New Team Member + Furniture Resizing Making Of (Patreon)

Hey there!

How are you doing today? On our side, we made some great progress this week on stuff related to the Paramaker, the clothing system and characters. Looking forward to sharing more about that!

We recruited a new 3D Artist

Sonia just joined us on the team and she'll be here full time for an internship until the end of the year! Here's a little something that she wrote:

Hello everyone, I'm Sonia and I'll be joining the Paralives Team as an intern 3D Artist! I'm really happy and excited to be working on this project! I've been following Paralives for a bit, mainly because Léa and I are friends and we've done the same studies. I'm a new graduate, but I've worked on several small games, both on Unity and Unreal.

I've been a big fan of casual games and simulation for as long as I can remember. Some of my favorite games are Animal Crossing, Stardew Valley and Minecraft. Typically games where I can chill and/or express my creativity! Other than gaming, I love drawing, scary stories and coffee. I'm a Character Artist so I'll be mostly working on the Parafolks (cloth, hairstyles, body types, etc).

A bit more about my take on video games: I grant a lot of importance in the atmosphere and being able to relate on an emotion to the character in the games I usually play. I'm hoping I can help to create a game with an original and interesting art direction and have you guys able to really connect with your character and make the game your own! I'm really glad to start this journey on such a great project and being able to bring my contribution to it!

Canadian Chalet Update  (Private for Patrons only. Please de not share)

As you know, we are planning to make a video about building a whole house. Last week, we asked you to vote for the purpose of this house. Here are the results. It looks like it's gonna be a retreat for couples!

Can't wait to get started on that cozy Canadian cabin for couples! We'll work on concept art for this house and decide the furniture we will need to create for it. We also need to improve some of the features regarding build mode and the build/buy user interface. So we should be able to showcase that house in the next 1-2 months!

Behind the Scenes: Object Resizing  (Private for Patrons only. Please de not share)

Hello everyone! Jérémie here, this week we wanted to shed some light on what I am working on, notably our new and improved system to resize objects in fun and interesting ways!

You might remember in previous videos that Alex showed a while back, you could resize objects, such as the bunk bed, and interesting things would happen. They wouldn’t just get stretched as they were resized, but they could transform - like with the second bed appearing. What you probably didn’t know is that the bed looked like this:

The bed was actually split in many smaller pieces, and these pieces would allow us to resize the whole thing properly and work our magic. It became however clear that this would be an issue for content creators - and ourselves, since we’ll use the same tools and processes - if we had to split all objects. Would it be possible to just add whole objects and have the game cut them in smaller pieces by itself?

Take this humble couch that you could make in a 3D modeling software and import in the game. Models such as this one are made of triangles and we can use code to act on these triangles as we see fit. Just stretching the object when resizing it kinda looks weird (left) but run some code (that I’ve been working on) on it and you’ll get something that looks a bit better, with the arm rests untouched and the back of the couch resized (right), you could make a bigger 3-seat couch with the same model as the single-place one!

You will also be able to ‘tile’ objects instead of stretching them if you want to. This coat hanger could be used to place a hat (left), but if you resize it you’ll be able to store the clothes of the whole family without having to place a dozen coat hangers next to each other (right)!

The sky is the limit! As a content creator you’ll be able to create very flexible items that can be used in different ways, as a player you’ll have the option to precisely resize certain objects like tables, couches and the like if you want to. I’m still working on that system, but I have high hopes I’ll see really neat stuff done using it in the future!

- Jérémie

That's it for this week! I hope you have an amazing weekend and see you next week :)

Alex   ✌.ʕʘ‿ʘʔ.✌