Relationships: Brainstorm and Poll (Patreon)

Hello!

Team day-to-day  (For Patrons only. Please don't share)

I thought it would be interesting to give you an overview of what our work days look like inside the team. Because of the pandemic, we work from home, but the plan is to get an office when everything settles down. Until then, we sadly cannot meet in person. However, we're connected together through our team chat app. That's where we share our progress with other teammates, give feedback, share inspiring illustrations or videos that we came across, share ideas that we had or just goof around.

We also have some meetings every week:

• Team meeting: That's when we talk about what's going on in the team and the project to make sure everyone is on the same page. We usually discuss recruitment, interviews that we had with candidates, our plans for the next Patreon post, etc. This meeting is also where we review our tasks and priorities for the next two weeks. Finally, every other week, we use this time to brainstorm about a given topic together. It's often a specific aspect of the simulation mode. In the past, we brainstormed about family trees, careers, ways to die, just to name a few.
• Art review meeting: Once a week, we get together to review what the 3D artists (Léa and Sonia) did this week. We also discuss design topics and technical issues related to the visuals of the game like the characters and the environment.
• Code review meeting: That's where programmers meet to take a look at the code that was written within the past week. The goal is to suggest improvements to ensure we have solid systems and game logic as well as finding optimizations to make the game run as smoothly as possible.
• Technical interdisciplinary meetings: Sometimes, people working on a same subject have to schedule additional meetings in order to design clever solutions for a technical problem. Usually it's a time where members of diverse backgrounds (programmer and artists, for example) share their different perspectives and knowledge and try to address these issues in a way that work for all parties. It's a nice opportunity to learn from each other!
• Discord weekly Q&A chat session: Every Friday, we attend our 1 hour long chat session on Discord where Patrons on the Hero and Legend tiers can ask us anything. All Patrons can read these chat sessions since we post them on Discord afterwards.
• One on one meetings: Last but not least, every 2 weeks, I meet each team member individually so we can chat together about how everything's going. That's a good time to discuss what happened in the last two weeks and how we can improve our work habits, planning, workflows and such.
  

Relationships Brainstorm  (For Patrons only. Please don't share)

As mentioned above, every other week, we organize an internal brainstorming session where we throw ideas about different game design topics to see what sticks. Next week's session will be about relationships between Paras so everything related to how they make friends, fall in love, socialize with their families or even how they make archenemies.

We're curious to hear your suggestions about anything related to relationships in the game so feel free to write down your ideas in the comment section of this post! Some questions that you can ask yourselves: what types of relationships would you like to see in the game? How will we build relationships and how will they affect the gameplay? How do we represent relationships in the game's user interface? Etc, etc. Tell us anything you have in mind!

Relationships Poll  (For Patrons only. Please don't share)

There's one specific aspect of relationships that I am really curious to get your opinion on. Let's say your Para has been friend with another Para for a long time. They often work out together, go to the movies and even travel abroad from time to time so their relationship level has reached a pretty high number. However, eventually, life gets in the way and they don't see each other as much as they used to. The question is: if Paras stop maintaining a relationship, would you rather see the relationship level slowly decrease or should bonds never weaken by themselves overtime?

Thanks so much everyone for your input and ideas!

Cheers,

Alex