Live Mode Progress + Loading Screen + Edit Your Relationships
Hi! Alex here. How was your week?
On the program today: a short update about our progress on the live mode and a showcase of three Hackweek projects made by the team back in June ✨
🎮 Live Mode Update: An Internal Playtest
In the coming weeks, we are organizing an internal playtest! The whole team will be playing a first version of Paralives’ live mode featuring fulfilling needs and wants, building relationships, leveling up skills and many secret features that we can’t reveal just yet. We’re looking forward to sharing more with you soon! For now, we need to fix a few more bugs.
This Parafolks is displaying strange behaviours…
🌱 Loading Animation
During this year’s Hackweek, Alice chose to focus on creating cute hand-drawn animations that we will be able to display in the corner of the loading screen of the game. Here’s how they look:
How cute is that!
Paralives is all about growing: your Paras’ personal growth, relationships evolving and of course, your garden too will be growing!
You can take a look here at other 2D animations that Alice did before and that we are planning to use in the game.
🔃 Loading Screen and Optimizations
Jérémie and Alejandro’s Hackweek was all about adding a proper loading screen when we load a save file in the game and making sure it loads everything as fast as possible.
The loading screen with a progress bar and a gameplay tip. The look, color and style of this screen is placeholder and will be reworked.
How were you testing the game up until now without having a loading screen you might ask? Well, the screen was simply becoming black and the game would freeze for many seconds while everything was being loaded at once!
Jérémie wanted to optimize the processing time when loading a game that has a big town in it. Since our town is not created yet, Jérémie quickly made a script that generates a terrain with many randomly built houses on it.
These look like colorful warehouses!
The interiors are also filled with randomly placed objects.
Don’t worry, our town and houses will be hand crafted! However, this was a great way for Jérémie to see how the game performs loading a big save file so that we can start optimizing all this and make sure your save files will load quickly when the game releases!
🤝 Defining Pre-Existing Relationships in the Paramaker
Anna’s Hackweek was centered around allowing players to edit the relationship between your Parafolks when creating a new household in the Paramaker. Read more about how relationship labels work in Paralives in this previous Patreon post.
In this GIF, you can select any relationship label to define a relationship between two Parafolks. However, in the Paramaker, just after creating your household, advanced labels such as “best friend forever” won’t be available and you won’t be able to increase the level of the label so that you can instead do that while playing in live mode. However, a cheat will activate full control over the labels!
That’s all for today, don’t hesitate to tell us what you think in the comments below and have a good rest of the day! ⛅
Alex
Comments (52)
Cool
I love the loading screen animations!
Animations, beautiful. Being able to edit preexisting relationships, flippin' phenomenal.
I LOVE the first 2D animation - it would be great to have that full screen and the more the game loads, the more the scene is revealed - or if you really want the loading bar, have it below the animation? I dunno, I just love that so think it should be centre stage :)
Cute!!!!
love this!
Hi team! Loving those loading animations. And once again, the relationship/labels are still so intriguing to me. Super excited about learning more
Super adorable animations and I really love the relationships and how customizable they can be. Plus, fast loading times?? Yes please!
Ohhh the relationships!! This is incredible! This game feels so warm already, can't wait to play it :))
Really cool!! Can't wait to see live mode! Also, just some other relationships for your consideration: twin (preferably fraternal included), cousins, cousins once removed, nibling (nephew/niece), Aunt/Uncle, grandparent, grandchild, crush, bf/gf, ex-spouse, ex-bf/gf, co-worker, classmate. could also add some silly relationships, like rivals, archenemies, Clone, Doppelganger, Alternate Reality Self, etc.
This is amazing! Multiple selections for one relationship makes me happy! It creates depth! For families can we create labels like “cousin, aunt/uncle, nephew/niece, step-sibling/parent”
Exceptional work and progress !!
That is adorable
you guys are always working so hard and always seem to be thinking of little things. one thing i hope you guys do is add townie mysteries and lore cx
Excellent work, glad to see this project coming along nicely. I look forward to this when it becomes available to play. To say I am excited would be putting it mildly, but given the state of the Sims, This feels like a fresh coat of paint and am eager to see the fruits of your labor in this niche genre that has become incredibly stale as of late.
as always, these are fantastic! the hand drawn animations are so unique, and fit the style of your game so well, it's truly a joy to witness all the little bits and pieces grow together into a gorgeous game. i also wanted to note that it always feels like you are focusing on making small things coherent, and beautiful, and interconnected, instead of creating something massive and impressive and complicated. a game can never be *everything* and limiting yourself to what your game can actually become (and what not) must be a very, very difficult job i imagine. so thank you for that, for the way you prioritise making something good, and well put together, and pleasing on so many levels, instead of trying to do it all. wishing you the best!
