Wrapping Up the Work on Our Paramaker Focused Marathon (Patreon)

Hey there, how are you doing today?

We’re already in December and we’ve been slowly getting into the spirit of the Holidays here. We decorated the office a bit and even put on some Holiday music the other day at lunchtime!

A few months ago, the Paralives team switched their focus to the Paramaker. We had a plan to work on the important core features that were still missing from this part of the game before switching our efforts on to the live mode. Good news! We’re closing in on that and we’re preparing a video showcasing many interesting features of the Paramaker. It will quickly highlight the features we have built to let you customize the look of your future Parafolks. We’re so looking forward to sharing that video with everyone!

What did we do on the Paramaker exactly?  (For Patrons only! Please don’t share)

Today, I wanted to share an overview of some of the Paramaker elements we have worked on over the past months and that we haven’t shared much about yet.

We use a spreadsheet like this to track the major features we needed for the Paramaker and our progress on them. I blurred out the descriptions because there are still some secrets in there!

• Fat and muscle sliders: All the sliders we had before were made to customize specific parts of the body. We added the fat and muscle sliders that now affect the body as a whole.
• Adapting skin details automatically: When you change the fat and muscle sliders, the look of the skin should change. We made it so it automatically changes the texture of the skin based on the current values for the fat and muscle sliders.
• Makeover of the style of the interface: The Paramaker interface went through a complete overhaul to have a more finished look and incorporate the new features
• Managing premade characters: Players will be able to save characters in their library to be reused later or to eventually be shared with other players on the Steam Workshop
• Integrated hair and dress physics back into the game: We had an issue with these before and they stopped working. All good now!
• Worked on Paramaker specific animations: When zoomed on the face, the animation should be more subtle so it doesn’t become a nuisance. Alice also created many outfit reaction animations for the Parafolks.
• Bone sliders: Before, we already had many sliders to change the size and shape of the arms, thighs, waist, nose, eyes, etc. However, some sliders like the width of the shoulders, the scale of the feet and others needed us to literally move a bone of the skeleton so we did that.
• General body slider improvements: modifying the shape and size of the different body parts and facial features is one of the biggest technical challenges of the Paralives project. We made a lot of improvements to eliminate bugs and to improve performance so that the game runs smoothly when editing your character.
• Added sound effects: almost everything you will be interacting with in the Paramaker will make a sound. Helpful to get feedback on actions done and satisfying too!
• Adjusting the camera angle in the Paramaker: There is a height slider in Paralives so that means that the camera has to adapt and position itself to be sure that you get a good angle at your character no matter it’s height.
• Global colors: Some elements that you can wear or activate on your character share a common color. For instance, you can change your hairstyles but the color you had previously chosen should carry on. Also, we added a checkbox to define if elements like beards and eyebrows should have the same color as the hairs or not.
• Non gender locked clothes: In Paralives, we want clothing items to be wearable regardless of the sex or gender of your Para. To do that, we had, among other things, to create a system that would load a variant of a piece of clothing, depending on if the character has breasts or not.
• Support undo-redo: We want players to be able to test changes to their characters without fearing to lose a state and look that they like. That’s why we added features to undo and redo the different actions and manipulations that you can do in the Paramaker.

I hope that gives you a good idea of all the things we went through with the Paramaker recently! There are also other features that I didn’t cover here because we talked about them in previous Patreon posts: body presets, patterns on clothes, skin tone selection, heterochromia and others.

Again, we will be able to showcase a lot of these features all together in a video that we are currently putting together. In January, we will be switching our focus to the live mode but Sonia and Léa will keep working on the Paramaker to improve our body and face sliders as well as starting to add a lot of content like hairstyles, clothing, accessories, and so on! There will still be some Paramaker features left to be done at a later time like improvements to the genetics system, randomizing Parafolks and managing outfits.

Poll: What’s your favorite thing to do when creating characters?  (For Patrons only! Please don’t share)

With all this talk about editing and customizing Parafolks, we would like to know what’s your favorite part when creating a new character in a video game? Please tell us in the poll below!

Have a great day and take care,

Alex