Recap of the Comiccon + A Look Into Quality Assurance + Build Challenges! 🐛

For this week’s Patreon post, brought to you by Alex and Charlotte, we will take a look back at our experience at Montreal Comic Con, followed by a look into Charlotte’s work as a Quality Assurance tester and her hack week!

This post is for patrons only, so please do not share! Thank you! ✨

Paralives at Montreal Comiccon

Hi, it’s Alex! Last month, we had the opportunity to showcase the build mode for a 3-days weekend at Montreal Comiccon. People had 20 minutes to test out the tools, decorate an existing home or come up a new floor plan.

 Two testers trying out the game. Our booth was well equipped with candies, stickers, cards and a Doggo!

 A cute and comfy pink bedroom made by one of the players.

 A bath with a view: a good use of the platform tools!

 Some mysterious things are happening on this player’s lot…

 I could use a creation space like this one!

 Of course some players will make it their specialty to test out the limits of the game!

 This player was eager to test out curved walls and browse the catalog to find the coolest objects available!

 A smol house for a creative astronomer.

 Léa, Sonia, Alex and Jérémie at the booth. It was really busy so it was a great idea to have different team members there each day so that the others could rest!

All in all, the Comiccon was an incredible event and it allowed us to collect more feedback for the build mode. We had trouble making people stop playing, giving us confidence in the state of the game for when it will be released!

I’m handing the keyboard to Charlotte now, bye!

Bug Life Cycle

Hello everyone! Charlotte here with my very first Patreon post.

As the Quality Assurance ( game tester) on the team, my main goal is to find and report bugs in the game. So, for my first post, I wanted to give a bit of a ‘behind the scenes’ look for how bugs are entered and what happens to them! I will also showcase some build challenges I’ve done as part of my Hackweek.

The first step in the life cycle of a bug, well, finding the bug! Either one of the other members of the team will flag a bug, or I’ll come across one during my tests. Once this happens, I will investigate further to see what triggers the bug.

 Here’s an example of a bug that I caught a couple weeks ago… those moldings aren’t supposed to reappear!

Once the trigger of the bug is clear enough, I will enter it on Notion, the task-tracking tool we use. Here, I will write down the information the programmers/artists need, such as a GIF of the bug, an error code (if applicable) and the steps to reproduce (STR) the bug.

 Here’s an example of what the bug report looks like once completed.

Once the bug is entered, programmers or artists will take a look, and they will then go on to fix it and/or discuss it if it needs a game design decision. It only comes back to me once it’s been fixed and goes into what we call ‘Regression’-- all that is left to do is for me to check if it’s been fixed or needs to go back into the pipeline!

 Here’s the pipeline of the different statuses a bug will have. ‘QA’ here is just short for ‘Quality Assurance’!

 Here’s what the ‘Bugs’ page in our Notion looks like! 45 New bugs in Notion, take one down and pass it around, you’ve got 44 New bugs in Notion. 🐛

Hackweek - Build Challenges

As you might have seen in previous Patreon posts, the hackweek is a time where we can dedicate an entire week to something for the game of our liking. It was very exciting since this would be my very first Hackweek!

For mine, I decided to try a few build challenges to test the game in a more casual manner. I did a few challenges, and so I will showcase a couple of ones that I think turned out quite well.

For the first one, I wanted to create a tiny home following certain criteria, which was the following;

• No more than 81 m2 (so 9 x 9 meters).

• Coastal-esque theme

• Room for 2 young adults, a teen and a child

Here’s what I came up with! A cozy coastal-esque home for a family of four.

The next and last one is the build I am most excited to show off– a shell challenge of PARALIVES spelled out, with each letter being a different home! Essentially, you make a shape with walls, and then you cannot modify, move or delete any of them. I decided to do this with each letter of Paralives.

 An overview of the empty PARALIVES shell before decorating it.

 The shells are now decorated ! Every room has a distinct ‘style’, from Boho to Eclectic, Rustic and more!

The goal was to make sure every letter used all items from a certain style and was a functional home– so each needed a bedroom, bathroom and kitchen at the very minimum. I allowed myself to add walls inside, but I could not remove or modify the exterior walls that made the shape of the letter.

 A closer look at each letter. Hope you have fun looking!

I also had a blast making up little stories with each of the letters, trying to portray the life of the people who lived in each letter. A single mother here, a lone bachelor there, a detective on a case, or a once renowned musician…

 Here are a few screenshots from inside the letters. 

Anyways, that’s all from me today! ✨ For all the builders out there, what’s a build challenge you’d like to do once Paralives releases? Let me know in the comments below!!

Signing off!

Charlotte 🐛