Testing the Live Mode: A Screenshot Gallery! 🖼️

Hey there, it’s Alex.

Today’s post will be all about our progress on the live mode and a playtest session we did within the team so let’s get started! This post is for Patrons only so please don’t share it, thanks! 🔐

💌 A Word About the Postcards

A quick word before we get into today’s topic. This week, we’ve signed more than 600 postcards to send to Patrons on the Hero or Legend tier and we can’t wait for you to receive it! However, there’s currently a strike by the postal service here in Canada and we don’t know when it will end. We are looking at the situation closely and we will send the postcards as soon as the postal service becomes available again. Your postcards will arrive a bit later than usual; Thank you for your understanding!

When we send the postcards every 6 months, it takes us 3 to 4 hours to prepare and sign them all ✍️

🎮 Testing the Live Mode

To help test the gameplay, I quickly created a simple starter house that contains the basic objects needed to test the live mode.

 Two Parafolks were part of the test so that we could notice the effect of different personalities on the gameplay. One had the personality trait “Joyful” and the other had the “Serious” trait. Can you guess who is who?

 To start off, I made one Para play the piano and the other was already working on their programming skills in order to get more chances at a fast career progression.

One of the many things we wanted to test out was a new version of our needs interface.

A feedback we got from the previous version of the interface for needs was that it was hard to know if a need was going to be at a critical level soon. Now, our needs are represented by hearts a bit like in Zelda or Minecraft. This way, you can track the current state of your Para at a glance. Also, when you go lower than 0 hearts, the bar will begin to fill up with skulls instead and that’s how you know when your Para will die because of a lack of sleep, for instance.

Another thing we like about hearts is that a Para with many points in their Physique trait can have one more heart in their Hunger need because their body is more efficient at being sustained for longer by a meal they ate. On the contrary, if your Para caught a virus, their maximum number of hearts in the Sleep need could drop to 1 instead of 3. This means that even after a full night of sleep, they will become sleepy again much sooner than normal.

This is a new idea we’re testing for character wants.

In Paralives, just like in real life, your wants often come from emotions. In the above screenshot you can see the following:

• Characters have positive and negative emotions depending on what they do during their day and sometimes, these emotions will offer wants.

• When you click on the “want offer” button, you will be able to select one want for your character

• Once accepted, a want becomes active and you can now work on completing it

In the image above, we can see that our Para has the “Inspired” emotion because they just moved into the house. This emotion triggered different want offers and you can pick one. Here, the “Play piano for 1 hour” want was offered because this new house has a piano and our character has Creativity stat points in their personality. The game will consider many wants that fit the current context and randomly suggest 2 of them.

We like this system so far because it lets you pick a direction for the story of your character. A more dramatic example would be: If you are very sad because a relative passed away, you will be able to choose a want that reflects the way you want to cope with this loss.

 This Para is having a bad day. The toilet is dirty and broken at the same time. This gave her the “Disgusted” emotion as well as the option to pick wants like “I want to clean the toilet” or “I want to get away from the toilet for 1 hour”. I also added a want named “I want to buy a new toilet” for Paras that have a lot of money and who are not the cleaning type! ⚠️ Please note that the visual of the water splash effect is temporary.

 For the test, I quickly built three workplaces for the technology career path. The one on the left is meant to be a good place to work for Paras with minimal experience and the other ones have job offers with better salaries, but they require more skills and expertise. ⚠️ Please note that these workplaces are rabbit holes meaning that you cannot see or control your Parafolks while they are working.

 For instance, here’s an entry-level job next to a job that requires more qualifications but pays better.

 This is a cool effect from the “Serious” personality trait that we added: if a character has been doing the same thing for more than 3 hours, they will become “In the zone”. This makes them gain a temporary buff that increases their skill learning speed and that makes all their needs ignored. Ignored needs can’t decay and won’t have negative impacts on your character, even if they are at 0 hearts.

There could be other situations where needs would be ignored. For instance, when a character has a big crush on someone or is really sad, they might ignore their hunger need for a while because they don’t feel like eating. I think there’s a lot of interesting things we can do with our need system to spice up the gameplay!

 This Para was quite tired and went to sleep. However, many people on the team encountered this bug: If the speed of the time is at x3, the characters do not position themselves correctly while using items and furniture. This should be fixed soon!

📊 Summary of the Feedback Received After the Playtest

🩷 Liked:

• The bonuses given by the Serious trait to level up skills faster are fun

• The new interface for needs is better at making you understand quickly where your Paras’ needs are at and it’s interesting that personality traits and emotions can affect needs

• The fact that you can see better job opportunities that you are not qualified for yet gives you an objective to aim for

• Earning money from work to improve your house in build mode bit by bit is exciting

• It is fun to upgrade your job in different ways by picking upgrades
  

📝 To improve:

• There are a few bugs to fix related to various live mode gameplay mechanics

• The interface for emotions and offered wants requires work to be easier to understand

• A wider array of different wants would be appreciated

• Gameplay effects given by needs and emotions should be described in tooltips

• Some needs go down too fast while others are too slow

Next, we’ll be working on our gameplay features according to this feedback as well as adding more wants, emotions, personality trait effects and so on! We will also be resuming the work on social gameplay and relationships.

Hope you liked this glance at our progress on the live mode! 

Take care,

Alex