🏙️ Designing Paralives' Town + Showcase of a Building (Patreon)

Hi, it’s Alex!

When Paralives releases in Early Access later this year, your household will move into a carefully crafted town that we’re currently designing. Today, I’m excited to guide you through our creative process for the town's design and Léa will show you the first building we’ve made for it.

🎯 Our Goals with the Design of the Town

As we work more and more on the town, we’ll be able to share sneak peeks with you as it takes shape. To start off, I wanted to dive into some of our goals with the design of our town.

1️⃣ Explorable open-world town: We really want to encourage the player to get out of their house and visit the city. To do that, we plan on having activities to do around town, places where you can meet people, shops, restaurants, workplaces and more. As a reminder, the town will be open world and there won’t be any loading screens when visiting different lots.

2️⃣ Human-sized city: The density of the town shouldn’t be too low to make sure your Paras can visit various lots in a given day without wasting too much time traveling. For instance, it shouldn’t take more than 30-60 minutes for a Para to walk to work or to a shop otherwise they will lose a big part of their day walking around. Cars will be added later on after the release but we still feel like a walkable city will be fun to explore as there will be many places to visit within a short distance.

3️⃣ A pretty town with a history: We want it to be somewhere you would love to visit as a tourist in real life. It should be filled with interesting locations, landmarks, and beautiful architecture and you should be able to feel that the city has an interesting past as well.

4️⃣ Have various lot types: We know that some players would like to play in a townhouse while others prefer bigger suburban houses. Some players like to build houses from the ground up while others prefer to establish their household in a premade house. As such, we will have various sizes of lots and a good range of prebuilt houses available for you in the town.

🏙️ The Layout and Identity of the Town

The town will be split into small districts, the two main ones being:

Old town: A densely populated, European-inspired area with townhouses made of stone and a small castle that was built when the city was first established many centuries ago.

 Some of the reference pictures we’ve collected to illustrate what we aim for with the Old Town district.Industrial: During its history, the town went through an industrial era where factories and houses made of bricks were built. However, since then, some buildings have been abandoned while others were renovated into modern lofts.

 Inspiration for the industrial district.

 The map of the different districts of the town, each represented by a different color. As everything with the town, it is still a work in progress and subject to change. We’re eager to share more details about each district in the coming months!

A small portion of a 2D map we’re using to design the town. It establishes the layout of the streets, lots and points of interest. Each small cell is 1x1 meter and buildings are shown in yellow.

 To give you an idea of the size we aim to have for the town, this small section of the map containing a few buildings takes up this much space in the whole town. We will have about 50 to 70 lots in total among which some will be public like parks and shops while others will be residential lots that you can buy or that are occupied by Townie characters.

🏡 Showcase: An Old Town House

Hello, everyone. Léa here to provide a closer look at a first house from the Old Town district. Chloé and I worked together to make sure this district has a strong and unique identity. Despite the good amount of objects made for the game so far, we still needed some new ones to convey the idea of historical buildings, so we worked hard to add as many as possible!The first step is always to find references. For the Old Town, we drew inspiration from Québec’s history and wanted to represent a fortified town that could have been a trading post during the 17th century. With this idea in mind, we wanted buildings with a strong structure that were well maintained that could have belonged to merchants in the past, and that now look picturesque.

The sketch was drawn by Chloé before starting the build. It serves as a guideline for the new objects we need to create and the composition of the build.

Here is the house we came up with! To test the versatility of our objects, Chloé also built two additional houses to help set up the build in a neighborhood:

Townhouses with stone walls and shutters on the windows are typical of the architecture style we are aiming for.

Here is a look at our references for this project:

  Front view of the building with a larger view of the street.

 Top-down view of the neighborhood with a better view of the roofs.

 Side view of the townhouse to show off the wood extension that, as we can imagine, was added later on by one of the many owners this house had during its history. Ready for a closer look? We put a lot of small details to convey the idea of a realistic street, here are some of them:

Closed-off windows are often seen on old buildings. At some point in time, houses were taxed based on the number of windows you had, so it was an easy way to avoid taxes!

We have some small flags representing the town’s colors.

There are loose electrical cables on the wall, probably added when cable TV started getting popular

Metal brackets in an S shape are very common in stone buildings. They help keep the structural integrity of the wall by holding the stones in place. 

On the corner of the house, we have some customizable street name signs.

An old drinking water fountain next to the left building which would have been used when running water was not yet available in homes. 

To help make the town feel alive, there are some scaffolding and traffic cones on the right (the orange drums an homage to our own hometown of Montréal, where you can find them everywhere)

We started work on some traffic and parking signs!

 Close view of the corner of the house with all its little details.

 Close view of the structural brackets, the scaffolding and traffic cones. You can also see the No Parking signs and new wrought-iron double doors.

That’s it for this week! I hope you liked this post and that it helped you imagine what its Old Town district might look like!🙂Have a nice weekend!Léa ૮⍝• ᴥ •⍝ゝEdit - April 24th, 2025: This post is now public, feel free to share it!