PARA NEWS #2: Checking on Paralives, Control Panel, Morphs, Tattoos (Patreon)

This is a quick look at some Paralives features I'm researching. Paralives is blowing my mind a bit these days. It looks set to be one of the most customizable games ever made - if not the game. And for it to be a lifesim too on top, to have that kind of framework and to be made with modding in mind from the ground up, makes it even more mindblowing.

The customization I'm talking about is not what you might think, like the normal gameplay stuff you'd expect. What I'm talking about is a feature called the Control Panel system.

CONTROL PANEL

The Paralives Control Panel is an ingame menu system that allows changing almost anything inside the game. It allows changing components of the objects. It turns the game into a complete sandbox experience.

It works as a sidebar panel on the left side of the screen, I think it will feel like an Edit or Inspect mode:

The control panel gives access to the components on game objects and their settings, allowing players to customize almost everything under the hood of the game, directly from the game UI.

In the case above, we're looking at a component of the camera object. The few settings shared here allow customizing in great depth everything about how the camera works. It's possible to do something close to a 1st person view just with these settings here. And this is just one example.

The devs described the Control Panel as:

An in-game modding tool to edit almost any gameplay and content parameters.

Judging by how complex the options are just for the camera object, the Control Panel looks like it's going to be incredibly powerful.

To show just how in-depth they went with some of these tools meant for customization and modding, a great example is the translation system:

If you want to add a translation for something, you can just hover a text, hit Ctrl+T and a popup shows up allowing you to set up a translation for that text.

MORPHS SYSTEM

The morph system looks nice too, it allows customizing models by dragging intuitive buttons. This makes sculpting models in-game very accessible to everyone because you can tell exactly what you're altering.

This screnshot above is interesting because it indicates the polygons of the models in Paralives. Models are a lot more detailed than they look at first glance. Players will be able to do very fine tuned looks. That's not apparent yet due to the cartoon aesthetic. But there will be mods without a doubt that will make the game look more realistic and the models' details will be clearer.

TATTOO SYSTEM FIRST LOOK

The tattoo system is very cool as well. It allows moving around pieces, rotating them and so on. It's very well thought out. It creates a canvas of the areas where to place the tattoo, in this case the arm. The texture map (blue area with grid) was designed in such a way to make decals/tattoos as easy to place as possible, without having them skew and stretch too much. It also makes it easy to do tattoos that wrap around. Makeup and tattoos are going to be quite the thing in Paralives thanks to these features.

SCENE BUILDING

The building aspect will be fun for a lot of people too, it looks powerful and easy to use.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Paralives looks like it has the potential to be something amazing for people that like customization and characters that feel alive, characters that have a story to them and have things to do. Paralives is still plenty months away, it's set to launch at the end of May next year, but I'll be keeping an eye of it because the potential for modding it is very high. There are some question marks too though at this point, but more on that another time.