Addressing Paramaker Feedback (Patreon)

Hi, Anna here!

Today, I wanted to explain a bit more what we have been doing since we released our video and came back to work this month, how we organize the work between us to properly wrap up this Paramaker period and show you some community and team feedback we are going to address.

Team organization and planning  (For Patrons only! Please don’t share)

Last week, Alex told you about the next exciting steps we are going to take regarding live mode development, but while planning and designing this new era, we (the programmers) still need to make some adjustments and fixes to the Paramaker. Even if we are very eager to start working on the live mode, doing so will help us feel more comfortable getting back to it when we will need to polish it and add more features in the future. Some of us will still start to work right away on those live mode first steps, but only part-time for now.

However, our 3D artists will still actively contribute to the Paramaker’s greatness for a while! Now that they have all the basic features working, they will continue to improve the characters, their customization options and slowly start to create all clothing items and hairstyles that we will need before releasing the game. Chloé will also continue to develop the art direction of the environment. That’s one advantage of having worked on the build mode and the Paramaker before live mode: now our 3D artists can work by themselves and test their ideas directly in the game without waiting for programmers to code their needed features.

A few days back, we organized a little playtesting session among ourselves to catch more bugs and to see which features needed more tweaks. After having worked so much on the Paramaker and having our nose buried into it every day, it’s nice to take a step back and try to enjoy it as players! It also helps a lot with finding what’s wrong, in context. We tried to make Paras from references, we tried to click every little button on the UI and listened carefully to every little sound. We came up with a lot of feedback!

Addressing feedback  (For Patrons only! Please don’t share)

Of course, thanks to the video and the community (so, thanks to you!), we also have a lot of useful exterior feedback to help us. Here is some of it:

• Feedback on the art style itself and how characters fit in with the environment. These types of feedback cannot all be addressed as our art style is ultimately our choice and we’re aware that it may not be to everyone's preferences. In next week’s Patreon post, Chloé is going to explain the choices we made, why we made them and she will show you some references that inspired us.
• The lower part of the legs and feet skin texture is darker than the rest of the body and the toenails look very light. That’s one thing we noticed too and the textures and their color information is going to be tweaked.
• The chest is a bit low on the torso. The whole chest area is being reworked as it also causes issues with some of the clothes and some of the body shapes.
• You really loved Marvin! We are very proud of him and really delighted that you all seemed to like him so much.

Here is a few of our own remarks after our playtesting sessions within the team:

• Sliders range. Some body and face adjustment sliders didn’t have enough range to make extreme shapes and some of them were on the contrary too extreme! We will need to go over them one by one and make sure the extreme sides of every slider are not breaking the skin or the clothes textures.
• Fat and muscle sliders. The rendered texture is not perfect for all body shapes yet and the mix of fat and muscle values do not produce the expected result. It definitely needs a bit more work!
• UI categories improvement. To me, this is one of the hardest things to test out! I feel like everyone’s brain is wired differently and we don’t search for a piece of clothing or a slider in the same way, so the categories and how they are separated in the UI may make sense for some people and do not for others, especially with so many things in the catalog! We will tweak some of the categories after the playtesting sessions and think about a search and filter option to make things easy for everyone.
• “Unequip all” button. It gets quite annoying when you test many clothing items and accessories at the same time and you need to start over from a clean slate. At the moment, you have to find them again in the different categories and unequip them all separately.
• ..and more! We’ve added a lot more to-dos on our list and will fix the highest priority ones. Other ideas regarding potential improvements will have to wait after we work on the live mode for a while!

Last, but not least, here are some of the bugs we caught:

From top to bottom, left to right: 1. This is why you should never let your kid cut your hair 2. It’s quite subtle but the right eye is a little bit tucked in for no reason! 3. We like our socks mismatched, but the reversed toe colors weren’t planned… 4. Looks like some slider drag handles want to escape! 5. The muscle sliders have had a hard time coping with some of our clothes 6. After we switch from a masculine to a feminine body preset, both underwear are equipped and there’s no way to unequip them.

That’s all for today! Hope you appreciated this little inside look at our last steps to wrap up the Paramaker-focused development period.

Have a great weekend,

Anna