What We Did This Week + Genetics Info and Poll (Patreon)

Hi there! How are you doing?

Postcards are in the mail

Two days ago, we sent postcards to all the Patrons who were on the Hero and Legend tiers on August 1. That's almost 500 postcards to write and sign! It was a really fun thing to prepare and we can't wait for you to see the original artwork Léa made for it. Tell us in the comments below if you already received yours! It might take a few weeks for you to get it depending on where you are in the world. Also, feel free to share your postcards on social media, if you want :)

Christine has completed her internship

When Christine joined us at the start of the summer, it was for a 4 months part time internship. It just came to an end and we really love having her with us on the team so she is now a full time employee! We're so happy about that! Recently, Christine worked on preparing the postcards, improving our Steam page (new description and banners), compiling the answers to the LGBTQIA+ diversity survey and more.

Character improvements

We collected a lot of feedback following the reveal of Maggie and Sebastian so this week, Alice and Léa worked on some improvements. This includes tweaking different proportions of the body, improving the shapes and making our character model easier to animate. For instance, one of the change Léa made this week is improving the hands. As some people mentioned, the hands (and feet) were a bit too small and also, the shape and proportions were off. We'll keep improving more character related stuff, thanks everyone for all the feedback!

Also, since Alice, our animator, joined us recently, we are designing the tools that modders will be able to use to integrate their own animations into Paralives. The goal is to let people replace existing animations or add new ones and share them on Steam Workshop for everyone to easily download. That should be pretty fun and I'm looking forward to see what people will do with it!

Build mode improvements

Jérémie is working on improving the build tools in preparation of the integration of the basement and terrain tools. Once we have that, we will be able to showcase complete house building videos. So it's going smoothly so far and we're really excited about the build mode!

Genetics system

As you may know, Anna is a huge science nerd so she's working on the genetics system for Paralives! Here's what she had to say about what she's working on:

The genetics system will include the possibility of linking genotypes to phenotypes, and defining levels of dominance, which means some traits may "skip" a generation. (hey! I'm looking at you, Punnet square geeks!)Take a look at this example below, illustrating the eye color case.

Eye color is defined by two main genes, HERC2 and gey, which both have two alleles (i.e., two possible versions of each gene). A person always get two versions for each gene, one being inherited from each of their biological parents. As a parent also has two versions of each gene, kids will get one or the other randomly. That's why you don't always have the same eye or hair color than your siblings!

Now, the table at the right shows the resulting phenotypes (how your eyes look like) depending on the possible combinations of the versions you get from your parents. We can say that the "brown eyes" phenotype is more dominant that the "green eyes" phenotype, which is more dominant than the "blue eyes" phenotype ; one "B" allele takes over all the other alleles and makes your eyes brown, whatever the other are!
On the left is an example of a possible family tree, which shows that a trait can stay "hidden" for many generations!

Reference: https://genetics.thetech.org/ask/ask316

This genetic system will be moddable, which means you will be able to create your own custom genes for custom traits if you'd like, or modify the existing genetics rules.
Also, the color you choose on the color wheel will be automatically considered as the closest color among the existing preset ones.

More information and explanations on genetics will come later, stay tuned!

But for now, we'd like to have your opinion on something: would you like the unnatural colors to be part of the basic genetic system (your blue hair Paras would pass their blue hair to their kids), or still differentiate the genetics from the "cosmetic" aspects of the Paras?  In any case, there will probably be a setting or cheat for that but tell us what you would prefer by voting in the poll below! Also, in the comments, feel free tell us about features related to genetics you would like to see in Paralives!

Edit: "Unnatural hair color" means colors that are not usually seen in human, like blue or pink hair! There will be an advanced DNA panel accessible from the Paramaker that will allow you to "unlink" your genes from your hair (like if you want your Para to have brunette hair genes, but you want to dye her hair blond)

That's it for today! Take care everyone :)

Alex and the team