Pets Brainstorming Recap + Poll About Babies

Hi there!

Alex here to share some news, a recap of the last monthly brainstorming about Pets as well as a poll about babies. Let’s begin!

New Team Member

We are very happy to welcome Javiera to the team! She will be working as an environment artist with us as part of a 3 months internship. She will be joining Chloé and Léa to create furniture and various objects as well as testing some improvements to their art style. You might also see her around on Discord from time to time.

Pets Brainstorming Recap

Thanks so much to everyone who participated in the Pets brainstorming here on Patreon as well as on Discord and Reddit! Today, I’ll be sharing some of the many interesting ideas that we wrote down. Please keep in mind that if you don’t see your idea there, it doesn’t necessarily mean we won’t be taking it into account when working on this aspect of the game. In the same way, listing the ideas below doesn’t guarantee that we will add it to the game either since we will be focusing on the most important features first in order to be able to release the game. More features and content will be added overtime after launch.

• 🧠 Pets could have complex personalities and act very differently based on their traits and also their past, making the game’s pets feel alive and unique
• 💭 The needs of animals could vary depending on their breed, size and personality
• 🐈 Have a lot of different fur patterns and breeds of cats, dogs and horses. A few of the requested ones: Maine Coon cats, Siamese cats, Spaniel dogs and many many more. Thanks for all the pictures and details shared on Discord!
• 🦌 In addition to pets, have wildlife such as deers, crows, butterflies, etc
• 🐄 Farm animals like cows, pigs and chickens and being able to take care of them
• 🚶‍♂️🐕 Walk around the neighborhood with your dog (and possibly other pets)
• 🥇 Being able to train pets and teach them tricks. Maybe you could teach your cat to play dead, your dog to bark when someone walks on your lot or teach specific words to parrots
• 😔 Pets could sometimes make a mess or damage furniture
• 📸 Special in-game photo mode to take beautiful, cute or funny pictures of pets
• 🐣 Pets could have babies and it would take advantage of the genetics system
• ⛺ Ability to choose if your pets are allowed to wander outside the house or outside the lot by themselves
• 🐕‍🦺 Pets being able to have professions like a horse who plays in movies, a service dog, a rescue dog, a cat who works in a cat café or a zootherapy pet
• 😊 Watching or taking care of animals could have a calming effect on human Parafolks
• 🌳 Cats and other pets being able to climb on cat trees/platforms/bridges, furniture, roofs, curtains and trees. Maybe you would even have to rescue a cat if they get stuck up high!
• 🏡 Being able to send your pets to the daycare or have a pet-sitter come over to look out for them while you are away
• 🧸 Have a large variety of objects for pets like toys, leashes, clothes, beds, tacks for horses, water and food bowls, automatic water and food dispensers, litter boxes, scratching posts and so on
• 💖 Have many different kinds of relationships, trust levels and bonds between pets and between pets and humans, unlocking many interactions like a dog jumping on the laps of a human when they are sitting or two cats always fighting because they can’t stand each other
• 🏥 Have services in town for pets like a dog park, a veterinarian, a pet store, a dog groomer, an animal shelter, an equine center, etc
• 🐠 The town could have a municipal aquarium
• 🌟 Pets could develop habits like always sleeping at the same spot in the sun, hiding under the bed when a stranger visits, always walking around with their favorite plush toy or laying in a cardboard box instead of the expansive bed your bought them!
• 👏 Ability to control your pet’s actions entirely or let the game autonomously control the pets for you
• 🏇 Being able to ride horses or dog sleds around town
• 😨 Some Parafolks could fear specific animals or be allergic to them
• ➕ Pets and animals that were requested a lot: birds, rabbits, fishes, snakes, lizards, racoons, ducks, hedgehogs, ferrets, insects and a lot more

There were many many more ideas that we took notes of but that’s it for this post’s summary! Here’s a word cloud that gives an interesting overview of the many many suggestions that have come out of this brainstorm:

Results of the poll on the Pets brainstorming Patreon post showed that if we are to add more pets after cats, dogs and horses, the most requested options would be birds, closely followed by rabbits! This was not a poll to confirm a new pet in the game but that surely gives us many ideas for potential new pets in the future, after the initial release of the game:

The results for the Patreon poll for the Pet monthly brainstorming.

As we told you when we opened the Pets brainstorming a month ago, it was the last community brainstorming session, at least for a while. With 16 brainstorming themes, we went through the most interesting topics and accumulated tons of ideas that will come in handy for us developers (and already have)!

Poll: Babies Gameplay

As mentioned above, community brainstorming sessions are over for now but it doesn’t mean that we will stop doing various polls here on Patreon and I happen to have one for you today!

As you know, right now, we are still working on adults and children but eventually, we will also be working on babies. Our goal for them in Paralives is to have a lot of interactions and gameplay that make babies feel like real babies. However, I was curious to know: would you like babies to be easy and fun to take care of or for them to require a lot of your attention as a player and be challenging to take care of? Please vote in the poll below and if you wish, tell us more about what you are picturing for the gameplay related to babies in the comment section!

Have a wonderful weekend!

Alex