Improving the Art Style (Patreon)

Hi there!

It's Friday so that means the weekend is here. But most importantly, it's time for another Paralives update! This week, we wanted to share some improvements we made recently to the art style of the game.

Developing by iteration

Like most games being made, we are improving Paralives by iteration. That means we often try to have a first version to start with and then later we spend time to improve that version for a second iteration. This way, we can integrate feedback and suggestions. That's true for the game features, the user interface and the art style. So the characters and environment you have seen in our videos are not final and we always work to improve the results. This doesn't mean we will change the style completely, only that we keep improving and tweaking our current style.
Improvements to the character skin texture  (For Patrons only. Please don't share)

A few weeks ago, Sonia and Léa spent some time to make some research and tests to improve the details on the skin texture of our Paras. Some of you may have noticed this on a screenshot in last week's post. Since we started working on the characters early this year, we had a specific style in mind. We wanted to make the Parafolks look a bit like a drawing. That means visible sketch lines for shapes and paintbrush-like details for the color of the skin. This effect was not as good as we wanted when we showcased our first Paras, Maggie and Sebastian. We also collected a lot of feedback from the community and did our best to integrate these suggestions to add a bit more details to the skin. Keep in mind that we still have some things to improve but here's a before/after showing the difference in the skin details:

Note: Left is Sebastian and right is Charlie (our test character). Charlie is in our test scene (different lighting and accessories) so that's why some of the things look better on Sebastian. We mainly wanted to show the new skin details like on the knees. The eyelashes on Charlie are not the correct ones at the moment and they are missing transparency. This will be fixed! Also, the eyes on Charlie are not exactly at the correct size because an animation is missing. Keep in mind that freckles, blush, skin color, etc are customizable in the game.

New wall and floor textures  (For Patrons only. Please don't share)

We also have been working on some new textures for the environment, mainly for walls and floors. That came with a lot of research to discover what style we wanted to go for. We wanted to show you some of the textures we made this week. We'll surely use these for our upcoming Canadian Chalet build. 

We are using Substance Designer to create these. It's a software that allows us to easily create different details to make an interesting pattern. It looks like this:

Have a great weekend everyone!

Alex