Personality Traits: From Design To The Game

A (belated) happy new year to everybody! Jérémie here to take a deep dive into what we’re currently doing with the live mode: thinking about the mechanics related to the personality traits your Paras can have, making sure we have enough interesting features and implementing all that into the game! This post will be in two parts, where I’ll first talk about the design side of things and then the technical bits and bobs, so I hope you’ll find something that interests you somewhere in there! As usual, this post is for Patrons only, so please do not share it outside of the Patreon! Thanks!

📚 A Small Reminder

In Paralives, the personality of your characters is defined by choosing multiple traits that can evolve, granting you various gameplay effects:

There are multiple categories of traits, and you pick one in each category. As you complete Wants you will get experience for your personality, and you can pick up evolutions for your traits.

This is all explained in more detail in this Patreon post from 2023, but I think that by reading this paragraph you have enough information to understand what’s coming next!

🧠 What’s in a Vibe?

While this might change as things evolve and we finalize our overall mechanics, vibe traits have four large categories of effects:

• Passive effects: Like improving your learning speed for one or all skills, giving you a higher cap in one need, improving your odds to get a promotion at work, and much much more. Effects can be negative as well, of course!

• Active abilities: These usually have specific requirements, like having an emotion or a need at a certain value. When you use them, they will have a profound impact on your character or others. Switching emotions around, ignoring needs entirely or refilling them, improving created items, etc. Most active abilities will have a cooldown, so you have to use them at the right moments!

• Wants: In Paralives, Wants stem in part from the personality traits you’ve picked up, and your Vibe is a big part of this. Depending on the vibe, you might get Wants related to job promotions, spreading happiness around, or just being a grumpy grouch!

• Togetherness: Finally, your vibe will impact what kind of Together Cards you get, how your character reacts to them, and so on.

Some vibes might impact certain categories more or less than others (and we still have stats, talents and social perks that might be related to these systems as well!) but we’re aiming for all the vibes to feel different from one another, with mechanics completely exclusive to one vibe, for instance. Maybe you have a special Need that other vibes don’t have, maybe you’re fueled by your work in ways mere mortals cannot understand.

 Para-Jérémie hard at work, thinking about what’s in a Vibe

📝 Vibe Design: Gloomy

Our current workflow is that Alex, our lead designer on personalities, thinks about all these things in a big document. Every vibe, talent and social perk is described in detail so we have an overall view of everything we have and everything we can do with these systems. It might look a little like this (keep in mind that this is just one part of the Gloomy trait and it is still subject to change, of course!)

Gloomy

Passive

• Doesn’t get some negative effects from being sad, like learning speed decrease.

• When in the aura of an Overjoyed character, gains happiness like everyone else but also +2 anger (people spreading joy angers them!).

• A higher chance to create a masterpiece the more sad you are.

Abilities

• When happy, have the ability to transfer the total happiness value as sadness for 4 hours. It consumes all happiness, and the ability cooldown is 12 hours.. 

Wants:

• Gets more wants from sad emotions.

Togetherness:

• Takes longer to become friends with Overjoyed and Energic characters, but it’s easier with Gloomy and Peaceful characters.

• Can give gloomy compliments.

• Better chances at flirting with characters who are sad.

It is written in such a way that a programmer can easily add these mechanics in the game, and we can then track what’s done and what’s left to do. We’re not trying to be formal here, and most people on the team can give suggestions because it’s written in plain old English!

 I’m not Gloomy in real life, but it’s my Patreon post and I’m going to star in it, by Jove! Also, the panel to the right is not in the game, it’s just a nice infographic I’ve made! But maybe we could have something like this as a tooltip?

🖥️ Adding the Vibe to the Game

To implement live mode mechanics, we have made a pretty powerful system of “Brain Logics” that works like some kind of programming language that you can use in the game to set up triggers (WHEN something should happen) and logic (WHAT that thing is doing). Logic itself can be fairly complex with full access to all of our gameplay systems via Evaluators (IF statements) and Outcomes (DO statements).

This can allow us to do pretty much everything we want almost from a single spot in the game’s data, and it’s a very robust system. Another thing that is used frequently is “Status Effects”, which are effects on your character that can last for a specific time (being happy for two hours after a nice meal) or applied every second (being stressed while nearby someone playing music extremely poorly; so if you leave, the status goes away).

This whole workflow makes it pretty easy to go from having an idea to testing it! Sometimes we do need to add extra game mechanics if we want to do something on a system that wasn’t affected beforehand, or check some data on the character, but once that’s coded in, you can do really neat things with Evaluators, Outcomes and Status Effects!

 On the left, you can see an example of the Brain Logic that will give you a Status Effect if you are gloomy. On the right is the status effect itself, adding your Sadness emotion score to your Skill Learning Speed.

Since we are near the finish line in terms of gameplay features around personalities, the number of systems we still have to add in is probably pretty low at this point, but we’ll add more content in the coming weeks while we’re playtesting and tweaking it all! Exciting!

I hope that gives you an idea of what we’re doing right now, how personality traits are going to affect your Para and how you’ll be able to use the in-game modding tools to add your own personalities with their effects when the game launches! Have a great weekend and stay gloomy!

Jérémie