Character Creator - Design Vision (Patreon)

Hello there!

I wanted to share with you a bit more about the goals we are trying to achieve with the character creation tools in Paralives. There are 3 main goals: flexibility, accessibility and modding support. For now, we are mainly focused on the visual customization of the Parafolks. The design of the personalities is a subject for another post! As always, please keep the information of this post a secret between Patreon supporters :)

Flexibility

Everyone should be able to recreate themselves and their loved ones into the game. Players should also be able to get creative and make totally unique and interesting Parafolks. That's why we want the character creator to be as diverse and inclusive as possible in terms of customization and variety. What it means:

- Great premade swatches but also full color wheel for skin, eyes, hair, clothes, makeup, etc
- Big variety of hair styles, clothes and accessories from different cultures so everyone can find their favorite style
- Huge array of sliders to customize any part of the body easily
- Flexible gender options
- Weight, muscle and height sliders (can't 100% confirm this last one yet, we're still running some experiments!)
- Much more stuff to be revealed later!

Accessibility

For a character creator to be fun, it needs to have a lot options but it also needs to be very easy to use. That's what we mean by accessibility. So the menus should be pretty simple but at the same time, have a deeper level for expert creator. Push/pull to edit different body parts make editing a character very easy. But advanced users can use the optional sliders to tweak with precision (thanks to you Patrons for your feedback on that subject)! Also, every part of the character creation process should have a randomize option as well for people who want to go quickly. Accessibility also means no disturbing yawning animations while trying to move a nostril by a tiny bit!

Modding support

We want to empower modders to customize almost every aspect of the Parafolks and the character creation tools. That means mods could completely change the skin textures, makeup, eye texture, eye lashes, etc. Mods could also be made to add new push/pull sliders on different parts of the character. As for clothes, custom content creators will be able to create them from scratch using a 3D modelling software such as Blender and import them into the game.

That's it for our goals with the character editing tools in Paralives. Tell us if we forgot something important! Unfortunately, we can't show the actual Parafolks yet, we need to make sure they are really great first. But we're so looking forward to show them to you because we are very happy with the style we are going for!

One last thing: people have been suggesting different names for the character creator module including Create a Para (CAP) and Design a Para (DAP). Do you have other suggestions? We could make a poll to decide together on the final name soon!

Cheers! :)

Alex