Animation Showcase: Hackweek and More Baby Interactions! (Patreon)

Hiiii, Alice here with you today! ☀️

I’m back from my holidays and this week, Lina and I would like to show you what we have been up to during this year’s Hackweek, as well as new baby animations! To showcase these, I made a short video that you can watch at the top of this Patreon Post. ⬆🎥 Everything shown today is still a work in progress and might change and evolve in time. ✨

🎥 The Animations in the Video

• Baby Playing With Rattle Toy

• Step On Something - Hackweek 

• Pick Up Baby From Floor

• Put Baby in Crib

• Changing Baby In Crib

• Back Pain Reaction - Hackweek 

• Look At Nails - Hackweek 

• Baby Crying

• Pick Up Baby From Crib

• Baby Laying in Arms Variation

• Playing With Baby in Arms (Plane)

• Bottle Feeding Baby

• Breast Feeding Baby

• Burping Baby

• Rocking Baby in Arms 

• Put Baby in Crib (again)

If you missed it, you can find the previous animation showcase in this Patreon post. Also, the music you can hear in today's video is a cozy Piano version of Andrei's music called Inner Child. We shared it in this previous post here!🎵

👶 More Baby Animations, our goal and challenges 

While I was away on vacation for most of July, Lina and I still managed to create a good amount of baby animations. Like always, we brainstormed first and then made a list of all the baby animations that we would need for the game, from the highest to the lowest priority. For now we’re focusing on the essential animations (holding, feeding, playing, changing the baby…). Once all of these are done and approved, Lina and I will move on to the next required animations for the game, and so on. Of course we’d love to add more cute animations and variations (and we have many many ideas), but we need to create all the basics for everything first if we want to be ready for EA next year! ⭐

On the technical side, this time Jérémie had to create a feature that lets us anchor a Parafolk to another one. We already had something similar working for objects, allowing characters to hold things in their hands, but not for holding another Parafolk! 

You might have noticed that we left space between the Adult Parafolk’s hands and the Baby. It is not a mistake, it is to prevent meshes interpenetrations when the babies wear clothing. As you can imagine, creating alternative animations depending on each piece of clothing would take too much time. (You will also probably ask haha, so yes, Sasha is indeed playing with a wooden spoon. 😂 I promise this will be updated in the near future. 🥄💨)

🤸‍♀️ 2024 Animators’ Hackweek

The Hackweek is our annual week-long event where everyone can work on anything they want (as long as it is Paralives related haha), even if it’s not a priority. I am always very excited about it, and this year was no exception! We thought it would be nice to add little animations that could help give more life to our Parafolks. I believe these will greatly contribute to the game’s charm and liveliness and I can’t wait to add more of them before Early Access! Here are the animations we did:

• Lina created a cute “Look at Nails” animation. It could be used in the Paramaker, or in the Live Mode if your Parafolks have nails equipped! 

• She also made a “Back Pain” reaction animation. This one could be useful for older Parafolks, or ones that have just woken up or are sore after too much exercise! 

• On my side, I made a “Step on Something” animation. I was thinking of using it randomly sometimes when your Para is walking on the sidewalk haha. Having dog poop on the streets could be fun (or not). It could also be used if there is something else spilled on the floor, like food, dirty puddles of water, vomit… 

• And finally, I also made a Whistle animation, but I can’t show it to you yet, as it is related to Andrei’s Hackweek work too! 👀

🔜 What’s Next? 

Once we believe we have enough content regarding babies for the Early Access release, Lina and I will start working on the Toddler animations! Because they are older, we will need a bit more animations for them as they will be able to interact more with their environment and other Parafolks.🎈Later on, we will add sounds and special effects to compliment animations, like, for example, a censored blurred effect for when the baby is being changed!

Annnnd that’s it for today! Lina and I really hope you’ve enjoyed seeing some of our recent work, please feel free to share your feedback and ask away if you have any questions in the comment section below. We’ll be more than happy to discuss your ideas and opinions. 💌

💫 Before I go, are there any baby interactions that you would really like to see in the game?

Have a great weekend!
Alice (◔◡◔)/

Edit - November 21st, 2024: This post is now public, feel free to share it!