or with a heartfelt pat in the back? There’s still so much possibilities to explore! We also understand the importance of creating diverse preset skintones with the right undertones and an attention to details (like lighter colored skin in the palms of the hands for example). Offering multiple hairstyles for each hair texture is necessary as well as providing choices for different hair lengths. 

Needless to say, we gathered a lot of inspiration for hairstyles, clothes, furniture, food and more! Imagine a Powerpoint of fifty slides filled with images and a large document filled with bullet points of ideas. Do you visualize it? Well, that’s what we have!

The moodboard above only contains about 1% of it all, can you recognize some things related to your culture?  

Name Customization

In Paralives, you can customize the name of your Parafolks in many ways. We plan to showcase that to everyone next week but we wanted to give you an exclusive sneak peek first so please don't share that outside of the Patreon community for now :) 

Nicknames
If you want, you can enter a nickname for your Para. People who are close to someone might call them by that nickname. It can be an abbreviation or a modification of the first name like Bob for Robert or "The Rock". By the way, Maggie's real first name is Margaret!

Middle Names
Here in Canada, we don't use middle names much but many countries do (John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Homer J Simpson, etc). Some people have one or many middle names so your Paras will also have that option.

Optional First Name and Last Name
Sometimes, you just want to remove your last last name or first name entirely so you can do that as well in Paralives. Hi Madonna, Lorde and the others!

Switch the Order of the Last Name and Given Name
In some East Asian cultures, the last name comes before the given (first) name. So we added that option as well!

That's it! I hope you liked this preview and don't hesitate to tell us if we forgot a name customization option!

Poll: Maggie's Last Name

Speaking of names, we realized that Maggie, our first townie, still doesn't have a last name. So please help us and vote in the poll below so we can properly name her!


Take care!

Alex