A Deep Dive In Our Design Process For Social Interactions

Hello everyone! Jérémie here this Friday to do a deep dive into a core aspect of the game’s Live Mode, social interactions. I’ll talk a bit about the whole process, from our original goals, to the ideas we’ve considered and prototyped, the Together Card System, and more into the future! By the end of this post, I hope you’ll have learned a bit about where we’re coming from on that side of the game and where we’re going with it! As usual, this post is for Patrons only, so please do not share it where you shouldn’t! :D 

🦸‍♂️ Paralives at Montreal Comiccon

But before we get into our main subject for today, a small announcement: Paralives will be at the Montreal Comiccon from July 5 to July 7! Along with 24 other indie game developers from Montreal, we will have a table with two computers there where people will be able to test an alpha version of the build mode. This will be yet another opportunity for us to watch people play the game so that we can take notes on the blockers they have while playing and the bugs that they encounter. Come say hi if you were planning to be at the Comiccon!

⚠️ Please note: Some of you might be wondering why we don’t send the game to you Patrons so that you can test it and share your feedback. The main reason is that Steam forbids game developers to charge money on other platforms to give access to a game before its release - including through Patreon pledges. Another reason is that it’s better for us to watch a few people play in person because we can see their reactions and ask questions in real time. Setting this up with many many Patrons would be less efficient and difficult, logistics-wise. We’re extremely grateful for your support though and we can’t wait for you to play Paralives!

👨‍👩‍👦 Social Interactions: Our Goals

From the very beginning, we had a few core pillars to work with for social interactions. We needed the whole thing to allow flexibility while not overwhelming, synergise with other game modules and work with two or twenty characters being part of a single interaction. There were also a few minor goals like giving the overall system a sense of progression and not showing too much text, amongst other things.

This is usually how we start designing a new aspect of the game, starting with core ideas that we often extrapolate from the core design pillars of the module (in this case, live mode) or the game as a whole.

First Prototype: Conversation System

The first system we came up with was chat bubble-based that looked like a modern chat system. You would keep the whole history of the conversation, choose answers, get replies and maybe even manage multiple group conversations, all in that interface.

Back in March 2023, we got this version working fairly quickly, so we could test how things worked

We quickly abandoned this prototype because while it had some interesting qualities, we felt it didn’t meet our goals enough. It would’ve been a lot of text to read, a lot of choices to make and it would’ve been quite hard to generate enough content for it to feel sufficient. It also didn’t allow for much roleplaying by the players, because if things are written down straightforwardly, it’s hard to make up a story in your mind that contradicts what’s on your screen.

From Conversations To Cards

We took some time to take a step back and answer a lot of questions. What is the ultimate goal of the social interaction system? How much player input do we want to require here? How do we manage progression through interactions? How repetitive can the choices be? It took us a fair bit of time and a lot of meetings, but we arrived at a system that answered all these questions.

Original mock up for the Together Card system. We usually use Google Docs for our design documents, but sometimes we just draw our mockups on paper too! The Together Card system arose from this kind of sketch.

The Together Card System

What we have right now has a lot of potential and accomplishes all the goals we had set out to meet when we started working on the social interactions for Paralives. You’ve seen it in this past post and in our Live Mode reveal video. Here are some examples alongside explanations of why this works well.

Without a lot of words, it’s easier to imagine what is being said, and it’s easy to see which characters are involved in a card.

Some of these are a bit silly and probably won’t be in the final product, but we can have cards appear based on where characters are, what info they might be hiding or their skills.

Looking To The Future

The system is a work in progress and it connects to everything else we’re making for the live mode. We need enough cards and situations to cover basic gameplay scenarios - friends, family, coworkers, lovers - and then we’ll build on that foundation to the Early Access release. We want to have surprises, interesting NPC scenarios and more! We can’t wait for you to discover everything about this system when the game is out! :D

 Like most of the content in the game, modding support is built-in and you’ll be able to create your own cards as well, if you’re inclined. In the above image I’ve made a little social interaction “Discuss Patreon Post”, as a little joke.

That’s all for me today! Hope this gave you a bit more insight about what we’re doing on that side of the Live Mode! This is our 250th Patreon post, which feels pretty amazing to think about! I’m glad to have you with us on this journey!

Jérémie out!