🎒 Hackweek Project: Inventory, Stores and More!

Hi everyone, Anna here! 

Today I’m excited to show you what Jérémie and I worked on during our hackweek. For those who don’t know what it is, every year at Paralives Studio, we all participate in a special week during which we can work on things that are not necessarily urgent (or even planned for the release). It’s nice because it allows us to work on exciting features without waiting for it to be the top priority! There are also no meetings during that week so it feels good to be “free” to focus on the same thing for a whole week. We don’t have to tackle the big problems and design questions since we always keep our hackweek projects to a small scale.

Keep in mind that all of these features are very early prototypes and may not make it into the early access release.

As always, this post is for Patrons only so please don’t share it, thank you!

Inventory

The main thing we worked on is the inventory! It is not something that we can confidently confirm for early access for now, but it has been considered for a long time and it is the cornerstone that makes a lot of cool other features possible, like:

• Collecting items, donating or selling them

• Buying furniture or clothing in-game (not in PAM or build mode)

• Buying specific ingredients for recipes in a grocery store

• Gifting things to other Paras

• Planting seeds for the gardening skill (which was started as a hackweek project by Léa last year!)

• Being able to read books everywhere by bringing them in your inventory 

• Eating snacks on the go, without having to get them from the fridge 

• And more!

For now, the inventory is shared amongst people of the same household, because we didn’t want to complexify the feature and because it seemed more practical for the player. However, that might change in the future.

My Para-self wanted a little snack so I made her pick up an apple!  (Keep in mind that the interactions are still a work in progress!)

Since I got two apples, I gifted one to my Jérémie. (Remember that the interactions and placement of the characters while talking with each other are still a work in progress!)

Stores

Stores have been requested very frequently by the community and they are a big part of what makes a town feel alive and why players might want to wander in the open world more frequently. Jérémie developed a special display stand that can be placed in a shop and displays items on sale! Every day, the items on the display stands change, so if you want to redecorate your house on a budget with this secondhand furniture shop, you’ll have to be patient to catch good deals!

Mustache Man made a great deal with this dresser! 

For now, we only tried it with furniture, but there also could be clothing shops, grocery stores, libraries… The sky's the limit! 

Collectibles 

Another feature that we thought would work well with the inventory system is collections. It is always always fun to seek little trinkets and try to collect them all! To do so, Jérémie created a way to have spots that spawn items randomly in various places around town. For now, you can pick up mushrooms, rocks, or even fishes! 

Here is the very first draft at a collectible UI (imagine those are precious gemstones instead of normal rocks!). As you can see, there are several (temporary!) categories of collectibles, and you can see which item you’ve already got in each collection. Also, yes, there’s a top secret category of collectibles that I can’t tell you about yet… 🤫

Another cool idea we wanted to implement for a long time was the collection of movies and books. After reading a book for the first time, you would see it unlocked in the collection interface! This way, it makes it a little more interesting to try and read all the books of the world. There could be a rare book section at the library, where book nerds like Maggie often go to see if they can complete their collection, or maybe some could only be gifted by other Paras! The same could go with movies. 

Of course, modders will be able to add a bunch of collection types.

Museum

Last but not least, we added a way to have a museum in the game, where any Para of the town can bring their collectible and admire them. Of course, the museum is grateful for your donations and will give you rewards for specific numbers of items donated!

On the left, you can see our temporary museum donation box, where you can automatically donate all your new collectibles. On the right, you can see that our 3 collectibles from before are automatically displayed! Again, this is really just a prototype and the look of the museum and its stands will greatly improve. 

There’s a new icon on the UI to show which collectibles you’ve donated to the museum! 

Without any fishes or aquarium items already in the game, we had to be creative to make a functional museum! I hope you like this uncommon cowfish in a scaled-up glass of water!

Obviously, we did not have time to polish all these features in just a week, so there’s still some work to do. For instance, snacks should probably degrade after a while of staying in the inventory, just like food placed in the world would. Additionally, to have a working book reading system, we would probably need the bookshelves to have their own inventory to keep track of what books are in them and maybe have a way of generating random books everyday for the library bookshelves. We have a lot of other examples of improvements on our to-do list but all of these features will have to wait a bit!

What did you think of all these inventory related features?

Do you like to collect things in games? 

Tell us what you think!

Personally I enjoyed taking a little break from the build mode to work on this project since I love working on the live mode. I can’t wait to go back to working on it full time! Have a great Friday and an even greater weekend!

Anna