Live Mode Progress + Options Menu + Object Naming and Pricing + More! ✨

Hi, it’s Alex! Today, I’ll update you on our progress on the live mode and show you various small features and improvements we’ve made. As usual, this post is for Patrons only, so please don’t share it! 🔐

Completing the Last Live Mode Features Before Release

These days, we’re finishing up some of the last features that we will have time to develop before the game comes out in Early Access on December 8th! Here’s an overview of the systems we’re working on:

• 🎯 Life goals (aspirations): Long-term objectives for your Parafolks to complete.

• 🚶‍♀️ Townies walking around town and visiting lots: You will be able to cross paths with and meet various Townies either when exploring the town or entering public lots! Each Townie goes about their day by going to work, school, restaurants, lots like the gym (depending on whether that fits their personality and skills), and returns home to sleep at night. It’s really interesting to see, and it makes the world feel alive! More on that will be shared soon!

• 🎮 Many improvements following playtest with friends: We’ve been running frequent playtests, and we’re actively fixing bugs and improving the gameplay experience according to the precious feedback we get! Our goal is to make the game as stable and as enjoyable as possible before you get your hands on it, and to keep improving it afterwards with the feedback that you players will send us!

• 🏦 Activities to do around town: Shops, collectibles, museum and more. An upcoming Patreon post will showcase this!

Options Menu

We’ve recently revamped the look of our options menu and added new settings to it! Here’s a quick tour:

We hope players will be able to customize their gameplay experience to their liking with this menu! We will be adding more options in the future.

Camera Edge Scrolling

In Paralives, there are many ways to move the camera:

• By using the arrow keys

• By using WASD

• By dragging the view by holding the middle mouse button

• 🆕 Camera Edge Scrolling: I recently added this feature to move the camera when your cursor is at the edge of the screen

The camera sensitivity can be adjusted in the options menu and Edge Scrolling can be disabled there as well.

Loading Screen

The more we add things to the game, the longer it takes for it to boot up when you launch it! It’s normal considering the number of assets we have in the game now:

However, Richard has been working on optimizations to improve the initial loading time of the game. It now takes about 5 to 10 seconds to load, depending on the specs of your computer. Also, I created a loading screen because before, we only had a black screen so you didn’t know if the game was frozen or if it was just loading!

We’re also improving the loading time when loading a save file, and there will be a loading screen there too.

Build Mode Object: Pricing and Naming

Last week, we tackled the big task of giving a price and a name to the many, many objects available in build mode!

• Price: The pricing strategy was to make it so you could furnish your house for cheap when starting out, but more luxurious items would be more expensive, requiring you to find ways to make money in the game to fully build your dream house (or just use money cheats, haha!)

• Name: Inspired by Ikea, we decided to name objects in Parli, Paralives’ own gibberish language. It was fun doing so because some of the Parli words that Chloé came up with evoke English and French words or real town names, and it’s nice when people spot the reference!

🌟Patreon name: As part of their Patreon reward, some objects in the game (maybe half of them) also have a special name given by a Patron (shown in blue). If you named an item, thank you for your creativity! It was really fun to see what you came up with!
*Please note that some of you on the Legend tier still haven’t been contacted for that reward. We will reach out to the remaining Patrons soon. Thank you for your patience!

You can get a basic chair for a really cheap price, but you will have to spend more money if you want something fancier! Note that we are planning to replace the $ with a custom Paradimes sign.

Can you spot the English reference in some of these object names in Parli?

Paramaker Animations

To make Parafolks feel more lively when creating them, we’ve added a few animations that can play when putting on certain clothing items, hairstyles and accessories:

My Para seems to be enjoying her new look! We’ve made sure that the animations are not too long and that they don’t play every time otherwise the constant moving could prevent players from editing their character easily.

Thanks for reading and have a wonderful weekend!

Alex