Paramaker Progress Update (Patreon)

Hello!

As you may know from a previous Patreon post, we are currently focusing on features and improvements related to the character creator module of the game, the Paramaker. We got A LOT of stuff done in the last two months and we’re taking a bit more time to finish some important tasks before we move on to other parts of the game for a while, mainly, the live mode. Meanwhile, today, I’m gonna be explaining some of the work we’ve been doing on the Paramaker. This post is for Patrons only so please don’t share it, thank you!

Slider Interface

In Paralives, you can change different body sliders on the character itself. Now, we’ve added the ability to also browse the sliders in an interface panel. It’s a second way for players to edit the shape of the face and of different body parts. What’s great about showing sliders that way is that it’s easier to know the exact value of a slider and you can even edit the numbers manually and copy-paste them.

In the Eyes section of the Paramaker, you will be able to change some specific eye sliders to mold them as you wish. This interface is still a work in progress.

Body Presets

In many games, including Paralives, you can change specific sliders to edit the size, position or shape of a specific part of your character’s body. It can be the height of the nose or the width of the hips, for instance. Games also often have what we call presets: a list of different pre-made shapes for a specific part of the body. You could have, for instance, a list of pre-made nose shapes to choose from, a list of pre-made body silhouettes, etc. We’ve worked on the design of this whole feature which is trickier than it seems and now we’ve started the code to get it working, hopefully next week!

Mouth presets (left) and face presets (right) as seen in the character creator of the game Demon’s Souls. We’re currently working on having features similar to that. Presets are great to quickly create a character. Of course, after selecting a preset, you will also be able to edit the sliders in detail to create the exact look you aim for.

Clothing Improvement and Fixes

When changing the different body sliders, it changes the size and shapes of your Para but also its clothes. This is quite tricky because the clothes do not always follow the body properly when changing the size of a body part. We explored different solutions to fix the different issues we had related to that and we’ve made a lot of fixes. It almost works perfectly now, we’re getting there!

This is another issue we had to fix. The shirt looks torn but in reality, it’s just not displayed properly. Jérémie changed the skin color to make it look like Hulk!

Other Tasks We’ve Done Recently

• Adapted the skin textures automatically depending on the fat and muscle levels
• Created more animations for characters when they are being edited in the Paramaker
• Added more body and face sliders
• Added more skin texture details
• Created more basic clothing
• Added an interface to create and delete Paras

What We’re Still Working On

Here’s a list of other features that are still being cooked:

• Creating features and interfaces for skin recoloring
• Making sure the camera controls work well in the Paramaker, regardless of the zoom level and height of your character
• Creating sound effects for the different actions you can do in the Paramaker
• Fully supporting undo-redo of actions done in the Paramaker

Once these are done, the plan is to move on to working on the live mode for a while. This doesn’t mean that the Paramaker will be completely done and ready to be played. We will still need to add more features later, improve the interface and mainly, add a lot more content to it since we only have a few of these items for now: hairstyles, clothing, makeup, tattoos, etc.

That’s it for today, have a great weekend!

Alex