Relationship Design + Community Brainstorming (Patreon)

Hi there,

I hope you are doing well!

Monthly Community Brainstorms

Thanks so much for all your ideas in last week's Patreon post regarding relationships in Paralives! Reading people's ideas on Patreon was so interesting that we decided to make it a monthly event. From now on, we'll come up with a different brainstorming theme each month. It will be introduced to Patrons first and a few days later, we will announce the theme to the rest of the community so they can suggest ideas on Discord and Reddit. Note that Patrons will also get access to an exclusive poll along with the brainstorming session, just like in last week's Patreon post!

Relationship Poll Results

Thanks to everyone who voted in last week's poll! The question was: if Paras stop maintaining a relationship, would you rather see the relationship level slowly decrease or should bonds never weaken by themselves overtime?

Here are the results:

Most people agree that relationships should decay overtime. You shouldn't chat with someone for a whole day, become friends and then never speak again without it affecting the relationship level. That's something we'll be looking to integrate in our design. Relationships shouldn't be static!

Design Vision for Relationships

This week, in addition to the community brainstorming, we also had a internal meeting to discuss the design of the relationships in Paralives. The goal of this team meeting was to establish the design vision of the relationship system.

• Each relationship should be unique. In real life, we can have many friends but none of these relationships are the same because there's always different elements that bring different people together. One friendship might be purely based on a common love for music while another might be based on long lasting childhood memories.
• Players should be able to build relationships over time and it should be rewarding. While playing Paralives, building and improving relationships should be a fun and rewarding.
• Relationships should affect other aspects of the game. Having good relationships at work should positively affect your career or having friends to practice your hobbies with should have a positive impact on your skills.
• Give players control over their stories. Since Paralives is a sandbox life simulation game, players should be able to guide different relationships in different ways. Getting creative should reward the players with interesting developments in a relationship between two Paras.
  

We came up with a foundation for the design of the relationship system to fit the above design pillars. The suggestions from the community were also very helpful to make sure we thought of every important aspects and constraints. Feel free to continue sharing and discussing your ideas, as not every detail of our relationships-related features have been decided yet. I'm looking forward to share more about our design in the future once we can show it in the context of the game!


Cheers!

Alex