Live Mode: Our Goals and Next Steps (Patreon)

Hey there!

I hope you had a nice week. We sure did! These days, we are doing some exciting work on the planning of all the tasks we will have to do for the live mode of the game. That will include anything that has to do with the simulation of the lives of your Paras: interactions, careers and relationships, to name just a few elements.

Live Mode: Our Next Step  (For Patrons only! Please don’t share)

Here’s how we’ve decided to attack the development of the live mode, in chronological order, split into development milestones:

1. Interactions, actions and pathfinding
2. The mind of your Para: identity, personality, skills, needs, autonomy and so on
3. Every facets of life: hobbies, school, work, raising children, meeting people, etc
4. Add flavor to life: pets, cars, boats, town activities, public lots, seasons and more

As you can see, we will first work on the interactions and actions that Parafolks can do. If we put it simply, a game like ours is mostly made of characters moving around all day and doing actions with objects or other characters. On the technical side of things, this part is also one of the hardest and more complex to create for us, developers. There are so many kinds of actions that Parafolks can do and they often have to do very complex sequences of animations to complete these actions. Also, characters need to move around town and inside buildings which is a big challenge to do well because they need to look natural doing so and they need to use the best path possible which can be very hard to calculate.

There’s a lot of other implications and challenges but that about sums up the first step we will take with the development of the live mode. It should lead us to being able to share a first look at the simulation gameplay by showing our Paras doing all sorts of interactions in the house! It will take a little while though because we will need to write a lot of design documents about that in the next couple of weeks. Meanwhile, many team members are still making various improvements to the Paramaker and build mode

Live Mode: Our Goals for Paralives  (For Patrons only! Please don’t share)

Before we start designing how game features will work exactly, we like to establish a set of game design goals that will help us stay true to our vision for the game.

For the live mode, here are a few of the goals that we have set ourselves:

1. Playing a single Para or a full household of many many Paras should be equally fun: Unlike many games where you play only one character, Paralives will let you play many of them at once. This is a challenge because we have to make sure that playing the game is not incredibly overwhelming if you have multiple characters in your household and at the same time, not too boring if you decide to play with only a single Para.
2. Make progression exciting: Making progress in the lives of your Parafolks should feel great and rewarding whether it’s leveling up skills, fulfilling needs, getting a promotion or improving your relationships.
3. Avoid ultra realistic gameplay elements to prioritize fun instead: To give you an example, we could make it so that in order to have internet access in your house, you would have to buy a router, a modem, call an internet service provider, make sure you don’t use the internet too much to avoid downloading more data than your contract provides and so on. While some players could find that interesting, we feel that making all aspects of the game too realistic like that would add extra tedious management that would take away the fun of the main gameplay loop of managing your characters and creating a life for them.
4. Give players the freedom to lead lives in the way they want: Paralives is a sandbox game and players should be able to manage each Parafolk’s life, ambitions and story as they wish.
5. Have a world filled with activities, opportunities and interesting things to discover: The game is not limited to a single house so we want to give players fun and existing reasons to go out and explore the town.
6. Ensure new players can learn the game quickly while also having advanced features for experienced players: Paralives will contain a ton of features and elements to play with so it could be a bit overwhelming for people when they first start playing. Fortunately, there is a lot that we can do to ease that and make the game enjoyable for brand new players and advanced players alike.

Live Mode: Poll  (For Patrons only! Please don’t share)

What are you most excited about regarding Paralives’s live mode? In the poll below, tell us which aspects related to simulating the lives of your Parafolks are you most looking forward to seeing!

Thank you for reading and I’m looking forward to sharing our progress on the live mode of Paralives!

Have a good one,

Alex