Behind the Scenes: A tool to Create Cutscenes in Paralives 🎥

Hi, it’s Alex!

Today, I wanted to show you a tool I made for the game that allows the creation of cutscenes. It’s very useful for us developers to showcase the game, and we used it to make the release date announcement trailer. I named this tool Storyboards. Our goal would be to make it available to players, too, once we have finished developing it, which could be after the initial release.

🔐 This post is for Patrons only so please don’t share it, thank you!

➡️ Storyboards: How It Works

Here’s an overview of how Storyboards can be used:

Here, I have created a 4.5 seconds long cutscene that shows off the flower shop in the Old Town plaza. It consists of two different camera angles.

By right-clicking an element, I can set the position of the camera to what I am currently looking at.

When I press play, you can see the results. Sorry for the low-quality GIF! Also, have you noticed the barbershop’s spinning thingie? I love it, hehe!

Then, I can add other effects to my Storyboard, such as changing the time of day, adding text and various image filters.

Here’s what the above Storyboard setup does. It’s a lot of fun to create these little movies!

Another cool thing Storyboards can do is to animate build mode items to showcase houses.

You can define if you want the items to appear from older to newer items or from the left to the right of the screen.

Storyboards can also be used to animate characters and make them interact. In live mode, with the character autonomy and everything, it’s not always easy to make Paras do exactly as you wish, so Storyboards come in handy to create cutscenes and get full control!

In the release date announcement trailer, Storyboards greatly helped us with complicated scenes like this timelapse showing the life of a Parafolk.

Behind the scenes, we simply had multiple characters and moved them into the shot at specific timestamps. Bonus: you might notice here that there was originally a Halloween party shot in the time lapse, but we had to cut some scenes because the trailer was a bit too long, unfortunately!

What a more complex Storyboard like this one can look like!

➡️ Going Further with Storyboards

Storyboards have been really useful for us so far to create videos to show off the game. In the future, we hope to do more with them, and our goal is for players to eventually be able to use them too, once we have improved and polished the tool but it won’t be available for the initial release in December.

Some potential use cases for Storyboards:

• Town cutscenes: For instance, when you first start a new save file, there could be a cutscene made by us, the devs, showing off the town.

• Important life moments: When getting married or when saying farewell to an elder Parafolk, there could be short cutscenes to make the moment stand out.

• Machinima: Youtubers could create stories with their Parafolks through cutscenes and share them online.

• Showing off builds: Players could create cutscenes with animated cameras to show off houses that they have built.

• And so on!

I hope you liked today’s post, and please feel free to share your thoughts below!

Cheers,

Alex