Exclusive Paramaker Showcase Preview (Patreon)

Hello everyone, Anna here!

Thank you for your overwhelming positive response to our new sliders feature. We spent quite some time thinking about this alternative and we’re very happy to see that you seem to enjoy it!

This week, all of us are very busy finishing the last details of our next video, which will showcase a lot of features of our improved Paramaker. It should be released to the public sometime next week, but let me take you on a small exclusive tour of our final stretch, just for you Patrons! Please don’t share this content outside of Patreon or on our Discord patrons channels, we don’t want to spoil the surprise for the public.

Fitting room (For Patrons only, please don’t share)

Here is the nice fitting room that Chloé, our 3D environment artist, made for the video. (This was the most wanted background according to this post!) Maggie is also showing off her brand new outfit made by Sonia for our upcoming video.

Note: during the game, this fitting room can be used when you create characters before creating their homes, but you will still be able to access the Paramaker at any time, directly where your Para is currently standing.

You can’t see it in this picture, but this room was (metaphorically) on fire a few days before. We ran into some last minute technical issues with the mirrors. All of a sudden, they weren’t working properly anymore!

“Through the looking glass, and what Maggie found there”

Last minute problems like this always happen when we’re wrapping up our work on a video or features, which is why we always plan a few days or weeks for (panic) debugging before our release deadlines. Don’t worry, they should all be fixed when you’ll have the game in your hands.

New Para (For Patrons only, please don’t share)

As this video will showcase the Paramaker, we had to show that we made at least one new Para since the last video, right? Well, guess who will join the team!

Sebastian and a mysterious new Para.

How we make videos (For Patrons only, please don’t share)

You may ask yourselves how we plan our videos and how it is included in our regular development planning (or you may just want to see Sebastian’s kid and won’t read this part, we don’t blame you!). It’s true that it’s a little bit different from other game development projects, as Paralives has tried to gather a community around these videos from the beginning, rather than making more advanced official trailers later down the line. As we now need to make them regularly to keep the hype going and to show you some updates, these videos became an important part of what we do, but in the end, our main goal is not to produce nice videos, it is to make a game!

To make sure we don’t make too much of a detour, we have some guidelines:

• Make the least amount of new or specific assets possible. Of course, for the video to be interesting and exciting, we need to show new things (new Paras, new clothes, new animations, new items, new music), but it’s not necessarily the priority in our development roadmap. We’re not at the step where we’ll produce a lot of content to fill those item catalogs yet, we’re still focused on making robust systems and improving our artistic direction as a whole. This is why we usually try to reuse our working items from previous videos and make sure most of them are not too video-specific and will be used in game too.
• Select a few new and/or improved features to showcase. As we’re still on a pre-alpha stage, we’re hard at work making new features and systems, but we’re also doing a lot of background things. For example, artists have to address some feedback on previously shown assets and programmers need to fix bugs or integrate working prototypes into the game. Not everything we’ve done in the game will be shown in every video, as they’re not all demonstration videos. Selecting only a few of them is usually enough to make exciting things, let us focus accordingly, and motivate us to get things done!
• Rescaling the video scope as we go. When we decide to make a video, we start by writing a short scenario for it, so that we know which features and assets we’ll need to make or improve during the following weeks or months. When unplanned things happen, the scenario we had in mind becomes either more delayed or less likely to be completely fulfilled. We usually have to rethink the scenario and cut some features or scenes off the video so that we don’t get stuck on it for too long. Some bugs or features require more quality time with us, without the constraint of fitting in a video, and that’s fine. Remember, the game comes first! That’s also part of the iterative process, or should I say, the rollercoaster that is game development.
• (Try to) know when to stop. There’s always something to polish, a bug to fix, or a last feedback to address to make things perfect, as (I believe) is the case in every work of art. Sadly, time is limited and again, we need to go forward with the regular development of the game at some point. Deciding to stop and finish the video editing is the hardest part for all of us I think, even if we’re usually very proud of what we accomplished! We know that our community members (yes, you!) are very supportive, understanding (wholesome!) and very aware that the videos show work in progress content that will evolve until the game is released and even further away.

With that said, having to make polished and interesting videos can also help the development a lot. Having a “finished” milestone version that is in a testable state every once in a while makes us a lot more confident in the project. After the video goes public, we all meet to debrief about how it went but we also discuss all the feedback that we got from the public, which is really helpful to us!

I hope you will like this last video of the year, we can’t wait to show it to you next week!!

Have a nice weekend,

Anna

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