We need your help! (Patreon)

Hi there,

We're back to our regular posting schedule with our first post of 2021. I'm taking this opportunity to wish you an happy new year again and I hope it will be a great one for you! We took some time off for the holidays and we're back to work with some exciting stuff going on.

We need your help

Canadian Game Devs nominated Paralives for an award, the most anticipated Canadian game! We feel honored to appear on this list alongside all these incredible games! Please check out the nominated games and help us by voting using this short form. We are on the second list: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSe-jzU68afbZ8rppjYwqbGGXt-AJPasehDP5HJUWCkddpiAtw/viewform

What we're working on  (For Patrons only. Please don't share)

As you may know, we usually plan our tasks in chunks of two weeks that we call sprints. Here's an overview of what we're working on these days.

Alice and Anna are making some tests to add more sitting animations for our Paras. The goal is to make it so they can sit on objects of different heights. It might not seem like a complicated thing to do but it's actually really tricky to make it so the animation can dynamically adapt itself and look good no matter the height of the chair and the height of your Para.

Christine, as always, is replying to messages on social media and she's collecting ideas from the community. She's also at work on our marketing plan to make sure we have everything thought out for when we are ready to launch the game in the future.

Jérémie is continuing his quest to make the build mode as good as possible by adding features and making improvements to the tools. Some examples of the tasks he has: improve the wall tool so they snap together more easily when you place them, show the object you are placing in red if you are trying to put it in an invalid location and allow players to copy and paste the hexadecimal color field in the color wheel menu.

Léa is working on some improvements for the eyes of the Paras. She's also thinking about improvements to the body and face transformations that we'll then create and add to the Paramaker. That means adding more options to change the size and shape of different body parts.

Sonia has been testing how to recreate different hairstyles in the game: curly, straight, braided, wavy, etc. So she's creating some hair cuts to see what it will look like in our art style and to test different ways to create the 3D models and textures of the hairstyles.

Alex: I'm working on finishing modding tools to allow developers and modders to edit any setting and content in the game. In short, it's a system that allows people to edit, through tools and interfaces, almost anything that's in Paralives. The price of furniture and clothing, the walking speed of the Parafolks, the color swatches for a given item, the texture of the skin, the interactions and animations of the characters: these are just a few of the things people will be able to change using the in-game modding interface that I'm currently working on.

Aside from that, here's a reminder of our next priorities:

- Paramaker: more customization options and features related to clothing
- Build mode: adding more features, improving the tools and making them easier to use
- Live mode: have a first base of character animations for basic actions
- Complete house building video, the Canadian Chalet, that should be ready in the coming months

That's it for what we're working on at the moment. As always, we'll keep you updated with our weekly Patreon post every Friday and we'll regularly post new videos as well! For Patrons on the Hero and Legend tiers, don't forget to join us on Discord, if you can, for a weekly Q&A session with us! The event time will be alternating between noon ET and 3pm ET with today's session being at noon ET. If you are not on the required Patreon tiers or can't make it, you can read our weekly chats that we post afterwards on Reddit and Discord.

Have a great weekend and take care!

Alex   (▰˘◡˘▰)