Relationships Gameplay Design + Resize to Accommodate + Painting Walls Fast (Patreon)

Hi, Alex here!

We have various interesting live mode and build mode development updates to share with you today. This post is for Patrons only so please don’t share it!

Relationships Gameplay Design

We’re currently working on everything related to relationships in Paralives. This includes interactions between multiple Parafolks like you have seen in last week’s post. Also, we are designing how the gameplay mechanics will allow players to develop relationships between characters.

Questions like:

• How will relationships progress?
• How will discussions between characters work and how can the player drive them?
• How will relationships impact your characters every day?
• How can building relationships in Paralives be really fun for the player?

We are analyzing all this and our plans for the relationships module of the game are getting more and more solid. We are designing many features and innovations that we are pretty excited about! We’re looking forward to sharing more about that later when we start to test these ideas in the game directly.

Resize and Accommodate!

Howdy everyone! Jérémie here for this part of the post! I’ve recently worked on allowing characters to use items - like chairs, beds and sofas - without getting on top of each other, and for these items to have the concept of “available spaces”. A single chair might have one space for a Parafolk to sit down, while a sofa might have two, or three. This is all well and good, but Paralives has resizable items, so we needed for the game to allow as many characters to sit down as it would make sense, considering the size of the item. Consider the following scenario;

The “Nowhere to sit down :(“ error text is temporary, but Mr Mustache really feels that way.

What do you do in this case? Well, if you are using a resizable item, like this bench here, you can just stretch it out and make more space! We’ve shown this functionality a while back, and we’re pretty happy to finally connect it to our interaction systems!

Resizing an item is still just as easy! Now this bench can accommodate nine people easily!

Everyone gets to a different spot on the bench. I can see plenty of future improvements to this system, but so far so good!

Everyone is waiting so patiently! Are they in line for something, or is it just a day that feels like hanging out on a bench?

There are a ton of small moving pieces that must be taken into account while making a game and this is one of these! I’m glad we got that working :) Have a great weekend everybody! Jérémie out!

Paint Walls Really Fast

Painting walls one by one can be relaxing.

In this GIF, I’m clicking on each individual wall to paint my room green.

However, when you have a huge house to paint and you want to be fast, you need more efficient tools! That’s why Alejandro added the ability to hold the shift key while painting a wall to affect an entire room with a single click. Here’s a demo:

Builders will save a lot of time using that shift-click feature!

That's it for today, take care!

Alex