Wall Moldings Exclusive Preview + Christine Is Leaving the Team :'(

Team Update: Christine is leaving the team 😢

Hi everyone, Christine here.

I have a very bittersweet message to share with you today. Next week will be my last working for Paralives as communications director.

There is a project of mine that I have cherished for quite some time now and I have decided to give myself the chance to explore it.

I am very sad to leave this team, project and community that I love so much. I have seen firsthand Paralives blossom and I could not be prouder of where it is at today. I have also met a talented, passionate team that is capable of doing amazing things and that will continue to do so. Rest assured that my departure in no way affects the development of the game.

On a more personal note, I want to thank you, patrons, for making the development of this game a reality and for your support throughout my time here. Please know that your impact is significant and that it never goes unnoticed. It was an absolute pleasure for me to get to know you, help you and take note of your ideas. While I will not be in charge of the community anymore, I will always stay a part of it. I remain very close with the team and will continue to support them and follow the development here, on Patreon.

My experience here has been amazing thanks to this wonderful team and all of you. I will always have fond memories of it.

Hugs,

Christine

🔨 Exclusive look at wall moldings in Paralives (For Patrons only! Please don’t share)

Hello everybody! Jérémie here, and this week we’re going on about one of the latest features we’ve added to Paralive’s Build Mode: the ability to add moldings to your walls. These pieces of decorative architecture will allow you to customize your interior and exterior walls even more and they look quite spiffy so far! Everything in this post is pretty much a work-in-progress even if they look quite functional because, you see, we have only worked for about two days on the moldings so far. We had moldings in some previous videos that we shared but the system was simple so we are working on more robust and flexible features for moldings.

Some interior and exterior moldings in real life.

Sometimes when we have features that we want to jumpstart and get working in a basic state quickly, what we’ll do is treat it as a Game Jam. Usually, these events are ones where people will try to make a game really fast - oftentimes a few days - and will stay up late and devote all their time to the game, but what we did is a lighter version where we’ll spend one day focusing on one feature and work as a team to bring a version out quickly. We do not develop all features like this, but it’s fun to do from time to time!

We first spent one good day on the design of our molding system. While it might be tempting to jump into programming immediately sometimes, we had to be sure of the tasks we would need to complete to get a minimally functional molding system. We thought about what moldings were, we studied pictures of moldings online, we took a look at the #build-tools channel on Discord, we even went to Google Street View and inspected the various external moldings of buildings around. When we had enough data, we started designing what would be needed in the code to store the molding information and to create their 3D models to dynamically fit with the walls. This is a bit of a challenge because it needs to work on curved walls and the corner junctions of the molding need to adapt to any corner angles, not just 45 or 90 degrees angles.

A sneak peek at the intro of our design document : )

We distributed the tasks and waited another day before we actually started working on implementing the molding system. Everybody knew what they had to do, so it started very quickly with crude UIs and debug-purpose 3D models, but through that day we built a basic molding UI, created the concept of moldings in-game, wrote part of the algorithm to generate them and place them, made the molding 3D models and parameters mod-able, added support for moldings at the top/bottom of a wall and on both sides, and more. The process went fairly well, and as you can see below we started with weird shapes but progressively got closer to actual molding models.

Three steps in our molding development progress, there were many more!

At the moment, this is what our moldings look like. Not too bad for two days of work!

These really give a plain old wall some well-deserved decoration. Some moldings can be applied on top of a half wall.

All of that being said, we’re not done with the molding system. There are plenty more things to implement before we can consider the system “completed”. Things like being able to undo/redo the placement of moldings, how split levels interact with moldings, moldings on curved walls, creating a beautiful UI and all of that. We’ll give you all more insight into how you can customize your buildings in the future and we’re happy that the molding system will be part of that.

Have a great weekend! Keep on molding!

Jérémie