Skin Tones Poll + Protecting your Saved Games + TikTok (Patreon)

Hi there, happy Friday!

This week, I wanted to update you on some of the work we have been doing so here it goes.

Paramaker Progress  (For Patrons only! Please don’t share)

As you know, we’ve been hard at work on the Paramaker lately. A few things we did this week:

• Make sure every interactions in the Paramaker can play a sound effect
• Research the style of the sound effects that we will have in the Paramaker
• Improve the body hair textures
• Design and rework the feature that let you wear mismatched socks and other clothing elements
• Generate small thumbnail images for every piece of clothing so that you can see what they look like before selecting one
• Improve the skin coloring math so that Parafolks can be good looking in any skin tone
• More secret things!

Poll: Skin Coloring Interface  (For Patrons only! Please don’t share)

Speaking of skin tones, consider these possible ways of selecting the skin color of a character:

Which of these do you think you would use the most to select a skin color for your Para? Please tell us in the poll at the end of this post! We’re currently working on that and would love your input. Note that this is a very important feature and we’re aiming to do as much research as possible to make sure that it’s done properly.

A: Complete list of a wide variety of skin tones for every ethnicity  (do not consider the skin tones in the above image “A” because the list of colors hasn’t been built yet)
✅ Easy to use, will cover 95% of the most common skin tones if done well
❌ Might not offer a specific skin color that you are looking for

B: Special color wheel made for skin colors
✅ You can select a very specific skin color
❌ Somewhat harder to use for unexperimented players

C: Full color wheel with ALL the colors
✅ Offers any color that you can imagine
❌ Hard to use for unexperimented players, hard to select a realistic skin tone when all colors are available

Protecting your Saved Games in Paralives  (For Patrons only! Please don’t share)

Have you ever played a game that you love and then, one day, your save file no longer works? That fear makes me stay up at night! To protect your precious saved game, we are building a little system that will make sure that it’s always updated and working properly. This system should also work with mods so that means mods shouldn’t break after you update Paralives to a new version. Fingers crossed that no one will have to suffer from broken saved games or mods!

Left: In Animal Crossing New Horizons, the game updates your save data so that it still works after you download an update for the game. Right: A very frustrating situation that could happen if the game doesn’t update your save data to make it work with the latest version of the game.

We’re Now on TikTok  (For Patrons only! Please don’t share)

We’ve created a TikTok account for the game! Follow us there if you’d like to see anything that we might post in the future: tiktok.com/@paralivesgame. To celebrate, I built the following floor plan using our wall tools. It’s pretty cool that we can create almost anything with them! Please don’t share that floor plan until we share it publicly next week, thank you!

The TikTok logo built in Paralives with walls (left) and the original TikTok logo (top right)

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

Alex