🏠 Save, Share and Move Your Houses Around + Interaction with Twitch Streams (Patreon)

Hello everyone! Richard and Alejandro here bringing you new features and changes to the Build mode! As you know we have been working hard on the last touches to the build mode before focusing on the Live mode. 

This post is for Patrons’ eyes only, so please do not share it 🐧

Save Lots as Premade and Move Houses Around

We started with the feature of saving your lots as premades to be shared with other people. It was a complex task but at least I, Alejandro, had the loading system to start from: when we load a game, we load each lot, and then the rest of the town. In my case, I needed to save and load just a single lot, with no extra data, so I started with that. 

Loading my first premade lot:

As it had no interface yet, I made a cheat command to load a premade to the game.

However, despite the lots being loaded correctly, they were not added to the current lot itself. We had an even bigger problem: they were loaded exactly where they were saved and we could not move them. So, we decided to add a new feature allowing players to move an existing lot, or a newly loaded lot.

Adding the “move lot” feature was a bit harder as lots of math was involved. Rotating so many objects at the same time was not as easy. 

Here are some bugs we encountered:

Here, the rotation went wrong, for math reasons!

We showed this bug a while ago on the #developers-posts on our Discord, but it is still funny.

After many iterations and bug fixes, I was able to move and rotate a lot without problems. (There were still many bugs to fix)

With these two features, we added the possibility to load different lots and move them within the current lot. A good example for this feature was the neighborhood we showcased not long ago of different houses made by the Paralives team.

All the houses were made in different saves and were all added to the main save using the premade lot feature.

Our small neighborhood, showcased in a Patreon post and on social media.

After all the technical stuff was done, we needed an interface to be able to easily pick a premade house; command lines are a bit excessive. I based it off of the interface for selecting premade characters and had to brainstorm a feature to take a screenshot of the lots. This feature is still a work in progress but for now, it is good enough, as we have to prioritize other features.

 Some premades do not have a photo as they were made before this feature was done.

That would be all for me! Now, I leave the rest for Richard and what he has to show you!

Outline On Hover and Selection

I added an outline while hovering and selecting walls, floors, and items. This helps make what you are interacting with more clear!

Selecting different sections of my house’s walls in paint mode.

On the left: before the change, when selecting this floor section (there was a subtle white highlight overlay on the floor). On the right: after the change.

What the outline looks like on a chair and on a cactus plant.

Here are some funny development GIFs of the outline:

While trying things out, I made a funny shadow effect.

Again, a funny effect on the hovered object. This is a normal part of development.

As you can see here, the outline doesn’t work well on vegetation and leafy objects. Therefore we will be using the white highlight overlay on them.

Hackweek: Twitch Integrations

For my hackweek, I wanted to see how much work would be needed to add Twitch integrations. This is a feature where a streamer can enable their chat, allowing players to interact with the game. Those interactions can either be helpful or hinder the player’s experience. They make the chat more interactive and are a lot of fun and/or chaotic.

I made the Together Cards into a chat poll. That way, the choice of what happens is now in the chat’s hands.

 A poll on whether my character should _______ or ______.

Here's what the chat can look like. The usernames have been hidden for privacy.

I also added the following interactions, other than Together Cards polls: 

• Make a Para  do an action:push-ups, dancing, etc.

• Set a Para on fire: yes, in my playtest I was constantly on fire 🥲

• Increase and decrease needs: now I understand why my Para always needed to use the bathroom! 

• Set fire to a random item in the lot: can you guess if my house was still standing after the test? 🤣

• Play a sound

• Spawn an item in the lot

• Turn the lights on or off: ghost simulator

• Be notified when a user has joined the chat

This feature was a lot of fun to show to the team. But it is far from being done! It will stay on the side until we have more time to work on it, which might be before or after the game’s launch. 

Have a great weekend, eat your vegetables, and see you next time 🙂! 

Alejandro and Richard