🧠 Simulation Progress: Emotions, Wants, Job Performance, Pathfinding and more! (Patreon)

Hi! It’s Alex 👋

As previously mentioned, the time has come for the game designers and programmers on the team to switch back to working on the live mode, after having brought the build mode to a near complete state! Today’s post will update you on our current tasks regarding simulating the lives of our Parafolks. As usual, this post is for Patrons only so please don’t share it! 🔐

🎯Current Goal: An Internal Live Mode Playtest Next Month

To kick back our work on the life simulation aspect of the game, we are aiming to have an internal test session in one month. The goal until then will be to tighten our gameplay systems and content in the hope of confirming that players enjoy managing the lives of their characters. Members of the team will be able to test:

• Needs

• Skills

• Multiple upgrade paths for one career

• Emotions

• A few personality traits

After that, we aim to keep our monthly schedule of playtests by inviting friends to our office so that we can collect feedback on the gameplay and content that we will be adding progressively. As with the build mode, I’m convinced this will serve us well in making sure the game provides an already good experience when we launch in Early Access next year.

🚶 See the Path your Para Takes

Richard added the ability to see the path your character takes when moving from point A to point B. It’s still unsure if we will activate it for players by default but for us, it’s a great way to investigate and fix bugs around the game’s pathfinding system.

 It’s also pretty cool to see!

🎥 Camera: Find your Paras and Follow Them

If you are like me, sometimes, you are just looking for your characters because you don’t know where they are and what they are up to. To help with that, I made it so pressing the F key will move the camera to center it on the selected Parafolk.

 After pressing F to find your character, as long as you don’t move the camera again yourself, the camera will follow them. Pretty handy!

📉 Career: Job Performance

One of the feedback we got when we introduced you to our job and career gameplay systems is that a lot of people wanted more challenge and wanted us to simulate the fact that if Paras have bad days at work or if they don't make efforts, they won’t progress in their career.

We agreed with that feedback and so we are designing a job performance system. From now on, characters won’t get an upgrade point after each work day. Instead, they will have a chance to get one each day and the chances are better based on different criteria.

For instance:

• If the Para is in a good mood, if their skills are at an appropriate level and if they go to work while having their needs met, they might have a 75% chance to get a career upgrade point.

• On the contrary, if a Para goes to work and they haven’t slept for 24 hours because they are extremely sad due to breaking up with someone, they might have only 20% chance to get an upgrade point today.

We are also planning on adding consequences if your Para goes to work in a really bad shape. They could lose a career rank for example and if it happens 3 days in a row, they might just get fired :(

🧠 Simulating the Brain of your Para

Right now, we are also working on revamping the way the code simulates what happens in the brain of your character. Our goal is to easily edit the logic behind which emotions and wants your character might dynamically go through based on their personality and how their day unfolds. To do that, we are creating tools allowing us developers as well as future modders to easily edit what can happen in the brain of the Parafolks. The interface will look like this:

 In this example, we show the logic that would be taken into account when a character finishes their work day. This tool will allow developers and modders to edit and configure that logic to add all sorts of conditions and effects on the character.

⭐ Wants: Improving What Our Paras Wish For

Wants are thoughts that go through the mind of your characters. They show what they desire at the moment which can be used as gameplay objectives by players.

Two examples of wants in Paralives.

Right now, we are working on improving our wants system and we are asking ourselves:

• Is it better to gain new wants for your character when you wake up in the morning or instead, at various times during the day? We aim for characters to feel alive and react to their world. To achieve that, we are thinking of making new wants appear during the day depending on where your character is in the town, their personality, the interactions they are doing, the people they are currently with, the emotional events that happen, etc.

• Is it better if wants are small tasks that can be fulfilled in a day or could they spawn multiple days or even weeks? We are thinking of making wants daily so that the player knows what their character wishes for in the immediate and they can fulfill it in a matter of hours max if they wish. We will most probably have aspirations and/or a quest system for longer-term tasks.

• If wants reset every day, can you pin a want to keep it for the next day? Since wants are reactive and show what the character is thinking, we might not allow the player to pin a want to complete it at a later time because it might stop making sense for the character if the context changes. We are still considering all this!

Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments and have a wonderful weekend!

Alex