🎸 New Skill Unlocked: The Guitar!

Hi, Alex here!

Paralives is a game about life and how sad would life be without music? That’s why we’ve previously shown how your Paras can learn the piano and today’s post is all about our second instrument, the guitar. 🎸

🎥 First of all, please watch the video at the top of this post to see the guitar skill in action

A Parafolk playing the guitar.

The Creation Process

• Choose the instrument to add to the game: We already picked piano as our first one. For the second and last one that will make it for the game’s release, we considered our options and went with guitar since it’s a very popular instrument to learn in real life, along with piano.
• The Guitar Object: To start off, Chloé created the acoustic guitar itself and its stand.
• Find references for the animations to create: Alice looked at many many videos of guitarists to find the movements to recreate in her animations.
• Create the character animations: Using the reference videos, Alice created 3 different guitar playing animations, one for each skill range (low, intermediate, high). Since there are many music tracks for each skill range, we couldn’t make animations that play the exact chords and notes of each music track. That would have taken a tremendous amount of work to animate and we prefer to use this time for other important game features.
• Make sure the animations work with Paras of different heights: Anna and Alice then worked on using our animation adaptation tools to make sure the animations work well with characters of different heights. For instance, a child or a Para that is not very tall will need to hold the guitar a bit differently because their arms are not as long as the average adult character.
• Record existing tracks: Some of the tracks we picked for the game are public domain so Andrei simply recorded them with his guitar. In the video, Greensleeves is one of these.
• Compose new tracks: Other guitar tracks were composed by Andrei and are completely original. In the video, all the tracks after Greensleeves are original compositions.
• Record composed tracks: Andrei recorded the tracks he composed. However, even though he’s a good guitarist, he didn’t feel comfortable recording the high level tracks.
• Work with a professional guitarist to record the high level tracks: Andrei worked with Remi Cote, a talented guitarist to record the more difficult tracks.
• Practice Interaction: Jérémie made it so when you ask your Para to perform the “Practice” interaction on the guitar, they will play random tracks that their current skill level allows.
• Play Specific Song Interaction: Jérémie also added the “Play song…” interaction to the game and it allows players to pick a specific track they want their Para to play. Modders will be able to add new tracks to the game pretty easily.

What We Could Improve in The Future

• 🎸 In addition to acoustic guitars, we could add electric and classical guitars
• 🕺  Add more animations to make guitar playing look more varied
• 💿 Add more tracks of different styles
• ➕ More ideas already mentioned in the piano Patreon post

Side Note: Patreon Community Chat

Some of you might have used the Community section here on our Patreon to ask us questions about the game. Recently, Patreon decided to remove that feature from their website to replace it with a new chat feature. We loved answering your questions in the Community section so feel free to ask them on the new Patreon chat now! However, please note that the chat only works on the Patreon mobile app for now and will be available on Patreon’s website at a later time. As always, you can also contact us on our Discord server or through DMs here on Patreon 💌

Have a great weekend and take care of yourself! 🦒

Alex

Edit - February 29th, 2024: This post is now public, feel free to share it!