This is so AMAZING!! The loading screen is super cute, all those animations. And the option to define the relationship in the paramaker is genious!
oh the labels will be just perfect. sometimes i have an idea for a character in a simulation game who is an established member of town, so getting able to easily define those parameters is soooo nice, even with cheats!
I love the loading screen
I LOVE the labels!!
I’m so excited! You guys are doing a fantastic job!
Alice, those animations are perfection! And I can't wait to use that cheat to micromanage my Paras' stories lol! Thank you all so much for your hard work and for sharing!!! <3
Thank you Lane!! <3
Could the loading screen be just a picture of the town? That’s be cute or night and day moments (from the night and day video)
Good idea! We will be looking at our options and this could be a great one! The current style and layout of the loading screen is temporary and just a placeholder
Wow, AMAZING! Love the cute animations!!
So exciting!! Love the loading screen animations! I saw you had “neighbor” and “acquaintance” in the relationship labels, does this mean we can determine relationships between people of different households in Paramaker?
Not by default but with a cheat, you should be able to edit any relationship your characters have, even if they are not part of your household. That's our plan at least, can't 100% confirm just yet!
The loading screen looks absolutely adorable! I just love the overall style of the game. And loading time - important! Keep up the great progress 🙌🏼
These posts make my heart sooooo happy, you guys are the coolest! i cannot wait to play the game
ANNA !!! May I give you a kiss on the cheek ?! This is so cool ! So much more advanced than That Other Game™, or, well, any other game I know of, really. The flexibility ! As usual Paralives' reputation of being very customizable lives on. As long as the cheat is usable in the PAM (instead of waiting for live mode like... you know like who™), I'm even ok with not all options being available by default. This is really, really cool. But don't worry, Alice, Jérémie and Alejandro, I didn't forget you and I really love how you eventually combined forces to create the first version of the loading screen ! Things like that are more important than what players often give them credit for. Can you imagine how it'd feel if our games actually froze on a black screen for a minute ? Longest minute EVER. And the animation is super sweet, too. Good luck everyone on the Internal Playtest ! This is probably going to create not just funny bugs but also enraging ones at times. Hang in there, Paradevs !
I love the little loading screen animation, though I think it would be nice to have it above the loading bar. That space looks a little empty (maybe it's just the pure black screen), so having it there (unless you plan on putting something else) would make it feel a little bit better. This is just something little and I don't mind where it's at. You guys have made such amazing progress and I'm so excited for this game!! <3
Thanks for the feedback! The style and layout of the loading screen is temporary and will be changed
Every post excites me more! Incredible work guys :)
I kinda like the warehouses - they remind me of a trailer town. It also doubles as a nice showcase of house colours.
I love all things randomized and would love to have access to a randomly generated town somehow!
Wow, everything I see here looks promising. There's nothing to say except that I can't wait to see the game in action. I don't know why, but I love the autogenerated houses. Hahaha! The loading screens are beautiful. Also, I see a lot of different kinds of relationships. I'm so happy to see that.
I love that this project is not just about looking nice on the surface (though it certainly does look very nice too!), but you are actually thinking through how to add so much depth to everything. Even already thinking of game loading times, the relationships, everything! It is clear you are thinking how to keep players engaged for the long term. I really appreciate everything you are doing and am so excited to see how the game continues to evolve! Proud to support this project by fellow Canadians :)
I have never backed or supported any other project that has kept me so amazingly well informed! You and your team takes transparency to a whole new level and I cannot thank you all enough! Have a fabulous week, everyone!!
Glad you like our weekly updates!
Awesome and more awesome!! Great work team!
Thanks Vash!
Every week the patron post feels like big news, but this one feels like extra big news. I’m so excited, thank you for all the passion you lot are putting into this game
Thank you <3 <3
I love the way you guys plan to do relationship. Instead of a line for friendship like in the sims you have a tree with branches! Amazing!
I'm pretty excited to extend on the possibilities offered by this system!
You guys are working so hard to bring us something we already have super high hopes for and I know you’re not going to disappoint. It’s so cool to see the amazing progress and how much you’ve done. I truly can’t wait to have the game and play it! 🙌🏻💜
Awwww, thanks so much Aneta, that means a lot!
These loading screens are absolutely cute❤️
Right??!
Another week, another patreon update! Thank you very much! Awesome work as always!
Thanks Julio!!